Is a donor a "customer"?
File under: How to sell acts of charity
Is disdain for everyday marketing holding fundraising back?
Customers? Yup
True-life story (mine)...
As a commercial copywriter, you're expected to sell.
You have potential customers (prospects). You group (segment) them into target audiences. Those target audiences have specific wants (not always reasonable) and needs (sometimes urgent: "winter's coming"). To reach them with your message, you study their pain points.
Shop talk.
I earned my living as a commercial sales copywriter for almost two decades. My job was to move some portion of a target audience to act. Ring up a sale. Ka-ching. Transform people from "potential" to paying customers.
Pretty much all my clients were easy to write well of, bless their hearts. They were reliable firms offering serious products with lots of features; the kind of stuff that's easy to write about honestly enough.
Anyway, when I eventually went Thru the Looking Glass that admitted me to nonprofit culture, I discovered that certain terms common in marketing were snubbed during my trainings ... drawing dislike, disdain, even ideological revulsion.
"We don't talk like that."
"I prefer not to manipulate my donors."
"Donors are NOT customers." That was the big one, argued over and over. Nonprofits are not selling; that's settled fact: charities are not in business. Fundraising is not a form of sales; it's a mistake to pretend it is. Donors are different. There is no obvious exchange. Transactions VERBOTEN.
I beg to differ.
It took me several years to reach the following conclusion and then many years after that to test it on the front lines of donor comms:
Charities have a real "customer" (as defined by professional marketers). And, yup, you guessed it: that customer is the donor.
Worse for naysayers? An actual sales transaction does take place: the charity exchanges emotional gratification for a gift ... at least it tries to make that exchange, if it's serious about donor retention and acquiring more supporters.
Charities, sorry my loves: even if you hate the word, you are in sales. You're selling sincere donor-appreciation hugs and certifiable visions of hope. The good news: it's easy to be emotionally articulate about that kind of transaction.
Welcome to my view of fundraising.
Curious about my lurid past? Helped sell custom sailing yachts to the mega-wealthy. Helped sell state-of-the-art online-lottery systems to governments worldwide. (Ate my share of criticism for that well-paid, 5-year gig.) Helped sell certificate-level adult ed at a good university [a fascinating target audience similar in some ways to likely donors to charity]. Helped a second-generation manufacturer sell the family's new, typhoon-tested roof membranes.
The article above contains ZERO AI contributions. A human wrote every word.
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