Your best donors don’t know you exist (yet) 

Lee Wochner: What if I told you that your nonprofit’s fundraising problem isn’t actually a fundraising problem at all?

What if the reason donations are flat—or falling—has nothing to do with your fundraisers, your development team, or your donor relationships… and everything to do with something some nonprofits never even look at?

Today, we’re going to talk about why so many nonprofits are trying to raise more money the wrong way: by asking harder instead of reaching further. And we’re going to talk about what happens when you don’t fix the real problem — and what terrific things happen when you actually DO.

Stay tuned. This one changes the way you think about fundraising — for good.

Jaclyn Uloth: Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner: If you’re a nonprofit executive director, a development director, or you’re on the board of a nonprofit that’s been wondering why you can’t seem to break through to new donors or to increase donations from existing donors, this episode is especially for you. As you may already know, Counterintuity’s mission is to help nonprofit organizations succeed and grow, to help them go from being generally

invisible online to becoming better known and better funded. We’ve been doing this since 2007, so almost 20 years. And the number one thing we’ve learned after years of doing this work, that most fundraising problems are actually marketing problems in disguise. Let me share with you what I mean. Here’s what most nonprofits do when donations are down. And I’m sure we’ve all seen this. They send more appeals.

They call donors more often. They squeeze the list a little harder. They add another fundraising event to the calendar and so forth. And I get it. When you’re under revenue pressure, you do more of what you already know. That’s human nature. But here’s the thing. Doing more gets you only so far because if your audience isn’t growing, if the same 500 or 5000 people are hearing from you every year,

you have a ceiling and that ceiling gets lower every year because donors age out, move out, simply stop giving or leave this mortal coil. The fundamental problem isn’t that your existing donors aren’t giving enough. The problem is that you don’t have enough people to ask. Now that may seem obvious, but in 20 years of doing this work, I’ve discovered that it isn’t.

as I’ve discovered that lots of other things related to marketing may seem obvious to us, but then are not always. It’s not obvious to everyone that this is an obvious situation. I had a meeting recently with a nonprofit, they’ve been around several decades and they have 16,000 emails in their CRM. Sorry, did I say CRM? They don’t have a CRM, not actually.

but they have 16,000 emails that they’re emailing to, email addresses, they’ve never cleaned the list and they aren’t adding anyone. I don’t see any mechanism for adding emails to that list. And sure enough, the response from that list has been dwindling for years. And when you look at their financials, you see what’s happened with their fundraising year over year. So think about it like this. Imagine you’re running a restaurant.

You’ve got a loyal base of regulars who love you. But if nobody knew ever walks through the door, if people driving by don’t know you exist or don’t know you’re any good, your revenue is always gonna be capped by the number of regulars you have. And when they stop coming, there’s nobody to replace them.

The same principle applies to nonprofits and donors. You need a larger audience in order to have more people to ask. Again, I know that seems obvious, but it bears stressing. And building that larger audience, that’s not a fundraising job, that’s a marketing job. And keeping the new audience members you get, that’s not a fundraising job, that’s a marketing job. The most successful nonprofits we’ve worked with over the

19, 20 years we’ve been around, understand this deeply. They don’t just ask, they build. They spend time and energy being visible, being findable, and being known. And when they do ask for donations, for volunteers, for board members, for help, they’re asking a much bigger room of people. So let’s talk about what’s actually going on here. What’s the difference

between a fundraising problem and a marketing problem. Fundraising is the art of asking for money. And I’m sure everyone here listening knows this. It’s the appeal letter, the gala, the major gift conversation, the grant application. Those things matter tremendously. But marketing is everything that makes the ask possible in the first place. It’s building awareness, establishing credibility,

reaching the right audience, and making the case for why your organization deserves investment. Telling the stories that grab people, that emotionally move them, that compel them to be part of the solution, that’s marketing. And your fundraising relies on your marketing. Here’s the uncomfortable truth. You can have a brilliant development director and still struggle to raise money if the marketing foundation isn’t there.

There are really two things a donor needs before they’ll give. First, they need to know you exist. Second, they need to believe you’re effective. That’s it. Know you exist, believe you work.

