A new year is often a time of reflection, planning, and alignment, for individuals and corporations alike. As your donors (and prospective donors) reflect on where they spent their time, energy, and resources in 2025, now is the time to refine your development strategies so you’re not only retained by existing donors but also discovered by new ones. With everything nonprofits have gone through in recent months, now is not the time to cross your fingers for new donors. It’s time to make yourself discoverable, trustworthy, and top of mind.
What we learned in our Voices for Good research is that most donors need a trusted messenger to introduce them to a new organization - think family, friends, and community leaders. Once the initial introduction is created, our Voices for Good respondents identified a few primary drivers that move a prospect to become a donor.
Our interpretation? Mission alignment acts as a gatekeeper; transparency is the threshold; reputation expedites verification. Emotion opens the door, but evidence keeps it open. We’ve seen this before as we explored other elements of this work. Stories spark attention, but evidence and credibility close the loop.
Through our Voices for Good work, we’ve explored how donors learn about, evaluate, and decide which new causes are worth their investment. Here’s what we learned.
At Brand Federation, we’re all about conviction. It’s what we do. But before you can sell someone on your convictions, you need to make a connection. People act when someone they trust signals a cause is legitimate and emotionally resonant. Word of mouth and peer networks remain the single strongest entry point across all ages and belief systems. So give them something to talk about. Produce regular, emotionally vivid storytelling that uses urgency or time-bound as needed. Integrate regular donor endorsements and give people simple, awareness content (e.g. impact snapshots, about the organization, board spotlights).
Our findings reveal that younger donors are looking for digital storytelling and shareable content. Older donors, in contrast, may be more moved by direct mail and community events. They want to see, hear, and feel your message.
Once you build the connection, then you need to sustain it and layer in the evidence of support. Sustained giving requires data to validate the emotional impulse someone has to give. Transparency with your spending helps convert a prospect, with 28% of Voices for Good respondents citing clarity on fund use as their top decision factor for giving to a new organization—second only to mission alignment.
As you begin to engage with prospects on a deeper level, continue providing transparent impact reporting to build trust and credibility.
Once you have done all of that, you need to create a sense of community and belonging within your organization as a whole. Your donors are an extension of your team, so make them feel engaged after their gift is delivered. This is particularly important for local and faith-based donors. Common issues that will cause a prospect to fall through the cracks and withdraw their support are things like:
Discovery is a social process, and evaluation is rooted in evidence. Donors find causes through people and stay when transparency validates emotion. So, what does this mean? Let’s put these findings into an actionable plan for the new year.
1. Operationalize trust. Create a “transparency center” that includes financial breakdowns, 30-day outcome updates, and donor FAQs.
2. Leverage networks that legitimize. Equip ambassadors and community leaders with shareable proof points and lightweight peer-to-peer tools.
3. Tailor by generation and channel. It may take more work, but you can’t copy and paste your strategy to reach your donors. Younger donors crave concise digital stories, instant feedback, and visible progress measurements. Older donors need print or in-person touchpoints, legacy and track-record framing, and structured planned-giving options.
4. Make the first 30 days count. Acknowledge gifts immediately, report early outcomes, and invite a small follow-on act (volunteer shift, webinar, modest recurring gift).
Nonprofits that pair emotionally resonant storytelling with rapid, visible accountability can double their conversion potential—capturing both the heart and the head of today’s donor. How will you adjust your outreach strategy in 2026?
Voices for Good, Brand Federation’s inaugural index that benchmarks donor behaviors and motivators, has uncovered a wealth of insights that create a picture of today’s nonprofit donor. Generated from the insights of over 500 nonprofit donors from around the country, Voices for Good provides nonprofit leaders and executives with proven findings and tangible action items for navigating today's economic uncertainty, ensuring that donor relations and expectations aren’t just met, but exceeded.
Brand Federation fielded 512 in‑depth, semi‑structured interviews on EmpathixAI’s CultureChat
platform. Built and overseen by PhD-trained social scientists, CultureChat conducted large-N qualitative interviews using a 17-question guide that blended open-ended and closed-ended prompts. Interviews totaled 213 hours of conversation. Transcripts were systematically coded and cataloged, combining expert-designed code frames with model-assisted classification to generate structured aggregates and prevalence estimates, which were reported in the Voices for Good Report. This approach preserves qualitative richness (what donors say and why) while enabling statistically defensible summaries across key demographics (e.g., gender, age, income, education, and religion/denomination).
Rian Chandler-Dovis is an accomplished researcher and brand strategist with two decades of experience helping organizations define what they stand for and deliver meaningful experiences. She has developed strategies for some of the world’s best-known brands, including MIT, Harvard Medical School, GM, American Express, Mercy Corps, Samsung, PepsiCo, the World Wildlife Fund, AB InBev, and Colgate.
