Finding Donors and Preventing

Their Fatigue

A donor is a person or group who makes, not surprisingly, a donation. In the

eyes of the person or group receiving the donor’s donation — in other words,

you! — the donor is a benefactor. In social entrepreneurship, donations (also

called philanthropy) tend to be gifts of money, goods, or property to a non-

profit group without expectation of direct, immediate economic benefit for

the donor. Donations are a central source of revenue for charities.

Strictly speaking, a donation is a non-labor contribution — meaning, it

doesn’t involve volunteer time. Many donations qualify as charitable contri-

butions and are tax deductible, though that’s only the case — and you know

this by now, right? — if the enterprise has acquired charitable status.

Donors are great, but often they’re people who have a lot of money, which

means you aren’t the only enterprise vying for their attention. Sometimes

donors get tired of being donors and feel they’re being asked to do too much

for too many organizations. Donor fatigue is the reluctance of a donor to give

any more money to a particular charity. Such a condition commonly results

when a charity has made excessive financial demands on the donor — and

the definition of excessive is really dependent on the donor (some donors

tolerate more requests for money than other donors do). When donor fatigue

hits, the result is temporary loss of interest in making donations. Donors suf-

fering from such fatigue have made one or more previous donations but have

decided that they’ve now reached their monetary limit. (Donor fatigue differs

from compassion burnout — see Chapter 18.)

Fundraisers often focus on donor renewal, targeting return donors, in their

attempt to attract them again to a particular cause. Donor renewal requires

significantly less effort than trying to entice new donors does. The logic

behind this strategy is that fatigued donors are usually still sympathetic to

your cause — they’ve just run out of money. With the passage of time, they’ll

probably be in a position to give again. Give the wallets of fatigued donors a

rest, and given their favorable attitudes toward your charity, they may con-

tribute anew.

What about trying to find new donors? The only problem here is that you

don’t know how potential new donors feel about your cause. Some people

will be inclined to give, and others won’t. So, spending time and money trying

to generate new donations often has an even lower rate of success than

trying it with fatigued donors does.

So how do you combat donor fatigue?