How to Create an Ideal Donor Profile

Donor profiles are an essential key to creating more successful nonprofit fundraising campaigns. When you understand who you’re trying to attract, you can more easily craft messaging that appeals to those people. 

An “ideal donor profile” simply means that you’ve narrowed down the exact type of person or entity you feel will be the best and most likely to contribute. You create a detailed description of who they are and where you are likely to find them.

Most nonprofits will have more than one profile among their supporters. Different profiles may be more or less relevant for different campaigns that you run. Having those profiles helps guide your fundraising design and marketing so that you can get better outcomes and a higher ROI.

What is a donor profile?

A (ideal) donor profile is a description of the attributes and giving behavior of an organization’s ideal donor. A strong donor profile outlines five key elements:

• Demographics – Age, gender, ethnicity, education level, income range, geographic location, marital/family status, profession, and affiliations.
• Giving history – Size/frequency of past donations, favored causes (such as specifically supporting arts & culture, community-based, education, faith-based, or healthcare organizations), patterns over time, and responses to appeals.
• Communication preferences – Preferred channels (email, phone, mail), responsiveness, and social media engagement.
• Psychographics – Values, motivations, personality traits, beliefs, causes of interest, passions, and life experiences. This value-based element is often referred to as an individual’s “donor persona.” 
• Employment and workplace giving eligibility ⁠— Knowing where a donor works can uncover opportunities for matching gifts, volunteer grants, and payroll giving, plus identify potential corporate partnership connections and inform personalized outreach. Including workplace giving eligibility in your profiles ensures you’re not leaving valuable opportunities for funding on the table.

An accurate donor profile enables nonprofits to identify, understand, and effectively engage their most likely supporters. Crafting personalized outreach and solicitation strategies based on donor profiles facilitates strong relationships and improves fundraising results.

Why create a donor profile?

Donor profiles are a valuable tool for informing every aspect of your fundraising efforts. They help you to craft effective messaging and devise campaigns that people want to contribute to.

Increasingly, nonprofits are taking a donor-centric approach to their campaigns. This means understanding donors’ ethical beliefs about fundraising as well as their wants, needs, desires, and wishes. 

Creating donor profiles helps you understand three main things: Donors’ motivations for giving, how to engage those donors, and what sort of campaign will resonate most with them.

Know what drives people to give

Different donors have varying motivations for giving to nonprofits based on their personal history, past interactions, and sources of information.

Looking at a donor’s background can provide key insights into their motivations and interests. For example, reviewing donation records over time can reveal patterns—some donors consistently give at the end of the year to maximize tax deductions, while others donate sporadically based on current events or personal experiences.

Developing a timeline of a major donor’s gifts, along with any publicly known biographical details, illuminates their passions. Understanding that a donor contributed heavily to cancer research after losing a loved one to the disease helps target solicitations to emphasize how a gift can honor that loss.

Similarly, knowledge that a corporation’s CEO sits on the board of a nonprofit signals shared values between the two entities. Incorporating these types of insights into donor profiles leads to a more accurate assessment of their potential motivation to give. 

Another common motivator is workplace giving eligibility. For instance, say a donor decided to give for the first time after learning their gift would be matched 3:1 by their employer. The opportunity to quadruple their impact at no additional personal cost made the decision easy and highlighted how employment data can directly influence giving behavior. Recognizing these kinds of incentives allows nonprofits to engage donors more effectively and turn potential interest into real action.

Know how to engage with people

Language and messaging will draw prospective donors in and lead to them engaging with you. Your donor profile should inform your solicitation strategy and give you a good idea of exactly what to say, how to say it, and the channels through which to get the message out in order to start building relationships. Having an ongoing understanding of communication preferences for your target audience assists you in getting better results.

For example, if you’re running a digital campaign, you’re much less likely to reach donors over age 70 than those in younger age groups. If you run advertisements in certain magazines, you will reach the demographics of that magazine’s audience. 

Your messaging in Cosmopolitan Magazine is likely to be more effective if specifically geared to their readership, whereas that same messaging may be less effective if you run the campaign in a National Geographic magazine.

Developing personalized solicitation strategies based on donor profiles can lead to more meaningful engagement. Rather than relying on generic mailings, you can craft targeted outreach focused on shared values and motivations.

This helps build rapport quickly and authentically. Furthermore, understanding preferred communication channels based on age or interests allows you to meet donors where they already are. 

A mix of digital and print platforms with messaging tailored to each outlet and audience will improve relationship-building and response rates. A generative AI tool for nonprofits allows you to draft these segmented or personalized communications quickly and effectively. 

Donor profiles guide you to the right people with the right message in the right place to start building fruitful, long-term relationships.

Know what sort of campaign to run

A person who would like to set up a recurring monthly donation of $50 isn’t likely to be the same person who will bid $10,000 on an item at a charity auction. If you’re asking the first person to attend your big-ticket auction, then you’re unlikely to get many attendees.

You need a good match between the type of campaign you want to run and the donor profile you’d like to attract. A glitzy gala evening attracts a different crowd than a fun run. A guest speaker attracts a different crowd than a concert. We’d start with the donor profile first, before determining the type of fundraising campaign. This way you can ensure you keep your fundraising strategies donor-centered.

