TL;DR:
- Product-centered donor experiences treat donors with the same care a great company gives its best customers, built around two questions: is this relevant to them, and does it deliver real value?
- Nonprofits don’t compete mainly with other nonprofits. They compete with Apple, Amazon, and every brand that has trained donors to expect a clear, fast, personal value exchange.
- The “be a good friend” test is a simple gut check: are you getting to know the donor and serving them, or just asking for the next gift?
- Direct response alone runs out of road. A product mindset (relevance, value, an experience worth coming back to) keeps donors engaged past the point where appeals fatigue them.
- Building this kind of team means blending nonprofit expertise with for-profit talent, then giving everyone a shared marketing framework to work from.
If you lead marketing or fundraising at a nonprofit, you already feel the squeeze. Donors have less attention to give, more places to give it, and a credit card statement that makes them ask “what am I actually getting for this?” every renewal cycle. Meanwhile, your team is often stuck running the same calendar of appeals everyone else runs, hoping it still works.
So how do you build something donors actually want to stay connected to?
On a recent episode of The Responsive Lab, hosts Scott Holthaus and Carly Berna sat down with Ben Webb, Chief Marketing Officer at International Justice Mission, to dig into why nonprofit marketing rarely gets the respect it deserves, what a product mindset looks like in fundraising, and a friendship analogy that reframes the entire donor relationship. Here’s what we took away.
Listen to the full conversation here:
Why Nonprofits Compete With Apple, Not Just Other Nonprofits
Most fundraising teams picture their competition as the other organizations asking the same donors for money. That’s the wrong frame. Your real competition is everything else fighting for a donor’s attention and dollars.
Think about what your donors can get elsewhere:
- 24-hour shipping on something their kid wants, with a tracking number and a delivery photo.
- A coffee that gives them a real boost on a hard afternoon.
- A streaming subscription that drops a new season the moment they want it.
Each of those is a direct, tangible value exchange the donor can feel. A nonprofit asking for $5 toward a cause the donor will never personally see is competing with all of it.
Consider the brands that win this attention. Red Bull threw a man from the edge of space to sell what amounts to caffeine and sugar, all to make a single promise land: this drink gives you wings. That level of investment and imagination went toward a can of soda. Nonprofits do work that matters far more, every day, and rarely market it with anything close to that ambition.
The challenge for the whole sector is to stop marketing at the level we think we’re allowed to, and start competing with (even eclipsing) the best marketing in the world. The stakes arguably demand it.
What a Product Mindset Means in Fundraising
The shift is from running direct response to building products donors actually want. In the for-profit world, the operating principle is customer obsession. The nonprofit version is donor obsession: a relentless focus on the value a donor receives and the experience they have, not just the gift they give.
Two ideas sit at the center of every product-centered donor experience:
- Relevance. Is this offer, message, or program genuinely connected to who this donor is and what they care about?
- Value. Does the donor walk away with something they actually wanted, whether that’s connection, impact, identity, or belonging?
Hold every monthly giving program, partnership tier, and campaign up against those two questions. If it fails both, it’s an ask wearing a product costume.
A product mindset also means recognizing that giving transforms two people, not one:
- The beneficiary, whose life changes because of the gift. Most nonprofits tell this story well.
- The donor, whose life changes because they gave. Generosity, and being part of a community built around it, does something real for the giver, and most nonprofits under-serve that side entirely.
Helping donors experience the full value of their own generosity is part of the marketer’s job, not a nice-to-have.
Where Direct Response Runs Out of Road
None of this means scrapping direct response. Plenty of giving tactics are tried and true, and there’s no prize for throwing out what works in the name of novelty.
The trouble starts when direct response becomes the whole strategy. Here’s the pattern that quietly erodes a donor base:
- The relationship becomes a steady stream of “give, give, give.”
- Nothing of clear value comes back to the donor between asks.
- Engagement cools. Donor calls go unanswered.
- Six or seven years in, the recurring gift lapses, and no one is quite sure why.
A product-centered approach interrupts that cycle by making the experience itself worth staying for: the product experience, the service experience, and the overall donor experience, all reinforcing what the brand stands for.
The “Be a Good Friend” Test
The simplest way to know whether you’re building a relationship or just collecting gifts is to imagine the donor as a new friend. Picture two versions of the same person.
The friend you start avoiding:
- Spends every conversation talking about themselves and never asks about you.
- “Forgets” their wallet, so you keep covering the bill.
- Invites you to dinner, then texts on the way to ask you to bring all the food.
- Finally reveals the whole thing was building toward “can you help us move?”
By the third favor, you’re screening their calls.
The friend you’d help at a moment’s notice:
- Covers the drinks and asks you genuine questions.
- Learns what you love and plans around it.
- Hosts you generously, with no strings attached.
- Only later mentions they’re moving, and your instinct is “how can I help?”
