What's Your Donor's Superhero Story?

Shannon Morris
Manager, Donor Communications
Cincinnati Museum Center

I’m pretty lucky. I wake up every day and go to work at the Hall of Justice – well, the inspiration for it anyway. And while Wonder Woman and Superman don’t regularly walk the halls of Cincinnati Union Terminal, I’m constantly inspired by the real superheroes.

Many nonprofits excel at highlighting their super powers. They paint colorful pictures about how they save the day. Unfortunately, they often forget the real superhero isn’t the organization. The real superheroes are donors.

As donor relations and stewardship professionals, we know that donors are the real superheroes because they fight evil and protect their community. They fight sickness, poverty, illiteracy or whatever injustice your organization represents with their support. But have you ever stopped to ask what your donor's story is?

Like any superhero, your donors’ story could likely fill volumes. Whether it’s their history with your organization, their giving history, or their personal history, it’s important to understand their story so that you can better understand why others might also like to support your organization.

While the heroes that make up the Justice League are super on their own, they know that there’s strength in numbers. Which is why knowing your donors is so vital in recruiting others. To help us better understand our donors at the museum, and also to help recruit others, we recently started highlighting our donors in our quarterly impact reports.

Each quarter we seek out one of our donors and ask them to tell us their story. Usually it’s someone that we think we know pretty well or someone who has just done something significant for our organization. While we can easily glance at their giving history in our files and records, it doesn’t always tell us why. By asking them why they support us, we’re able to find the key to their inspiration and inspire others. And it’s not always what we might guess.

At the museum, we’ve broken our donor highlights down into three categories: donors of time, talent and treasures. Each quarter, we rotate through and highlight a different type of donor. More often than not, a superhero donor will fall into more than one category. By highlighting all the different ways that someone can support our organization, we’re hoping that we can inspire others to deepen their support by becoming a donor in a different category.

Even though this initiative is still in its infancy, we’ve already started seeing positive results. We’ve had some members of our giving societies get more involved because they realized someone they know volunteers with us. And we’ve had donors join our legacy society after seeing that someone they identified with was also a member.

In addition to promoting the many faces of philanthropy, we’ve found an additional benefit to getting to know our donors, which is a lot more obvious than it sounds. By getting to know our donors we’re getting to know our donors. As the Manager of Donor Communications, this helps me immensely. The better I know my audience, the better I’m able to communicate with them.

When I’m crafting a proposal for a gift officer, it’s easy to forget sometimes that I’m writing to a real person, a superhero donor. By better understanding our donors, I’m also getting a better understanding of what inspires them and will spark their next gift. I’m able to appeal to not only their interests, but also their story.

Knowing your donors’ story isn’t just about them, it’s also about your organization. It will help you build your superhero team and it will help you better understand them. So, the next time you’re tasked with communicating with your donors, I invite you to ask yourself, “What’s their superhero story?”