Without marketing, you’re only talking to people already in the room, and that room gets smaller every year. Here’s a question that will tell you a lot about where your nonprofit stands. When was the last time someone who didn’t already know you discovered your organization? Not a referral from a board member, not someone who already had you in their bookmarks, a genuine cold discovery.

If you can’t answer that question or if the answer is I don’t know, I understand, but that’s a marketing problem. One of the best frameworks for thinking about this comes from a piece we published on our website called Most Fundraising Problems Are Marketing Problems in Disguise. The core insight is this, most nonprofit fundraising failures are tied to three things. One, you’re reaching the wrong audience. Two, you’re telling the wrong story.

Or three, the right people simply don’t see you as a priority. More appeals and harder donor outreach won’t fix any of those, but a clearer marketing strategy will.

So let’s take a couple of minutes and talk about marketing strategy and what does a marketing strategy for a nonprofit actually look like. I wanna break this down into four pillars that we use with our clients and they’re easy to remember, I think, and none of these will come as a surprise, but here they are and they aren’t abstract concepts. These are the things that move the needle. So the first pillar of a

Marketing strategy for a nonprofit is get found. It’s awareness. You need to show up where potential donors already are. And I want to tell you about something that happened this week because it’s a perfect illustration of what’s frequently the problem. We just started working with a new client. Their search traffic, people finding about them and what they do had plummeted and they couldn’t find out why. And one of the first things we do with any new client is look at their digital presence.

We dug into it and found out that their SEO strategy had never been updated, not once. So whatever was put in place whenever it was put in place was what was still being followed. And what happened is once AI kicked in last year, artificial intelligence, once AI kicked in and revolutionized how SEO works, their traffic fell apart.

because generative engine optimization, the AI led successor to SEO works very differently than SEO does. And because of that, their website was essentially invisible to anyone who didn’t already know their name. People searching for their type of services, their area, their impact, those people were finding other organizations or they were finding no one at all. That sort of example is a marketing problem, masquerading as a fundraising problem.

Nothing else had changed about them except that they’d never updated their marketing approach. They had become invisible to the people who should have been finding them and getting involved. Here’s what every nonprofit needs to understand about search. If someone hears about you at a dinner party and goes home and Googles you, do they find you? And do they find something that makes them want to give? Beyond SEO, there’s also a tool that most nonprofits are leaving on the table, the

Google Ad Grants program. Google gives eligible nonprofits to 10 up to $10,000 per month in free search advertising every month. And yeah, it’s got through some changes again, because AI is now involved. It doesn’t work precisely the way it used to, but it’s free and it’s still effective. Most organizations either don’t know it exists or haven’t set it up properly. That’s potential donors finding you for free.

and most nonprofits are missing it entirely. And that’s a great way to get found. So pillar number one of a marketing strategy for nonprofits, get found. The second pillar is messaging. And this is where too many nonprofits need to make a big adjustment because they’re just not doing it well enough. And in a very specific way, they’re not doing it well enough.

Donors and funders don’t principally give to needs. They invest in outcomes. So if your messaging leads with what you need, we need funding, we need volunteers, we need support, you have a marketing problem. And I’ve seen that messaging a lot. Here’s our crisis, please send money.

There’s a lot of crisis to go around and my heart goes out to all of them. But I want to know what the solution is and I’m not alone in that and you need to please tell me how you’re solving it. Your messaging in this case is the marketing problem. The organizations that raise the most money have done the clearest work connecting their programs to results that matter to funders.

We worked with an organization called the Center for Living and Learning that illustrates this perfectly. They were struggling to raise money and for a good reason, people thought they were a car donation charity. That’s what they were known for, but that wasn’t what they actually did. What did they actually do? Well, they were a workforce development and reentry solutions provider for people leaving incarceration.

helping people transition into employment, reducing recidivism and rebuilding lives. That’s an attractive mission and the program clearly works, very results oriented. When we reposition their brand and rebuild their messaging around those results, those outcomes, specifically the money the state of California could save by investing in re-entry programs run by the Center for Living and Learning, which does fantastic work.

