Nonprofit Marketing Definitions

Donor File

A fundraising term for the list of donors of an organization. Used interchangeably with “Donors” as a whole.

Housefile (Mail Housefile; Email Housefile)

Commonly used in direct mail to refer to the audience of donors or donor prospects known to the organization and actively receiving postal mail, sometimes referred to as an “owned” audience. “Housefile” can also be used to refer to the sendable email audience for your organization. It’s often used to distinguish mail or email being sent to your own existing audiences from those being sent to prospecting (non-owned)  audiences.

Prospecting

Sending mail or email to audiences who have not yet donated. In the nonprofit space, this can include shared (co-op) sources, mail or email prospecting lists owned by third parties, digital advertising targeted to non-donor audiences, etc.

Prospect

A potential donor that you either have contact information for or are reaching through another organization’s audiences.

Premium

A resource (usually physical, such as a book, tote bag, or t-shirt) used as an incentive for a donor to make a donation. Some organizations also use “digital premiums” such as eBooks or similar. Generally, the phrasing of a premium offer would be along the lines of “our way of saying thank you for your gift of any amount”. Some organizations will also use “upsell” premiums that require a minimum donation of a certain amount. The Fair Market Value (FMV) of any premiums must be subtracted from the tax-deductible gift amount when receipting.

Fair Market Value (FMV)

This concept applies to any tangible goods of value a nonprofit provides to a donor, and this portion of value is non-tax-deductible (meaning it is reduced from the amount of any charitable gifts when tax receipts are provided.

Seasonality

Differences in trends of giving throughout the year. This could be due to natural deadlines (e.g. calendar year-end), campaigns (e.g. fiscal year end), or vertical-specific relevance (e.g. cause days or national holidays, political/policy cycles, etc.). There can also be seasonality to specific types of giving, such as new donor acquisition based on budgeting periods or the type of acquisition being done (events vs. postal vs. digital).

A good example of seasonality is the problem of showing a month-over-month comparison of December and January. Due to the high level of giving in December for calendar year-end, January will always look to be down.

To minimize the effects of seasonality, report on full 12-month periods or ensure that you’re only comparing the same portions of partial periods. In our example above, comparing January to the previous January would also limit seasonality. And like with Outliers, looking across 3–5 reporting periods also helps to understand any longer-term seasonality.

Outliers

This is a statistical term that refers to values that are outside of the normal or expected distribution. A recent example would be giving during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw some organizations wildly up and others significantly down compared to their historical trends due to changes to people’s environment during the lockdowns, the economy, and the work nonprofits were doing at the time.

To help spot outliers, it’s often to look at trends over a 3–5 year period. This avoids assuming your program is trending one way when it’s just returning to the previous trend from an outlier year.