Donor Communications: How to Engage with Donors Effectively

Every donor has different engagement habits. Some read every email you send. Others delete digital messages and light up when they receive something in the mail. Meeting donors where they are is the foundation of a strong communications strategy. Here’s a rundown of the channels worth your attention:

Email: This channel is your workhorse. It’s fast, affordable, endlessly customizable, and offers opportunities to learn more about your audience through robust data analytics. The key is segmentation and relevance. A well-timed, personalized email will always outperform a generic blast to your full list.

An email campaign for GivingTuesday was successful for Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation. “In total, we received 168 gifts, mostly generated through emails, with revenue including matching gifts totaling more than $21,000, which exceeded our revenue goals by 68%,” said Richard Pummell, Vice President.

Phone calls: With a world that more and more frequently relies on AI and automation, a phone call is a thoughtful, personal touch that can break through the noise. It’s particularly effective as a thank you when the recipient is already familiar with your organization. Even if the call goes to voicemail, it’s an excellent way to kick off a one-to-one relationship with the donor.

Text/SMS: Open rates above 90% make SMS hard to ignore. But, unlike email, it shouldn’t be used as frequently. Text messages are considered personal and too many can feel like an invasion of privacy. Be selective when you use SMS. A good use case is for urgent moments, such as a matching gift deadline, a campaign milestone, or a disaster response appeal.

Direct mail: Physical mail still punches well above its weight for the right audience. The key is being selective, recognizing that direct mail will resonate with only a portion of your audience.

Patrick Griffith, Director of Advancement Services at Phi Kappa Psi, firmly believes in the value of direct mail, but recognizes that it needs to be paired with additional channels. “Within our peer organizations, we can very much say that direct mail is not dead, and we definitely believe that. However, we are also forward-thinking enough to know that we need to meet our younger brothers and our constituents in the ways that they want to be reached—and that means online communication and using social networks.”

In-person meetings and events: Nothing builds a relationship faster than a real human connection. Cultivation dinners, behind-the-scenes tours, and donor appreciation events give your supporters a reason to feel genuinely invested in your work.

Social media: Social media can be an effective donation channel in peer-to-peer fundraising, but for the organization’s brand it’s a better avenue for storytelling rather than a direct fundraising channel. It’s where you can show (not just tell) your mission in action and demonstrate how donor support makes your endeavors possible.

Use the following donor communication best practices to create a more engaged donor community.

1. Segment Your Donor Base

Your donor list isn’t one audience but dozens of audiences. A donor who gives a $20 gift one time is going to be very different from a 10-year major donor. And, someone who gives via a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign is going to be very different from one of your monthly, recurring donors. When you separate your audience according to similar characteristics, you can send relevant communication to each group of donors within your audience.

If you don’t have donor segmentation in place, start with the basics: new donors, recurring donors, lapsed donors, and major donors. From there, layer in factors like program interest, geography, and giving history. Even simple segmentation dramatically improves the relevance of your communications.

2. Implement Moves Management

To help guide your donor communications throughout the donor lifecycle, consider moves management. Moves management is a framework used by fundraisers to move donors through the donor lifecycle, from prospect to major donor. By planning each “move” or interaction with a donor, organizations can foster stronger relationships and increase engagement over time.

It’s helpful to have a program in place that creates a structured path for communicating with donors. It keeps fundraisers accountable and helps you see what communications are working for which donors.

3. Leverage Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics allows organizations to identify which donors are showing early signs of disengagement, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, which donors have a high likelihood to give more. By using predictive analytics and targeted donor stewardship, fundraisers can help donors stay motivated to give.

War Child, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting children affected by war globally, uses Blackbaud’s ProspectPoint predictive modeling to assign custom “likelihood to give” scores to the contacts in their database, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. Based on a scale of 0 to 1,000, these scores allow War Child to segment their audience and focus on contacting those most likely to give to major gift, monthly, or direct mail appeals. From these targeted appeals, the organization raised more in the fourth quarter of 2024 than it did in all of 2023.

4. Find the Right Communication Frequency

More is not more. Bombarding donors with appeals is one of the fastest ways to earn an unsubscribe or get your phone number blocked. But, going silent between campaigns isn’t the answer either.

A useful rule of thumb is to aim for a 3:1 ratio of donor stewardship to solicitation. For every ask you make, send at least three touchpoints that are purely about the relationship: an impact story, a behind-the-scenes update, or a simple expression of thanks. Donors who hear from you only when you want money will eventually stop responding. Donors who feel genuinely appreciated tend to stick around.

