Digital Marketing Readiness List

Dope you made it here. This is a quick checklist of things you need to think about before launching your donor acquisition task.

1- Set A Goal

Simply saying “We need to add new donors each year” is too vague, put a number behind it. If you want to optimize money spent on new donor acquisition, you need to be specific about the number of new donors you desire to acquire over a specific time period, then set targets based on that goal.

Need help determining how to set these numbers? 

Holla at me :)

2 - Get to Know Your Donors (and Donor Targets)

Do you understand the demographic and psychographic profiles of your donors, especially the newly acquired ones? Do you have insight into their age, income level, education, interests and the media they consume? If not, it’s critical to get clear on who is giving to your organization now, before you invest a lot of money into new donor acquisition.

From your list look for trends in:

• Age

• Gender identity

• Location

• Household income

• Other areas of giving

• Education

It’s likely that you’ll want to target others who align with these trends when running new donor acquisition campaigns. 

Create a few “target donor profiles” that detail the sorts of donor prospects you want to target based on list above.

3 - Make Sure You’re Ready to Track Results

Are your donor database and website analytics tools set up to properly track new donor acquisition efforts?

Make sure you’re able to seamlessly track data on:

Things to pay attention to:

• Number of new donors acquired

• Source of each new donor

• Amount of first gift from each new donor

• Subsequent gift amounts from each new donor

Heck, yea now you’re digging deep.

• Annual cost of donor acquisition efforts (including paid campaigns and staff time)

• Lifetime value of each new donor

• Cost per new donor acquired (annual cost of new donor acquisition efforts  / new donors acquired per year)

• Return on new donor acquisition investment (lifetime value of new donors acquired in a year – annual cost of new donor acquisition efforts)

With these foundational elements in place, you’re ready to start running new donor acquisition campaigns.