How to create a donor profile

Your donor profiles should paint as complete a picture of your donors as possible. It’s often the small details that make a big difference in the effectiveness of your campaigns and your overall engagement. Real data is critical for helping you to build the most accurate picture.

Here are some steps for creating your donor profiles:

Analyze existing data

If you have existing donor data, then that’s a great place to start your analysis for a prospect profile. You can examine demographics, behavior patterns, donation history, interests, concerns, and personal histories with your organization. You can also determine each donor’s capacity to give with wealth screening.

This can also be a great start for identifying key donor segments. For example, you might segment by donor type (recurring, large donor, etc.) and their key interests (environment, education, giving history, etc.).

Tip: Data-gathering can be very time-consuming. Using prospect research software that offers live profiles allows you to quickly gather information about your current and prospective donors, and continuously track critical changes like real estate transactions, new donations, and insider filings, with instant alerts. This real-time information enables fundraising teams to keep existing donor profiles up-to-date.

Interview or survey your donors

The next step is to gather more information from your current donors in their words. You might do this either by conducting a survey or by meeting with them directly. In either case, it’s important that you get answers from the different segments that you have identified so that you are getting a fair spread of information. 

If you were to only interview your major donors, then you wouldn’t have a broad range of motivations and preferences. 10 to 20 surveys or interviews would be ideal, if possible.

Your aim should be to dig into the segments you identified and to define a handful of key characteristics for each type of supporter. Your questions should cover demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. Here are some examples of questions that help you to narrow down your donor profiles:

• Demographic information: age, marital status, gender, occupation, family size, annual income, homeowner or renter, etc.
• What are your main hobbies and interests?
• How did you hear about us?
• What types of events do you enjoy attending?
• What inspires you to give?
• How do you choose a nonprofit to give to? What characteristics do you look for?
• What does your typical day look like?
• Do you volunteer? If so, when, where, what…?
• Where do you find your news or information?
• What is your preferred method of communication?
• What is your current employment status and company name?
• Does your employer offer any workplace giving programs (i.e., matching gifts, volunteer grants, payroll giving, etc.)?

Check your social media insights

If you use social media channels, you have access to analytics. For example, Facebook Audience Insights provides you with “lifestyle” demographics and the typical traits of people in those categories. You can also see the types of content that get the highest engagement and consider how those relate to your donor demographics and fundraising goals.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn can also be a helpful tool for uncovering employment insights, especially if you lack a more automated way to source that information.

Fill in the gaps of your data

Even after analyzing internal records and collecting insights through surveys or interviews, chances are your donor profiles still have some missing pieces. That’s where data appending, or the process of supplementing your existing records with third-party information to build a more complete and actionable profile, becomes invaluable.

Appending can enhance your data across a range of fields, such as mailing addresses, phone numbers, email validation, wealth indicators, and more. But one of the most impactful areas for enrichment is the appending of employment data. Knowing where your donors work allows you to uncover whether they are eligible for workplace giving programs like matching gifts, volunteer grants, and payroll deductions. Without this insight, you may be leaving thousands of dollars in potential corporate funding unclaimed.

Analyze your data

You now have a large amount of data to analyze and help you identify patterns. The goal here is to develop some defined personas by distilling that data into groups. In general, each persona should represent a segment of donors and should be narrow enough that you can hyper-target your messaging.

You can segment your donors based on giving amount and frequency (information you can find in your donor pyramid) or by donor type: corporate, foundation, grantor, individual, etc. 

The common advice with personas is that they shouldn’t be so narrow that they only encompass a small handful of people. However, in the nonprofit world, a very narrow persona may be relevant. For example, it might cover seven of the largest donors that you have, and every nonprofit wants to keep that segment happy!

Format into donor profile templates

A donor profile template should be straightforward and simple to share across your organization. Basically, anyone who reads it should understand in an instant who you intend to engage. This helps your marketing and outreach people to tailor their messaging accordingly.

Donor profiles are often built around an “avatar” that represents a single person. For example:

Profile name:

Donor Jenny

Demographics:
Age: 45-60 

Occupation: Full-time, executive-level 

Household income: $200k – $500k 

Location: San Francisco, CA 

Family status: Married – kids are teens or older

Traits: 

Reads email newsletters and posts on Facebook 

Learns about nonprofits through colleagues or direct appeals 

Cares deeply about nonprofits dedicated to providing accessibility to higher education institutions

Enjoys volunteering at workshops or cleanups

Giving habits: 

Donates $50-$100 per month to educational funds 

Donates online or by direct debit

Common objections to donating: 

Needs to know more about the governance of the nonprofit

Data-based donor profiles work

Once you’ve crafted a defined donor profile, you’re ready to start using them to inform your messaging and campaigns. What we’ve just outlined here isn’t a short or easy process, but it is thorough so that you build accurate profiles for cultivating donors and stewarding your existing donors more effectively.

Knowing who you’re writing to allows you to craft your message to resonate with their values, habits, and economic possibilities. With articulated donor profiles in hand, you’ll be ready to reach more of the right people, at the right time, via the right channels.

Julia Beltran

Julia Beltran is the partnerships manager at Double the Donation, an organization that helps nonprofit organizations and schools increase fundraising from corporate employee matching gift and volunteer grant programs.

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