How I Got Got (and How You Can Get Your Donors Got, Too)

The other day I found myself driving into Central Austin smack dab in rush hour to attend a donor event. The normally 20-minute-drive was projected to take over an hour, and I was miserable.  My vow to never drive on I-35 in rush hour had been broken, and I wasn’t sure why.

And then it landed. I'd been got.

A year before that, I was a $10-a-month donor to an organization I thought was pretty cool. Now I'm on their advisory board, giving somewhere north of a thousand dollars a year, and apparently willing to fight highway traffic on a Tuesday night to show up for them in person. I could not tell you the exact moment I crossed over from casual supporter to person-who-sits-in-traffic-for-this. There was no gala that converted me. No slick year-end appeal, no clever ask. I just looked up one day and realized I was all the way in.

So what did that organization actually do? Once I started picking it apart, the answer was almost startling in how simple it was. Nothing about it was clever. Almost any small shop could do the same thing starting tomorrow. Which is annoying, honestly, because it means the excuse most of us are running on—that we don't have the budget, the team, the sophistication—was never really the problem.

The busywork trap

If I told you we were going to grow your individual program, you’d want a strategy. And a strategy is great, but a lot of “strategy” is procrastination wearing a spreadsheet.

Segmenting the donors you already have, even if they haven’t given in six years. Mapping every board member’s LinkedIn connections, even though half of the members won’t answer your emails. . A shiny new acquisition campaign because the number in the budget line needs to go up. An event, because it's been a while since we had one and events feel like Doing Something. None of these are bad ideas. I've recommended most of them. But they can also, quietly, become the thing we reach for instead of the harder work underneath: figuring out why anyone should care, who actually already does, and what happens when we ask a real person directly and they tell us no.

I don't think this is laziness. I think it's self-preservation. Building a spreadsheet feels like productivity. Sitting across from someone who might turn you down does not. So we build the spreadsheet, and we call it a strategy, and we wonder six months later why the number didn't move.

There's an order to this work - why, then who, then story, then plan - and I've watched enough fundraisers (including myself!) skip straight to the tactical stuff to believe the order is the actual point. Not because sequence is some sacred ritual, but because each step you skip is usually the one that scares you.

Start with your why

I know. You're already doing the thing where you sigh and think, great, more work, I don't have time for a side quest. But knowing your why - being able to deeply articulate why your work matters right now - isn’t a side quest. It’s the whole point. I don't mean the why sitting in your case for support, and I definitely don't mean the mission statement your board approved four strategic plans ago.

I mean the gut-level why. The stories that light you up when you're three drinks in at a friend's birthday party and someone innocently asks "so what does your org actually do."

Getting to that why sometimes means putting the grant proposal down entirely. I like running an actual visioning session for this - carve out real time, phones away, and just talk about the why with no agenda item called "the gala" or "the campaign" allowed anywhere near it. If you can get someone outside your organization to facilitate, even better, because they'll drag you back when you wander (and you will wander - my brain takes off on a tangent about once every four minutes and I need someone whose job it is to reel me back in).

If you're running this in-house, there's a Liberating Structures exercise called Nine Whys that does the job cheaply: you ask why the work matters, then ask why that answer matters, and keep going until you hit bedrock. We also like an inversion exercise in these sessions - name out loud what would actually kill a donor's connection to you, then honestly check which of those things you're already doing. It's uncomfortable. That's sort of the point. The discomfort is what tells you it's working, not a sign to stop.

What you're building toward isn't a slide deck. It's two or three "north star" truths you could say out loud to a donor without a script, and a story arc you can return to when everything else in the org is on fire. And it should not be boring. It should be a little too honest. If it sounds like something a committee approved, you haven't found it yet.

Know your who

Once you know your why, you need your who. And the answer is not "everyone” or “our database of people”. It’s somewhere in between. Who actually cares about your work right now?

Not who cared two years ago. Not who your board thinks should care. Doing this work - some people call it a donor avatar exercise, we sometimes pair it with informal network mapping - can feel unimportant when you're in a fundraising crunch and just want to send the appeal. I get why it feels like yet another side quest. But skipping it is how you end up writing to nobody in particular and wondering why nobody in particular writes back.

