The Soft Skills and Leadership Needed to Acquire a Lot of New Donors

Earlier this week I shared how nonprofits acquire significant numbers of new donors every year through paid acquisition.    

But to acquire new donors through paid acquisition, a nonprofit needs to demonstrate a high-level of what we might call “vision and steadfastness.”

Here’s what I mean, and I think you’ll see why a nonprofit needs some of those “softer skills” in order for paid acquisition to be a success:

• The nonprofit must create a new line item in your budget specifically for donor acquisition.
  • This is hard for a nonprofit that already feels low on money!  This feels like a big new expense when you’re trying to run as lean as possible.
• The acquisition program will lose money in year #1.
  • You more than make up the loss in future years.  But the people with the longer perspective will have to be just as vocal as the people who are fixated on short-term ROI and want to cancel the program.
• Usually a nonprofit needs to do paid acquisition for at least a year before they get good at it.
  • Because buying ads, creating offers, and creating acquisition ads is a skill you have to learn through practice, your results the first year will likely be low – but you have to keep going for the investment to be worth it.

It’s easy to see why not very many nonprofits sign up for this!

I say all this because for a smaller nonprofit to start an acquisition program is a real effort in leadership and faith.    

So, How Do You Succeed?

Thankfully, tens of thousands of nonprofits have successfully gone down this path. 

Here’s what their experience tells us is necessary to succeed…

1. The leader of the program, and often of the entire nonprofit, must talk about what the plan is, why it makes sense, and why it’s worth it.  And because all the outward signs are negative, the leader has to talk about it a lot more than they expect to.
2. The organization must have an investment mindset.  They must look past the short term; they must think in business growth terms like “cost per new donor” and “lifetime value.”  If the Board or anyone else is overly focused on short-term ROI, the nonprofit will cancel the program too early, leaving itself with most of the expenses and almost none of the new donors.
3. Finally, the person leading the effort must get good advice.  Talk to acquisition experts.  Pick the brains of larger nonprofits who have established donor acquisition programs – they will happily share the lessons they’ve learned.

The chances of figuring out scalable donor acquisition on your own is unlikely, but thankfully it’s unnecessary.  You are not alone – other organizations have been down this road before!