Most nonprofits, without meaning to, behave like the first friend: we’re great, we do work no one else does, you should give, you’ve only given a little so give more, come to this event where we’ll ask for more. Then the sector wonders why donors drift.
The fix is to get honest about the value exchange. There’s meaningful work donors can be invited into, and there’s a real person on the other end whose motivations are worth understanding. The goal is to build a donor experience where people feel seen and cared for across the whole arc of their generosity, in a way that’s relevant and valuable to them, not just useful to you.
The Subscription Economy Raised the Bar
The subscription economy has trained all of us to expect something back for a recurring charge, and that expectation now follows donors into their giving.
The research bears this out. Cancellations cluster around moments of friction, and the biggest one is a credit card expiring and needing to be re-entered. That’s the moment a person:
- Looks at their statement and asks when they last used a service they’re paying for.
- Turns to their partner and asks, “did you sign up for this?”
- Re-evaluates every recurring charge through one lens: what is the value to me right now?
Recurring gifts get caught in that same audit. The difference is the stakes. Cancel a streaming service and nothing happens. Cut funding to certain charities and the impact is direct and immediate, as the documented fallout from reductions in USAID funding has shown. Reduced funding can mean the difference between someone moving toward safety and freedom or not.
That raises the bar rather than lowering it. Donors aren’t obligated to keep your cause top of mind every day. Making it relevant and valuable enough that they want to is the marketer’s responsibility.
How to Build a Team That Can Actually Do This
A product-centered approach often needs a different team than traditional nonprofit marketing is built around. The most effective version blends two kinds of expertise that don’t substitute for each other:
- Nonprofit expertise, which is earned over years, not in a weekend course. Ethical storytelling, doing no harm with photography, and interviewing a survivor with care are skills built through lived experience. You can’t drop in a commercial filmmaker and assume a clean translation to working with survivors or people in poverty.
- For-profit expertise, which brings outside thinking. A marketer who helped a brand like Red Bull stand out, or a researcher who has studied global segmentation and behavioral psychology for large brands, changes the whole flavor of the work when you bring them in.
The common thread to hire for is people who have operated at scale and think entrepreneurially. Then put the two kinds of expertise in the same room (the ethical-storytelling expert next to the award-winning animator) so they raise each other’s standard.
A Framework That Travels
To unify a team pulled from that many backgrounds, it helps to work from a shared marketing framework. A simple five-phase version holds whether you’re marketing sporting goods or a justice movement:
- Insight driven. Start with what you actually know about the audience.
- Concept led. Develop the creative idea from that insight.
- Powered by stories. Tell something compelling.
- Scaled by technology. Use marketing automation and personalization to reach people at scale.
- Measured and refined. Assess objectively and improve based on what you learn.
A shared framework gives a team of mixed backgrounds one language, so everyone can pour their specific experience into a single coherent way of working.
Putting Product-Centered Donor Experiences Into Practice
The work is urgent, and it’s easy to lose that urgency in meetings and Zoom calls. A useful filter is a short set of plain questions to run any decision through:
- Are we identifying real needs, for the people we serve, our donors, and our staff?
- Are we actually meeting them?
- Can we do it with urgency, generosity, and kindness?
Building product-centered donor experiences is how that simplicity scales. It means knowing your donors well enough to offer something relevant and valuable, and serving them with the same care your organization brings to its mission.
That’s where a connected system helps:
- Virtuous CRM+ brings donor data, automation, and intelligence into one place, so you can build 360-degree donor profiles and respond to real behavior. That’s the foundation for treating every donor like a friend worth keeping.
- Virtuous Raise helps you design donation experiences that feel personal rather than transactional, the kind donors want to come back to.
Get a demo of Virtuous CRM+ to see how a connected platform supports a product-centered approach, or explore Virtuous Raise if your first focus is the giving experience itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a product-centered donor experience?
It’s an approach that treats donors with the same care and intentionality a strong company gives its customers, built around two questions: is this relevant to the donor, and does it deliver real value to them? The aim is an experience donors want to stay connected to, not just a series of asks.
Who do nonprofits really compete with for donations?
Less with other nonprofits and more with brands like Apple and Amazon that have trained people to expect a clear, fast, personal value exchange for their money and attention.
Why do recurring donors stop giving?
Donors often drift when the relationship becomes a one-way stream of asks with no clear value coming back. Cancellations frequently spike at moments of friction, like a credit card expiring, when donors audit their recurring charges and reconsider what each one is worth to them.
What does the “be a good friend” test mean for fundraising?
It’s a gut check on the donor relationship. A good friend gets to know you and serves you before ever asking for anything. The test asks whether your nonprofit is doing that, or just talking about itself and angling for the next gift.
What kind of team do you need to build product-centered donor experiences?
A blend of nonprofit expertise (ethical storytelling, working with survivors, proven giving practices) and for-profit talent (people who’ve marketed at scale for major brands), unified by a shared marketing framework so everyone works from the same playbook.
