Small and Individual Donors Tipsheet
What is the Small and Individual Donors Model?
The Small and Individual Donors Model involves receiving small amounts (donations) from individuals to support your organization. There is a large range of ways to facilitate small donations.
Key features of this model include:
Small Donations: Focus on small contributions that can be easily contributed by a broad base of community members and supporters.
Payment Mechanism: To allow individual donors to give funds to your organization.
Outreach and Marketing Strategy: To make potential donors aware of your organization and its work and to drive them towards giving money.
When Should Your Organization Consider This Model?
Strong Culture of Giving: Making individual donations is a common practice in your community, network, region, or country. There is a sizable portion of individuals in your community that have some disposable income and contribute to causes and nonprofit organizations on a semi-regular basis.
Strong Storytelling: Your organization has a strong ability to communicate your mission and impact to inspire donations. You can craft compelling stories that resonate with individuals and become interested in your work.
Easy Donation Methods: Easy to access and straightforward methods to receive donations are available to your organization. This could range from a donation button on your website that is connected to a payment platform to a crowdfunding platform that manages the donation collection for your organization to digital payments solutions such as QR-code enabled payments to simply collecting physical cash.
Existing or Potential Online Presence: Your organization has existing presence on or the ability to tap into digital channels like social media, email newsletters, and crowdfunding platforms to reach and engage small donors.
What Are Five Steps You Can Take to Establish This Model?
Identify target donors: Through online research, or conversations with other organizations and/or fundraising experts and consultants, get a sense of what the culture/market around making donations looks like in your region and community. Think about:
Who is likely to donate in your community? What are their demographic characteristics?
On average, what amounts do these individuals donate?
How do donors learn about different causes?
Based on this initial research, you will start to see different types of donors emerge (donor personas) and your goal is to identify which types of donors would best fit your organization’s mission and vision. For example, in some communities, young professionals are more likely to donate to environmental causes than any other groups.
Establish Key Messages and a Convincing Narrative: People are more likely to donate if they feel emotionally connected to your cause. You can do this by:
Developing key messages that highlight the problem you are addressing, how you are addressing it, and what impact a donation can have. These key messages will help guide the marketing strategy.
Craft a story that connects emotionally with potential donors, keeping the profile of your target donor in mind.
Set Up a User-Friendly Donation System: Ease of making donation is important to ensure that any potential donor that is interested by your message, can pay the donation amount quickly and without any complication. Complicated processes can deter potential donors. Look into what system for managing and receiving donations works best in your country and community context. Specifically ask yourself – how will we make it easy for an individual to donate to us? Some examples of this include:
Set-up QR codes linked to reliable digital payment systems like PayPal, various digital wallets, or direct bank transfers. This allows potential donors who come across this QR code through an advertisement or an event to simply scan the QR code with their phone camera and donate.
Utilize a crowdfunding platform that might already be popular in your region. A crowdfunding platform allows you to manage your donation campaign within a certain time-period and gives you access to their existing set of users that are already proven to make small donations (please refer to the Global Giving Handbook and list of crowdfunding platforms at the end of this document to learn more about crowdfunding).
Setting up donation boxes in places where individuals are likely to bring cash.
Develop a Marketing and Engagement Strategy: Have a strategy in place on how you will engage potential donors. Think about the following:
How will you reach your target donors to make them aware of your work?
How will you convince them to donate?
Use different channels such as email, social media, advertisements, and events to share your message. The message should be consistent across every channel. Targeted and involved strategies could include:
Fundraising campaigns – for example, project-based campaign (fundraising for a specific program or project), annual donor campaign (an annual fundraising driver for your organization but it also could be for a specific program or project), emergency campaign (fundraising for an immediate and emergent need of your organization or in the community)
Ongoing individual donor engagement programs
Partnerships that give your organization access to potential donors (e.g. grocery store donation boxes, donation drives run by students at schools, co-hosting events with partners and their network/community)
Build Internal Capacity to Manage the Donations: Ensure that you have the resources (staff, technology, time) to process and manage small donations. This could include:
Set up of a secure payment system and process that address any required donor compliance
Maintenance of a donor database
Ongoing updates for donors on the impact of their contributions
Additional Resources on Small and Individual Donors
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