Giving Compass Take:

• Adrienne Day, writing for Stanford Social Innovation Review, explores data-driven options for nonprofits to build trusting, impactful relationships with donors.

• How important is trust in meaningful relationships with donors? What can you do to incorporate data into your giving strategy? Why is this especially necessary right now, with coronavirus enacting its toll?

• Explore various resources that use data to connect donors to the fight against COVID-19.

For all of the power that data can bring to bear on creating lasting and meaningful relationships between organizations and their supporters, it still isn’t enough. Donors’ demands for deeper connections require not just real-time and personalized information, but also moving stories about the good that the nonprofits they support are doing in the world. Technology can help here, too.

“It’s the stories that draw people in, and technology is at the heart of that,” says Aparna Kothary, director of technology operations at Global Citizen Year, a nonprofit that helps organize gap year study abroad programs for high school seniors. “You can really build the tools to be able to collect those stories, with more frequency and more quality.”

The nonprofit’s website features fellow stories, blog-style updates by overseas participants in the program. It also provides alumni stories, multimedia packages about Global Citizen alumni that include videos.

At UNICEF, such stories are numerous and delivered on its website and over social media. A couple of the campaigns include airlifting midwives to help pregnant women give birth in conflict zones in Nigeria and turning harmful plastic waste into plastic bricks to build schools for children in Cote d’Ivoire. In response to COVID-19, the organization is using chatbots to provide evidence-based information to millions of young people across 42 countries.

By combining powerful data with engaging stories, organizations can execute what the Nonprofit Trends Report refers to as a “comprehensive engagement strategy” that ensures deep connections between nonprofits, beneficiaries, donors, clients, and partners. And by creating and strengthening those rich relationships, the collective goal gets closer, one story and one data point at a time: a better world for all.

Read the full article about data forming relationships with donors by Adrienne Day at Stanford Social Innovation Review.