Why Authentic Connection is the Key to Acquiring the Right Donors

by Kalie VanDewater, NonProfit PRO

If there is one challenge nonprofits are grappling with the most, it’s that fewer and fewer donors are giving. Per the most recent Fundraising Effectiveness Project data, the donor base decreased by 3.6% in 2025 — marking the fifth consecutive year donor numbers dropped.

Other industry data reveals related donor acquisition and retention trends. According to the latest data from Virtuous, three in every four first-time donors are not giving again.

“Obviously, that’s really concerning and then puts a lot of pressure on not only donor acquisition — but also what types of donors are we acquiring, and then how do we retain them?” Sarah Krasin, managing partner at CCS Fundraising, said.

This question is key — particularly because acquisition is more costly than retention, and because donors who make a second gift have a higher donor lifetime value (LTV).

Finding High-Quality Donors
When it comes to acquiring high-quality donors, making sure prospects are aligned with your organization’s mission is paramount. To get the best return on your efforts, Tal Alter, managing director at Orr Group, recommended nonprofits do the alignment work upfront.

“By looking first at interest and then second at capability, you’re able to put a nonprofit partner in a position to initiate and qualify a prospect and then build an authentic relationship with them,” Alter said.

Gina Vaughn, vice president of client service at the Gail Perry Group, emphasized that affinity is a big piece of the puzzle, especially when considering major donor prospects.

“With major donor acquisition, the idea that somebody has capacity and therefore is a great target for you as a nonprofit organization is problematic, because somebody just having money doesn’t in any way say that they have any affinity for your cause, your organization, your outcomes, any of that,” Vaughn said.

This is all part of the prospect research process, for which Krasin said using data science and analytics tools is “table stakes for the sector.”

“Yes, of course, fundraising is always going to be something that requires high emotional intelligence and it’s an art, [but] also the science of donor analytics, predictive modeling — it works,” she said. “Within your own organization and your own key indicators and building your own specific predictive model, you are able — across a constituency — to identify the [low-value donors] versus the [high-value donors]. It’s not perfect, but it’s very directional.”

The Role of Connection
Donors give for a variety of reasons — an emergency appeal, to help out a friend who is fundraising, or because they have a personal, emotional attachment to your cause.

“Giving to a nonprofit organization is the No. 1 way that people express their values in America,” Krasin said. “It is how people share in a very specific way what matters to them. It's like they're casting a vote on the future they want to see.”

If your nonprofit can tap into that and find donors that are aligned with your mission, you are on your way to creating a donor base with a high LTV. In order to do this, you must build a genuine connection with donors — something both Vaughn and Alter mentioned.

“Once you have engaged a donor and have qualified them based on proclivity, aligned interests, and capability, then what's critical is intentional and authentic communication and relationship-building,” Alter said. “… It’s making sure that donors feel seen and heard and valued — they don’t just hear from you when you have an ask to make.”

Creating a Donor Experience
All donors have to start somewhere — and creating some sort of experience can help move them toward a higher LTV.

“When we’re talking about donors further down the gift table — lower-dollar donors — it really is an affinity and donor experience kind of an equation,” Vaughn said.

Building a community for your nonprofit can play a major role in the donor experience. This is especially evident with peer-to-peer giving.

“The strongest pipeline for high-value donors is going to be peer-to-peer — so other high-value donors networking on your behalf,” Vaughn said, noting that board members can also get involved here.

However, she cautioned against relying too much on one or two channels. 

“Reaching out to people across multiple channels actually, in some ways, increases the likelihood that you’re going to reach somebody in a way that is meaningful to them,” she said.

These multiple channels include all the usual suspects: email, direct mail, social media, and more. Krasin highlighted how important digital channels have become, urging nonprofits to make it a priority.

“If you’re not online, if you’re not thinking about your digital presence, if you’re not making it easy — the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today, as the proverb goes,” Krasin said.

Authentic connection must be a throughline in all of these channels; it’s not enough to make an ask via both email and direct mail, for example. So, it’s important for nonprofits to share the impact they’re having through storytelling.

“The communication begins and ends with authenticity,” Alter said. “The authenticity should be directly tied to the really tangible impact and outcomes that the organization is helping make possible, and the more detailed you can be and the more evidence-based you can be, the better.”

This, Vaughn said, is how you can unlock greater LTV down the road.

“Impact giving is really the way of the future, and talking about impact — there’s no better way than storytelling to personalize whatever your organization is doing,” she said.

Balancing AI and Connection
For nonprofits with limited time and resources, artificial intelligence (AI) poses both a challenge and an opportunity.

“Some people are open to it, but I do think that people have different and sometimes complicated relationships with AI,” Vaughn said. “So, I think it’s part of the acquisition conversation moving forward, because, of course, it creates efficiencies, but there’s no substitute for human-to-human interaction.”

Since genuine connection still requires a human, Alter sees AI playing more of a supporting role in acquiring donors — namely, with workflow automation for manual but low-value tasks.

“AI is not reducing the importance of the human touch,” he said. “It’s taking what might be a seven- or eight-step process with manual intervention at each step, and turning it into the same process with two or three manual interventions. … For donor acquisition and donor stewardship, that translates into more donors feeling like they’re getting a personal touch from the organization.”

Volume Versus Value
With all that in mind, nonprofits may wonder if it would be more advantageous to key in on donors they perceive to have a higher LTV.

“It’s frequent that organizations are just trying to cast as wide a net as they possibly can and see where the chips fall,” Alter noted, “and I think the data now is out there to be more intelligent and more intentional about who’s going to be able to give” at different levels.

But as Krasin points out, she’s seen many organizations weigh the value of a few large gifts and meeting “a topline number through whatever arithmetic magic wand we want to wave” against other fundraising goals.

“I think we're seeing a lot of institutions focus on new donor acquisition, donor retention metrics, and what's happening at the middle and the bottom of the pyramid during their campaigns,” she said, “because they know — and all the data shows us when we do the analytics — that those are their future campaign donors.”

That’s why it’s so important to build that genuine connection with truly engaged supporters, regardless of their current capacity.

“Don't just steward and don't just cultivate to someone's last transaction, to someone's last gift,” Krasin said. “If they are a high-quality, high-lifetime-value prospect for you, steward and cultivate them now to their eventual capacity. … The organizations that are thinking about that are going to be, of course, much better positioned, because I don’t think this dollars-up, donors-down trend is going anywhere.”

The bottom line is this: Nonprofits must strike a balance between acquiring enough new donors and prioritizing the right, high‑LTV donors to meet fundraising objectives today and in the future.

“Every donor starts somewhere, so you can’t walk away entirely from good old-fashioned donor acquisition and see how it shakes out,” Vaughn said.