5. Lead With Transparency

Donors don’t need your organization to be perfect. They need it to be honest. Sharing not just your wins but your challenges, such as how a program is evolving, a goal you came close to but missed, or a change in direction, tends to build trust rather than erode it.

This is especially important when a donor has made a restricted gift. If they designated their contribution to a specific program, follow up with a direct update on that program’s progress. It closes the loop, honors their intent, and lays the groundwork for the next gift.

6. Communicate Ethically and Protect Donor Privacy

Beyond compliance with legal requirements related to your donors’ personal and financial information, establish a privacy policy to ensure any images or narratives featuring beneficiaries are shared only with proper consent. Ethical communication means making sure every person in your orbit, donor and beneficiary alike, is treated with dignity.

7. Set KPIs and Track What’s Working

If you’re not measuring, you’re making assumptions. Before every campaign or communications push, define what success looks like: open rates, response rates, average gift, cost per dollar raised, or retention rate. Then, review the results honestly.

Data is how you learn more about your donors and find what resonates with them most. A subject line that underperforms might tell you that the topic doesn’t interest that audience. If one segment engages more with an email than other segments, that tells you what type of content to focus on for that segment. Testing, learning, and iterating will continuously improve your communications program over time.

Every organization hits a rough patch eventually. A budget falls short, a program doesn’t deliver, or a crisis occurs that no one saw coming. What you do with your donor communications in those moments can make or break the trust you’ve built with your community.

It can be really tempting to go quiet and figure everything out internally before saying anything externally. Resist that impulse. Instead:

• Be transparent, but purposeful: You don’t need to share every internal deliberation. What donors need to hear: what’s happening, why, and what we’re doing about it. Lead with your mission and your commitment to it.
• Acknowledge the impact on your mission: If a program a donor cared about has been paused or restructured, say so, and explain what it means for their gift. Most donors will respond with understanding and even increased support if they feel respected and informed.
• Use a tone of calm confidence: Panic doesn’t inspire giving. Neither does spin. The tone you’re going for is honest, grounded, and forward-looking. “We’re facing a challenge, and here’s how we’re meeting it” lands far better than either “everything is fine” or “we’re in crisis.”
• Ask for support: If a program is going under, share the challenges with donors, why this has happened, and how much exactly is needed to maintain the program. You might not be able to keep the program running, but you won’t know unless you ask.

Here are several facts to guide your donor communication strategy.

1. Personalization increases email open and click-through rates.

By personalizing your donor communications and providing information relevant to specific audiences within your contact base, you improve engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Meanwhile, Hubspot found that personalized calls-to-action perform 202% better than standard CTAs.

2. Online donors prefer communication via email and social media.

Thirty-three percent of online donors shared that they would be most likely to donate after an email from a nonprofit followed by the nonprofit’s social media at 29% and a nonprofit’s website at 17%. The majority (57%) of respondents prefer to be thanked for their online donations via emails while only 4% preferred a phone call. This is a good reminder that your donors have different communication preferences and creating segments according to channel preferences can be a great way to keep donors engaged.

3. Donors use mobile more than desktop.

Mobile users represent 53% of all nonprofit website visits, which means mobile design should be more important than ever for your donor communications. If your donor cannot easily access your emails or website via email on a cellphone, they are likely to leave the website or delete/unsubscribe from your email.

4. Retention requires frequent communication.

It’s a common myth that communicating too often annoys donors. In reality, the type of communication matters far more than the quantity. To improve retention, touchpoints must be focused on impact and building the relationship with the donor, not just additional asks. Frequent, intentional communication that builds donor loyalty is worth the effort: Donors who give seven or more times in a year have a staggering 87.3% retention rate, compared to just 19.2% for one-time donors.

5. Supporters are unaware that their company offers matching gifts.

More than 26 million individuals work for companies with matching gift programs, but over 78% of this group are unaware that their company offers a matching gift program or know any program specifics. Collecting information like a donor’s workplace can help you identify and communicate matching gift opportunities to your donors. In fact, 84% of donors say they’re more likely to donate if a match is offered.

Blackbaud has you covered with resources built specifically for fundraisers, to help you strengthen relationships, improve stewardship, and make better use of the tools in your organization or school’s tech stack.

Start here:

• Streamlining Donor Relations for Greater Impact
• Donor Stewardship Best Practices