The fastest way to find your people is to look at the people you already have, and most of us avoid this step because it means confronting our own numbers. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project's most recent data puts overall donor retention across the sector at 43.3%, and the split by giving history is the part that should actually worry you: donors who've given seven or more times retain at 87.4%, while one-time donors retain at just 31.9%. That gap is not really about the donors. It's about what happens, or what doesn't, after the first gift.

We treat donor attrition like a personal referendum, like if someone stops giving it means we failed them somehow. Mostly it just means people's lives have changed.

Financial capacity shifts. Priorities shift. Someone who cared deeply about you in 2019 might just be somewhere else now, and that's not a judgement on you as a fundraiser, or the work of your organization. But the flip side of that same math is real: the person who gave once, came to one event, and never heard from you again didn't necessarily leave. You might have just stopped showing up. A former board member, a one-time volunteer, a donor who came to a single event three years ago - these are not lost causes. They're doors you shut without noticing, and most of them are not locked. (I think about this a lot in terms of how every entry point is a door, not a destination - the mistake isn't that people walk through and leave. It's assuming the door only opens once.)

None of this requires a data team. Who opens your emails. Who shows up twice. Who do you run into at the grocery store who still asks how the org is doing. Start there before you spend real money trying to manufacture someone new.

Tell better stories

Why and who meet in the middle at storytelling, which is both the most important part of this work and the part we're most likely to botch by overthinking it.

If you came up in this sector like I did, you learned the donor-centric model: beneficiary in need, donor as hero, your organization as the noble bridge between them. It works, in the sense that it raises money. It also treats the person you serve as a prop in someone else's story, which is its own kind of extraction, even when it's well-intentioned. The framing we use now is less about "ethical storytelling" as a nice-to-have add-on and more about a real question: is this story moving your organization toward repair, or is it just becoming a branding tool for somebody else's warm feeling?

You don't need a six-month consultant engagement to fix this. I've built a working storytelling framework with a client in about ninety minutes, using scaffolding from groups we already trust - Community-Centric Fundraising and Ethical Storytelling both do this work publicly and well - and then filling in what we already knew about the org. The one rule that actually matters: go into these conversations curious, not with a version of the story you've already half-written in your head. If you walk in looking for confirmation, you'll walk out with the same tired narrative you started with. Go in actually not knowing what you'll hear, and people will surprise you. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes it's a little shocking. That's the realness donors respond to, even when it's not the realness you expected to find.

The one-page plan

So now you've got a why, a who, and a way of telling the story. The last question is how you run all of this without it eating your life, because a fundraising plan nobody can hold in their head is a fundraising plan nobody executes.

I am stubborn about the one-page plan. Anything longer and it's not a plan anymore, it's a document that lives in a shared drive making everyone feel vaguely guilty.

Start with what you're already doing. Your core programs, the milestones you hit every year without fail. If you work with students, you've got a graduation moment already built into your calendar. If you're in animal welfare, there's a season you're already posting nonstop about. The goal of an individual giving plan isn't to invent new work. It's to put a spotlight on work that's already happening and build a donor conversation around it.

Map it out month by month:

What's happening programmatically, and just as important, which months you're too underwater to add anything new. Then ask the question that ties the whole thing together — when and how do your people actually want to hear from you? Maybe it's your existing newsletter with better storytelling and an actual ask in it. Maybe it's a quarterly note to monthly donors. Maybe it's an invite tacked onto an event you're already running. None of it has to be new. It just needs a door cut into it. (This is the same instinct behind the small tweaks that changed everything — the overhaul is rarely the thing that moves the needle.)

We built an actual one-page individual giving plan template out of this exact framework, the same one we walk clients through. I'll drop that below if you want the do-it-yourself version instead of just reading about it.

Back to the car

So why did it work on me, stuck on I-35, weirdly happy to be stuck even though it cost me an hour? Warmth. Consistency. That's it. That's the entire secret. That organization didn't bury me in swag. I've bought their merch with my own money more than once, on top of what I already give. I think I have five shirts at this point. But I know I'll hear from them. I know they'll invite me to things. When they comp my ticket to their big event, it feels less like a discount and more like being recognized. It feels like being an insider, not a line item.

None of it is rocket science. It's treating your people like people instead of a segment. Talking to them the way they'd actually want to be talked to. Telling stories that are real instead of tidy. Refusing to turn this into some elaborate game with a scoreboard.

I still don't fully understand how it worked on me without my noticing. Maybe that's the whole point - the good version of this doesn't feel like being fundraised. It just feels like being seen.