Day 23: The Instant Donor Model
I always tell clients, “You don't want just any subscribers, you want engaged subscribers—the kind who open, read, click and donate to your emails.”
That's why I'm a big fan of Nathan Hill from Avid and how he's teaching organizations to build an audience.
His method? It's called The Instant Donor Model.
The instant donor model is list building with a purpose. If you’re looking to grow revenue, you don’t want more email addresses just for the sake of reaching more people. You want more of the right people that are likely to donate.
This model leverages valuable content, your existing donor lists, and type of landing page called an “Instant Donation Page.”
Here's how it works.
🛠️ How to build The Instant Donor Model
Step 1: Create a content offer people actually want.
There are a million ways you can capture email addresses. Giveaways, raffles, lotteries, and sweepstakes can bring in a lot of emails. But these new emails rarely become donors.
Even if they might have the profile of a donor, they didn’t join your list with the right mindset.
Instead of focusing on free giveaways, create a valuable content offer (or lead magnet) that helps the potential donor learn more about the mission, and gives them something valuable right away.
Content offers come in all shapes and sizes:
eBooks
Video series
Surveys
Quizzes
But the key to an effective offer that leads to donations is that it reinforces the core mission and value proposition of your organization.
Here are some examples:
Faith-Based Organizations: a 30 day devotional, a daily prayer guide, a series of videos teaching on a book of the Bible
Advocacy and Relief Organizations: a petition about a current event, a quiz about a hot topic related to your cause
Health & Human Services: an ebook about eating healthy, an ebook on navigating the health care system with a sick loved one
Education: a series of videos teaching on a popular topic from a known professor, a survey inviting feedback about your areas of focus
🧠 Those are just a few to get your brainstorm started.
If this feels daunting, almost every nonprofit I’ve ever worked with has already has some form of content on their website or in their program materials that can be repurposed into a content offer.
Get creative. Don’t overthink it. And get it ready to launch!
Step 2: The Ads
Promote your content offer using advertising. Meta ads is a great starting place and will give you a lot of room to scale.
Don’t forget that your content offer can be valuable for your existing email subscribers as well. And it can be a mechanism to convert them into new donors.
The advertising landscape is always changing in terms of what’s effective. But here are some guiding principles:
Show the offer visually in your ad
Be clear about what is and what the value is to the end user
Make your ads feel authentic. Overly branded ads usually underperform.
Don’t be afraid to write longer copy in your ad explaining why someone should access the offer.
Step 3: The Targeting
There are seemingly infinite ways to setup your ad targeting. But one of the most surefire ways to reach likely new donors is to use a donor lookalike audience.
Go into your CRM and export a list of donors who have given in the past 12 months. You’ll want to include fields like:
First Name
Last Name
Email Address
City
State
Country
Zip
Phone
Meta will hash this data, find matching users, and create a custom audience that you can target.
But the goal is not to target existing donors, it’s to reach new ones.
From there, you can create a Lookalike audience—an audience of Meta users that are similar to the custom donor audience you just created. This Lookalike audience is often one of the most effective sources to find likely new donors for your organization.
Step 4: The Optimization Metric
A critical misstep that many fundraisers take when running Meta ads is optimizing for the wrong metric.
You may be tempted to optimize for “Impressions” to get the most visibility. Or “Clicks” to get the most engagement. Or even “Leads” to get the most emails.
But if your goal is to acquire emails that turn into donors, you actually want to optimize for a “Purchase.”
This tells Meta that the behavior you are looking for is someone who is likely to actually transact online as a result of the ad.
Remember, the goal of this model is find people who will give—not just get emails for the sake of having a large list.
Step 5: The Instant Donation Page
The final step is what happens after someone accesses your offer on a landing page.
The typical approach is to send them to a confirmation that says “Thanks! Now share this on social media.”
But the moment someone downloads or accesses your offer is one of their highest points of engagement. And it opens the door to make a donation ask right away.
Use a confirmation page that does the following:
Confirm that their offer is on its way to their inbox
Pivot immediately to a relevant donation appeal
Provided significant copy (several paragraphs) outline why someone should donate
Include a donation form directly on the page
The average “Instant Donation Page” converts about 4% of people who download your offer.
For those that don’t give right away, trigger an automated new subscriber welcome series that is focused on making the donation ask within their first 30 days on your email file.
💡 Why it works
This tactic works for a variety of reasons.
First, it's focused on giving something meaningful to the potential donor first. This builds trust and credibility immediately, opening the door for a donation ask right away.
Secondly, it leverages “Foot-in-the-Door” technique, building momentum throughout the process. Each step asks for a little bit more than the last:
Clicking on the ad
Choosing the read about the offer on a landing page
Filling out a form to get access to the offer
Choosing to give
Ads that ask directly for a donation generally don’t work—particular for new donor acquisition. But this Instant Donor Model is designed to build momentum that leads to giving.
📊 Results
Many growing nonprofits are using this exact model to grow and scale their donor acquisition.
In fact, one Avid customer using this model is on an incredible growth track. And it’s made even more powerful by enriching and automating their targeting.
Read this case study about how they unlocked 25% growth in donor acquisition building on top of this “Instant Donor Model”.
🧰 Tools Needed
A landing page (for hosting the offer and download form)
An email automation tool (for sending the offer after someone completes the form)
A donation page / form tool (for hosting the ‘Instant Donation Page’)
Meta advertising (for deploying your ads)
Avid — to coordinate all your efforts, automate your segmentation, generate & deploy your campaign
If you want to make life easy, Avid can generate your whole campaign for you in a matter of minutes. See how it works at avidai.com/build-my-campaign
🗣️ Last thought
The Instant Donor Model really pulls together a few things we've talked about throughout the challenge:
Build a compelling offer people actually want
Run ads to it/promote it far and wide
Invite people to take the next step by making a donation
Would you give this method a try?
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