Everything changed. They went from a cash crisis with under $100,000 left in reserves to operating with a $5 million budget. Same mission, same work, completely different message and a completely different audience to receive it. So this again is why marketing is essential to fundraising. The formula that works is story plus data.

They sure had a great story waiting to be told and they had data, they showed results. So a human story that makes the mission real, that grabs people by the feels, that’s supported by data that proves it works, that’s unstoppable. Don’t lead with the need, lead with the impact on people’s lives.

There’s a lot more to come in this episode, but we’re gonna take a short break here. When we come back, I’m going to dig deeper into building audience and how that affects your fundraising, plus some to-dos, how to achieve glorious outcomes, and much more. Stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth: Most people assume their hosting company handles website security. It doesn’t — not all of it. There’s a gap between what hosting covers and what WordPress requires, and cybercriminals know exactly where it is. We broke it all down in our latest Counterintelligence briefing. Read the full article at counterintuity.com.

Lee Wochner: And we’re back with just me today, speaking with you about how marketing is essential to fundraising and what to do about that. Thank you for being here. I think this is gonna be really helpful, but I appreciate you being here. We covered the first two pillars of marketing strategy, getting found and communicating effectiveness. Pillar number two was communicate effectiveness. The third pillar.

of a marketing strategy for nonprofits is audience building. And this is the long game, the one that unfortunately doesn’t get enough attention because it doesn’t produce immediate results. But think like a farmer, if all you do is the harvest and you don’t plant for next year, where will you be?

Here’s the principle, people give to organizations they trust, and trust takes time to build. You can’t just manufacture it in November for your year end campaign, and I think we’ve all seen that go on as well. wait, it’s November 15th, we’re doing a year end appeal, what should it be? You gotta be a little further out on that. But what you can do is consistently show up in people’s lives,

through email, through social media, through your community presence, throughout the year, before you ever ask them for money. Build the email list, grow the social following, create content that demonstrates your expertise and your impact. Stay in touch, don’t be a stranger. When you’ve been showing up for someone for six months or a year, and you make an ask, you’re not a stranger, you’re an organization,

they already know and that they already believe in. The warm audience principle applies here. A warm audience converts at a dramatically higher rate than a cold one. There’s a marketer talking to you. A warm audience converts at a dramatically higher rate than a cold one. One-time campaigns fail in general precisely because they try to take strangers from zero to donor in a single interaction.

And this is the example that Amy Kramer on our team always gives when she goes, when someone comes up to her at a cocktail party and says, hey, here’s what I do. Would you buy our services? Well, I don’t really know you. I just met you and now you’re throwing this business card at me and I’m supposed to be doing this. That’s not going to work. And that’s what one-time campaigns pretty much do. Ongoing presence on the other hand.

Ongoing presence wins because it turns strangers into followers, followers into believers, and believers into donors. it’s you. I know what you do. Yeah, I’m kind of interested in that. How do I help? So the third pillar was audience building, which leads us to the fourth pillar of a nonprofit marketing strategy. The fourth pillar is consistency. Build up the habit of your marketing.

And this might be the most common marketing mistake we at Counterintuity see nonprofits make. Some nonprofits market only when they need money. They’re quiet for nine months, and then they flood the zone in November and December, as we were just talking about. While year-end giving is real and important, treating it as your entire marketing strategy? That’s not a good plan. The nonprofit with 16,000 email addresses?

That’s exactly what they do. They do this once a year fundraising. Whereas some of us who think highly of them think their donors could give twice a year, four times a year, maybe even 12 times a year by doing a monthly donation. But to do that, they’d have to hear from the nonprofit more than once or twice in November and December. You would need a constant outreach.

The organizations that build the kind of credibility that makes fundraising easier every year are the ones that are visible all year. Not necessarily expensive, just consistent. A monthly email, maybe even twice a month, a steady social presence, a blog or a podcast like this one. Something that keeps you in the conversation, keeps demonstrating your impact and keeps building that warm audience I mentioned.

We get more listeners every week, every month on this podcast because we’re consistent with the podcast. We started at zero, obviously. We’re not at zero anymore. Consistency gets you somewhere.

