Good to Great: Growth Strategies for Up-and-Coming Nonprofits

In addition to communicating with donors based on social mentions, think about leveraging your influencers for fundraising. By using data such as a supporter's Klout score, an organization can easily identify a variety of celebrities, professionals, bloggers or prolific tweeters who can spread a message further than ever before. Across a survey of 90 Attentive.ly nonprofit clients, it was found that the top 5 percent of an organization's influencers can reach more than 470 times more people than everyone in the nonprofit's CRM. Sending a personalized message to these influencers is the first step in building a relationship in which they may be interested in spreading the story of why they themselves are recurring donors. This can help attract new donors and remind existing donors why they provide support in the first place.

The tools are here to capture what supporters and donors are talking about. The magic is in how an organization decides to use them. Engaging with people when they're interested in an issue, prompting them with a timely donation ask around topics important to them and having an influencer help tell the organization's story are all different ways nonprofits can easily communicate with supporters and fight back against donor drop-off.

Roz Lemieux is CEO and co-founder of Attentive.ly. Reach her at hello@attentive.ly

Bernard Ross is director of the Management Centre (=mc). Reach him at b.ross@managementcentre.co.uk