Why Aren’t We Treating Donations Like Shoes?

It's time to start treating your silent auction like your nonprofit's

e-commerce storefront on Black Friday.

Keri Cotterman, Giveio Co-Founder | VP Sales & Marketing

A pair of sneakers you almost bought will chase you across the entire internet. They will corner you in your inbox and have your text messages and push notifications pinging like a Salvation Army bell at Christmas.

What happened to garner all of this attention? Someone clicked "add to cart," got distracted, closed the tab. Within the hour: an email. "Still thinking it over?" By tomorrow: a 10%-off code. By the weekend those shoes are strutting around your feeds and every app you open.

A $60 impulse buy for a pair of shoes gets a three-week, multi-channel, personalized retention campaign. I’m curious. What does your $500 donor get?

Why aren’t nonprofits treating their donations like shoes? Finding them in abandoned donation forms and stalking them across the internet until they donate.

Let’s think of a donation as a purchase in your fall line or holiday collection. Do you wait an entire year to talk to them? Totally missing the entire spring and summer collections?

YES! This is what so many

nonprofits are doing. Do you think people are wearing sweaters during the summer? Don’t skip over any of your collections. Your donors need shoes all year.

E-commerce has spent two decades and untold billions perfecting the customer lifecycle. Nonprofits are sitting on the exact same lifecycle and treating every donor like a one-night meet-cute without the cute.

The retail playbook is on autopilot. None of this is secret. E-commerce has sorted it all out for us, and each of its moves has a fundraising twin in need of a systems makeover.

Abandoned cart = the abandoned donor. Someone bails on a donation or a bid on an auction item. The intent was right there. Shopify would have that person re-engaged before they finished parking the car.

Next season's line = stewardship into the next campaign. Retail makes you anticipate the next drop. You're excited for it. Nonprofits should be sending personalized nuggets acknowledging your event attendee’s prior year experiences. Remind them how much they love that shoe purchase and get them to buy one in every color. This doesn’t require a fairy godmother. It requires more time and a better system.

"Customers who bought this also bought" = giving people the cause they actually care about. Amazon personalizes down to the individual plus the item. Meanwhile nonprofits send the same email to their entire list. This makes every donor feel like a stranger.

Loyalty tiers = your recurring and major donors. Sephora will assign you a status, a color, points, early access, a birthday gift. Your donor who's given faithfully for nine years gets… their name spelled right, if they're lucky. You should be texting them, telling them about the great collaboration hitting shelves. TALK TO YOUR DONORS!

One-click checkout = your fourteen-field donation form that times out, demands a login, and asks for a mailing address to take $25. Think of your donor form like meeting someone at a bar for the first time. You just need one way to continue the conversation in order to get a first date. After the first date, maybe you ask for an address.

An auction is an e-commerce storefront that’s open for a limited time. Strip away the ballroom and the paddles and look at what an auction actually is: a storefront. Every bidder is a customer. Every item is a SKU. Your event is doing exactly what a retail site does on Black Friday.

And then the lights come up. What happens to the list of bidders? Everyone who bid and didn’t win is like someone who couldn’t find their size in a department store. Nordstrom doesn’t throw them out. They reach out and say, “I found your size and here’s how to complete the look.”

Better tools = better systems = more donations and better donor relationships.

Giveio solves at least one of your problems. We build your storefront. We fill your auction with donated items, so nobody spends hundreds of hours chasing them down around town. Every item we source comes with an introduction to the business behind it. This is a brand-new donor, added to your pipeline, just waiting to hear about next season’s line.

Retail figured out a long time ago that the money isn't in the first sale, it's in the second, and the tenth, and the "welcome back for the new season." Your donors already work exactly the same way. They're just waiting for someone to treat their donation like a shoe.

Mayhem's out. Mission's in. We'll change the auction game, so you change the world.

Contact: keri@giveio.org