My family and I regularly contribute to various philanthropic causes. In the range of contributions we make, I've noticed that technical non-profits are far and away the worst at attracting eager donors like myself when compared to other causes.

In this blog post, I'll share what I've learned from my own activity with other causes as well as what I've learned from spending more time with donors in general. This blog post will be biased towards larger donations, but I think many of these concepts translate nicely to smaller donations as well.

I am highlighting tech non-profits specifically because these are all concepts that I find other causes get right more often than not, whereas tech consistently gets them wrong. I also have a bias towards wanting technical organizations to become more successful.

How do I donate?

It is surprisingly difficult to simply figure out: how am I supposed to give you money?

Tech projects usually nail the metaphorical swipe-a-credit-card donations to provide small one-time amounts and specific smaller tiers ($X/month). But a lot of donors don't work this way. I don't work this way.

I donate through a donor-advised fund (DAF). To donate, I need -- at a minimum -- the verifiable EIN of a tax-exempt organization (DAFs can only contribute to registered non-profits). On top of that, I usually need a physical address and the contact information for a real human that can work with the fund managers to process the donation. DAFs are just one of many vehicles for donation, though.

The best non-profits have a dedicated "Donate" page that has an obvious and easily accessible list of donation methods: credit card, check, donor-advised funds, employer matching, stocks, legacy giving (will, trust, retirement accounts), etc. Each donation method leads to its own dedicated page with very specific information about how to donate via that method.

It may sound obvious, but you want to make it as easy as possible to initiate the financial transaction. And yet, a lot of non-profits make this needlessly difficult.

Why should I donate?

Attracting donors is not so different from attracting customers: you have to engage in some level of marketing. For non-profits, the question is: why should I donate?

Technical people tend to be bad at this for their own technical projects. So its not surprising to me that technical people are also often bad at this for their non-profits they're involved with.

I, too, used to have the attitude of "the value is obvious" or perhaps the idea that "if you build it, they will come." This is true for a small, small segment of the "market,"¹ but for the much larger segment, you have to educate.

Aim to answer the following questions:

• What do you do?
• Why is what you do important?
• Who is benefiting from what you do?
• Why do you need money to do what you do?
• What have you done recently?
• How has money enabled you to do what you did recently?
• How much money do you need to do what you do?
• Why do you need that much? Is it going up, or down? Why?
• How are you spending your money?
• Who else is donating?
• Why aren't more people donating?

A lot of these questions -- especially the financial ones -- can be answered by reading an IRS Form 990², but giving a more human-friendly version of the information is always helpful.

Technical projects often don't answer any of this. They either consider their value obvious or simply point to the projects they build and expecting the viewer to gather enough information based on that.

But that isn't enough. I'm a technical person, I can look at a project and understand its technical value. I can conclude "yes, this is a cool thing that I'd like to continue to exist." But that doesn't answer the very basic questions of: how much and why? Beyond that, there's so many more questions I have (as listed above). If you want to attract more donations and appeal to a broader donor base, you must answer these very basic questions.

What is my donation doing?

A non-profit typically issues an annual impact report. I've only seen a couple technical non-profits produce an impact report and of those, they were extremely amateur compared to the average non-technical non-profit. Most don't produce an impact report at all, which is a terrible mistake.

An impact report is the human-friendly annual report of what the organization achieved and its goals for subsequent years. It usually includes a report of the financial health of the organization, as well.

The couple technical ones I've seen³ did a good job on the what, but it read too much like a product keynote. The what was good! But its more important to relate that to finances: how did the finances lead to that? how will more finances achieve more? what is the strategy for increasing fundraising?

These are all important questions for few reasons.

First, a donor generally doesn't want to be part of a small group of donors. I specifically care deeply that the organization will have a healthy group of donors so that I'm just a piece. Fundraising goals and marketing is part of that. I'll donate more if I know more people are donating.

Second, the larger the fundraised amount (either individually or in aggregate), the more I want to see results, mainly so that the money isn't being wasted. I think most non-profits aren't trying to waste money, but the goal of a non-profit is to achieve some public good, and its easy to inefficiently allocate funds. Non-profits especially can't afford to be inefficient allocating funds (but too many are).

To that end, impact reports should also contain measurable goals. And in subsequent reports they should contain reflections on those goals. One thing I really try to look for is cases where a goal was missed and how that organization reacted. As with other things, how one deals with failure often speaks more loudly than how one deals with success.

If I can't find that information, its okay, because the next thing I'll do is try to talk to a real human, which I cover next.

Unreasonable Effectiveness of Human Connection

Talking to a human is unreasonably effective. You can discover information, align goals, resolve arguments, and more so much more quickly and easily by talking to someone face to face.

Technical non-profits tend to lack a meaningful amount of face to face connection. They lean too hard on asynchronous, textual mediums such as IRC, Matrix, or email. This sort of conversation may work for technical work and communities, but it doesn't work for financial transactions (non-profit or otherwise).

I can understand the expectation that donors should do their own research, consume the various written material, and be self-sufficient. This is how a lot of technical projects -- especially open source -- work. But that's not how you do sales, and a non-profit is ironically a strongly sales-driven organization.

My advice for technical organizations is to make it easy to get in touch with a real human being via phone (yes, a phone!) or at worst a video call. In 30 minutes to an hour, a prospective or current donor can not only receive information, but connect in a way that is very difficult to do in other ways.

This is also a retention strategy. Schedule meetings with your existing larger donors. If you're in town (or they're particularly heavy donors), try to schedule dinners. If you're going to be at the same conference, schedule a lunch or drinks. Use this time to remind them of the mission, the recent achievements, how much they're helping, etc.

Honestly, become friends. I genuinely mean this. For for-profit organizations, it can be a lot more transactional. For non-profits that are mission-driven, these are usually people that are highly philosophically aligned and its likely you'll get along at a personal level. Become friends, it makes the whole thing a lot more fun for both parties.

Conclusion

A for-profit is a machine that takes money and returns more money to investors. A non-profit is a machine that takes money and returns social impact to donors. They're very different, and yet uncomfortably alike.

I believe people sometimes tend to believe a non-profit organically gets donations from little-known sources -- the larger group of do-gooders. But, most successful non-profits I've worked with (even the smaller ones) that also do the best work have people aggressively working on the "business" of donations. This should be unsurprising, since the ability of most non-profits in the early stage is directly correlated to the funding they can get⁴.

I used to wonder why a non-profit needs a CEO/President, sometimes with a group of full time employees. There's a lot of reasons, but attracting and retaining donors is a big, big job. Actually, its also a very well defined job, typically called "non-profit development."⁵ You can even go to school for it, similar to studying business management.

I want to see new and existing technical non-profits be successful. I think the vast ecosystem of existing technical non-profits are leaving a ton on the table by being -- quite frankly -- terrible at attracting and retaining donors. I hope this blog post helps illuminate the work involved and paints a roadmap of how non-profits can improve.

Footnotes

1. I'm sorry, but despite being a non-profit, you inherit a lot of the same challenges that a business has. ↩

2. I've gotten really adept at reading 990s. ↩

3. I don't want to link them because I'm not trying to call anyone out. ↩

4. At later stages with larger dollar amounts, it can be hard to scale that success. ↩

5. If you web search for "non-profit development" you'll find many resources. ↩