A key aim of our advancement work should be to gain deeper awareness of our donors (and prospective donors).
What do they believe about our institution? What is their motivation to volunteer? To give? What are their specific reasons for engaging with us? How would they describe their values? What other organizations do they support charitably and why?
Each day we should strive to gather answers to questions like these from as many of our donors as possible. The more “donor aware” we become, the more we put ourselves in positions to delight them. And the more donors we delight, the more engagement and resources we will generate for our cause.
The Donor Awareness Matrix presented here is a simple tool that assesses donor awareness opportunities from degrees of communication differentiation and interactivity. The more we differentiate our communications and the more interactivity we build into our outreach, the better opportunity for deep donor awareness.
The real helpfulness of the Donor Awareness Matrix is not that it unlocks some previously hidden “secret sauce” of donor engagement. There is nothing novel or new here.
The real helpfulness of the Donor Awareness Matrix is the fundamental question it demands of us:
Why are we not doing more of the work that leads to deeper donor awareness?
