Inclusive Fundraising and Marketing Strategy: Building Stronger Donor Relationships Through DEI

How a changing donor landscape affects Fundraising Strategies

Looking at today’s donors, you’ll see a wide range of demographics – across race, gender, ethnicity, culture, age, and socio-economic status. With so much diversity, the motivations for giving vary greatly, along with preferred communication methods and the values that are most important to them. The sector has become adept at crafting donor journeys to meet diverse needs, but do they truly include everyone? An effective fundraising strategy acknowledges these differences instead of making assumptions. These assumptions could look like:

Generalised assumptions

There are validated orthodoxies that are generally accepted within fundraising communities, but which may lead to money being left on the table. For example, many organisations will focus their efforts on the over 50s, understanding that younger donors may be less likely to give or will give less when they do. But when we ignore younger donors, we miss their energy, advocacy, and long-term giving potential. Fundraising is, after all, a long term business.

Gender-based assumptions

While research has shown that women donate more often than men, leaning too heavily into this has the potential to create unbalanced campaigns, and create communications that do not resonate with a significant cohort of donors.

Cultural or language-based assumptions

It’s extremely rare for fundraising campaigns to be produced in any other language than English. This overlooks the fact that growing diaspora communities, particularly from China and South Asia, have a culture of giving, are keen to give and are increasingly well resourced. Not engaging with them because of cost or complexity is a big missed opportunity and is possibly even disrespectful.

The Risk of Non-Inclusive Fundraising Practices

Such biases within fundraising orthodoxy may not be immediately apparent. But if we don’t seek them out and address them, we risk creating fundraising strategies that unintentionally exclude, alienate, misrepresent, or even offend the people we serve.

A key example of this is how beneficiaries are represented in fundraising campaigns. There is a temptation to make the problem look as challenging, immediate, and awful as possible – exaggerating the helplessness of beneficiaries and undermining their agency and dignity.

While yes, beneficiaries may have pressing needs, at the same time they can be self-determined, self-aware, and doing the majority of the work to solve their problems within their communities. If this isn’t recognised it does them a disservice, and risks eroding trust with both donors and beneficiaries.