When you show up consistently, your year end campaign isn’t a cold ask. It’s a warm invitation. And it’s an invitation to give more than just once because you’re solving a problem that matters to people and they’d like to be part of the solution. So those are the four pillars of a marketing strategy for nonprofits. Awareness, messaging, audience building, and consistency.

So let’s take a couple minutes and look at the other side of this. And we’re gonna get to the good news in a couple of minutes, I promise you. Because this is a more donors, more donations conversation. And that means we have to talk about what happens now when you don’t invest in marketing, which would feed your fundraising. Here’s what happens when you don’t invest in it, your audience shrinks, your donor base ages and shrinks.

No new donors enter the pipeline. The people who’ve been giving to you for 10 years get older, give less, or stop giving altogether, and there’s no one to replace them. Again, like the farmer who harvests but doesn’t plant. You become over-reliant on a small number of major donors, and that’s a fragile position to be in. And I could name a very well-known national nonprofit.

whose convention I addressed once, who was in exactly that position, relying on a small number of major donors, and then something happens there. If one or two of those relationships change, if a major donor dies or moves or redirects their giving, you have a crisis. Meanwhile, other organizations, organizations that are marketing consistently, showing up in search results, building their audiences, are capturing new donors.

Not because their mission is better, because they’re more visible. And here’s the hardest part. Here’s what happens. Most nonprofits don’t close dramatically. In fact, I’m not even sure that most of them ever close. They don’t have a single catastrophic moment. When they don’t keep up their marketing, they just quietly shrink.

So I am a reader, a big reader of novels among other things. And I’m gonna share with you a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Yes, I’m a Hemingway fan. And in that novel, a character is asked, how did you go bankrupt? And the other character answers two ways, gradually, then suddenly. That’s a famous quote. And that’s what happens.

with nonprofits that don’t pay enough attention to their marketing. Year over year, the budget gets a little tighter. The team gets a little smaller. The programs get a little narrower until one day the mission is compromised, not because the work isn’t good, but because not enough people knew about it. And I have to tell you, there’s one nonprofit I know of that I have, this is going on with them. I’ve seen it and I’ve tried to offer some counsel. I wonder if they’re listening today.

So great work that nobody knows about doesn’t get funded. That’s the truth. And it’s worth sitting with. And the problem you’re solving and the way you’re doing it, if you’re actually generating real outcomes, real improvements in people’s lives, it’s worth knowing about. It’s worth spreading the word about. It’s worth getting funded. The organizations that turn this around

rarely do it just by working harder. And who wants to work harder? The organizations that turn around this sort of situation do it by getting clearer about who they are, who they’re talking to, why those people should care, and doing the marketing around that consistently.

Okay, so that’s the cautionary tale, but let’s paint the picture of the upside, which we also get to see all the time to our great delight. The genuinely exciting part of doing the work and getting found and getting more support and being able to really fulfill your mission, because the flip side of all this is genuinely thrilling. When a nonprofit does the marketing work,

when it invests in visibility, sharpens its message and builds a real audience, something remarkable happens. Fundraising gets easier, not overnight, but structurally, fundamentally easier. Think about it. Think about what it means to walk into a major donor conversation when that person already knows who you are. They’ve read your emails.

They’ve seen your impact stories. They’ve Googled you and found a website that made them feel confident. You’re not starting from scratch. You’re closing on a donation from a relationship that marketing already opened. Think about what it means to launch a year-end campaign to an audience that’s been warming up all year through your content. Your open rates go up. More people reading your stories. More people watching your reels.

your conversion rates go up, more people clicking to donate, your average gift goes up.

Because you’re not a stranger asking for money. You’re an organization they’ve already decided they believe in. They know your story. They’ve heard the results. You’ve grabbed them emotionally and you’ve made them feel like they could be part of the solution because they want that problem solved and you’re doing it. Think about what it means to be findable in this way.

We talked about our new client whose search traffic had plummeted because their SEO was never updated. Now imagine the reverse, a nonprofit that shows up at the top of search results when someone in their area types in a problem that they solve. That’s not just traffic, that’s intent. Those are people actively looking for what you do. That’s as warm as a cold audience gets. And here’s something that surprises a lot of nonprofit leaders.

Good marketing doesn’t just bring in more individual donors. It changes how institutional funders, foundations, government agencies, corporate partners, see you. When you can demonstrate that you have a real public presence, a real audience, real community credibility, you become a more fundable organization. Funders want to back organizations that have earned trust.

Marketing is how you prove that you’ve earned the trust. We saw this with the Coalition for Responsible Community Development in Los Angeles. They started in 2005. This is a story I’ve told before, but it’s a story I love. They started in 2005 with a $25,000 city contract, specifically for graffiti abatement. Today, they operate at over $50 million in annual revenue.

Their growth came directly from continuously asking better marketing questions. Who do they serve? What do they need? Who else has a stake in that outcome? Because those are the conversations we wanna have. And every time the answers evolved, the strategy evolved with it and the funding followed and the Coalition for Responsible Community Development, I can tell you is actively.

changing people’s lives in the area it serves. It’s an amazing success story. Good for them. And that is what’s possible when marketing is treated as the foundation of your fundraising strategy. Not a luxury, not a nice to have, not an I’ll get around to it, but the infrastructure, everything else runs on. And so let me hit that again. Your marketing is part of your infrastructure. When you treat it as such,

More people know you, more people trust you, more people give to you, and the ones who give tend to give more and come back more often because they feel connected to something they believe is working. Don’t we all want problems solved? Don’t we all want to do what we can do to help? The answer is yes, almost all of us. And if you’re doing those things and you can help them find you, you will succeed.

And that’s the upside. And it’s available to anyone listening, and it’s available to any nonprofit willing to make the shift.

Okay, there was a lot there. Let me sum it up just to help people grab onto this if you haven’t already. If your fundraising results are underperforming, the cause is almost always upstream. It’s not your fundraisers, it’s not your donors, it’s not your mission, it’s that the wrong people know you or the right people don’t know you well enough, or not enough people know you at all. Having more donors and more donations starts with

more audience, and more audience starts with marketing. Here’s what I want you to do this week. And so again, this is part of the recap. Ask yourself that one question. When did someone you didn’t already know discover your nonprofit this month, and how did they find out about you? Not a referral, not a board connection, a genuine cold discovery. Someone who found you through Google, through social media, through a piece of content you created. If you can’t answer that question, you now know where to start.

A few concrete first steps you can take. Check your Google presence. Search for the kinds of things your donors would search for and see if you show up. If you’re a local environmental program, if you search for terms around that, do you come up? Then do the same on chat GPT and on Claude AI. Are you showing up? Because AI is the new search engine. You have to show up there.

Look at your last 30 days of social content and ask whether it demonstrates impact or just makes asks. And if you haven’t looked into the Google Ad Grants program, do it today. If you want to go deeper on this, we’ve written about it in detail on our website. I’m going to plug this again. There’s a piece called Most Fundraising Problems Are Marketing Problems in Disguise. That’s at counterintuity.com under the counterintelligence tab. That’s where we…

put a lot of useful information. Most fundraising problems are marketing problems in disguise, digs more deeply into what I just shared with you. It walks through the three diagnostic questions that will tell you whether you’re a nonprofit, has a fundraising problem or a marketing problem.

On the next episode of this podcast, we’re gonna talk with the dynamic nonprofit leader who absolutely has understood the role of marketing and of asking the right questions and how she and her organization are transforming lives in the area they serve. There’s a lot to learn there and you’re not gonna wanna miss it. And so I just plugged it. I’ve never plugged in appearance in advance before, but we’re really excited about that one. Until then, if you found this useful, please.

share it with a nonprofit leader you know. Leave us a review, please. We’d love to see your reviews and any feedback, any comments. And if you’d like to talk about your organization’s marketing strategy, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on LinkedIn or even better, shoot me an email at lee at counterintuity.com. We’re always here to help and I’m happy to provide advice or just be a good shoulder to lean on.

as someone who has run several nonprofits myself, I understand and I’m here to help. Thanks for listening. Go off, go off and market. Tell the world what you do because what you do is important. We need you. Go do it. Thank you.

Jaclyn Uloth: Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.