Understanding Your Audience: Donors, Volunteers, and Communities

The Email That Missed

A development director once told me she spent an entire weekend crafting the perfect year-end appeal letter. Beautiful language. Compelling statistics. A clear call to action. She sent it to her entire mailing list – 4,000 people.

The response rate? Less than 1%.

The problem wasn’t the writing. It was the audience. She’d written one letter for everyone: major donors, one-time givers, lapsed supporters, volunteers who’d never donated, and community members who’d attended one event. One message, four thousand different relationships.

AI can help you write faster. But writing faster to the wrong audience just gets you to the wrong result more quickly. Before we draft a single grant or compose a single email, we need to understand who we’re talking to.

The Five Nonprofit Audiences

Most nonprofits communicate with five distinct audiences. Each has different motivations, concerns, and communication needs:

1. Funders and Grant Officers

• What they want: Evidence that your program works, clear budgets, alignment with their priorities
• What they worry about: Wasting money, backing organizations that can’t deliver
• Tone: Professional, data-driven, confident but not boastful
• Key phrase: “Here’s how we know it works”

2. Individual Donors

• What they want: Emotional connection to impact, recognition, a sense of making a difference
• What they worry about: Is my money actually helping? Is this organization trustworthy?
• Tone: Warm, personal, story-driven
• Key phrase: “Because of you, [specific person] can now [specific outcome]”

3. Volunteers

• What they want: Meaningful work, community, flexibility, appreciation
• What they worry about: Time commitment, not feeling useful, disorganization
• Tone: Friendly, enthusiastic, clear about expectations
• Key phrase: “Here’s exactly how you’ll make a difference”

4. Board Members

• What they want: Financial health, strategic progress, risk awareness
• What they worry about: Fiduciary responsibility, organizational sustainability
• Tone: Concise, strategic, forward-looking
• Key phrase: “Here’s where we stand and where we’re heading”

5. Community Members and Beneficiaries

• What they want: Access to services, respect, agency in their own story
• What they worry about: Being used as props, losing access, being patronized
• Tone: Respectful, empowering, clear
• Key phrase: “This program exists because of and for you”

Quick check: Which of these five audiences takes the most of your communication time? Which one do you feel least confident writing for?

Building Audience Personas for AI Prompts

Here’s where this becomes practical. When you prompt AI to write something, vague audience descriptions produce vague output. Specific personas produce targeted content.

Let’s build a persona for each audience. You’ll use these throughout the course.

Donor Persona Example:

Audience: Mid-level recurring donor
Profile: Sarah, 45, donates $100/month. She started giving after attending our
annual gala two years ago. She opens every email we send but rarely responds.
She shares our social media posts occasionally.
Motivations: Wants to feel her money makes a tangible difference. Values
transparency and updates on specific programs.
Concerns: Worried about "overhead" spending. Wants to see direct impact.
Preferred communication: Email, 2-3 times per month. Short, story-driven
updates with one clear photo or stat.
Call to action: Continue giving, consider increasing to $150/month, attend
upcoming volunteer day.

Now, when you prompt AI to draft a donor email, you can include this persona. Watch the difference:

Without persona: “Write a donor email for our nonprofit.” With persona: “Write an email to mid-level recurring donors like Sarah who give $100/month, value transparency, and want to see tangible impact. Include one beneficiary story and one key statistic.”

The second prompt produces dramatically better output every time.

Creating Your Own Persona Library

Here’s a prompt to build your complete persona library in one session:

I run a nonprofit focused on [your mission]. Help me create audience personas
for my five key audiences:

1. Grant funders (foundations and government)
2. Individual donors (break into: first-time, recurring, major, lapsed)
3. Volunteers (break into: new recruits, active, inactive)
4. Board members
5. Community members/beneficiaries

For each persona, include:
- Brief profile (who they are)
- Primary motivation (why they engage with us)
- Key concern (what might hold them back)
- Preferred communication style (tone, length, frequency)
- Best call to action (what we want them to do next)

Our organization: [paste your context block from Lesson 1]

Run this prompt and save the output. You’ve just created a reference document you’ll use in every lesson that follows.

Quick check: Take two minutes to run this prompt with your real organization details. Even a rough version is better than nothing.

Matching Message to Audience

Here’s a practical framework for adapting any message to any audience. I call it the TMCA framework:

When you prompt AI, specify all four TMCA elements. For example:

Write a program update using:
- Tone: Warm and personal
- Message focus: A story showing individual impact
- Content type: Short email with one photo caption, 200 words
- Action: Encourage donors to share the email with a friend

Program details: [your specifics]

The One-to-Many Technique

Here’s one of the most powerful techniques for nonprofit communications: write once, adapt for many.

Start with your core message – say, a program milestone. Then use AI to adapt it for each audience:

Here is a program update about our after-school tutoring program reaching
500 students this year:

[paste your core facts and one key story]

Please create five versions of this update:
1. A 200-word email for recurring donors (warm, story-focused)
2. A 100-word summary for our next grant report (data-focused, professional)
3. A 150-word volunteer newsletter blurb (enthusiastic, emphasize volunteer role)
4. Three bullet points for the board report (strategic, concise)
5. A social media post for Instagram (celebratory, community-focused, include
   emoji suggestions)

One prompt. Five tailored communications. What used to take an entire afternoon now takes 15 minutes of prompting plus 30 minutes of review and personalization.

Avoiding Common Audience Mistakes

Mistake 1: Poverty porn in donor communications. AI can generate emotionally manipulative content if you’re not careful. Always prompt for dignity: “Write about our beneficiaries with respect and agency. They are participants, not victims.”

Mistake 2: Jargon with the wrong audience. Grant language doesn’t work in donor emails. Social media language doesn’t work in board reports. Always specify your audience’s vocabulary level in your prompt.

Mistake 3: Assuming one size fits all. A $25 first-time donor and a $10,000 major donor need very different thank-you messages. Use your persona library to differentiate.

Mistake 4: Forgetting the call to action. Every nonprofit communication should ask for something. Not always money – sometimes it’s volunteer hours, social shares, event attendance, or simply opening the next email. Always specify the desired action in your prompt.

Exercise: Build Your Audience Map

Create your nonprofit’s audience map:

1. List your five key audiences (use the categories above or create your own)
2. For each, write a one-paragraph persona using the template provided
3. Run the persona library prompt with your real organization details
4. Save everything in one document you can reference throughout this course

This is your communication foundation. Every lesson from here on builds on knowing who you’re talking to.

Key Takeaways

• One message for all audiences is the fastest way to get ignored – different people need different approaches
• Build specific audience personas with motivations, concerns, preferences, and desired actions
• Use the TMCA framework (Tone, Message, Content, Action) in every AI prompt to ensure targeted output
• The one-to-many technique lets you draft for five audiences from a single set of core facts
• Always prompt for dignity and respect when writing about beneficiaries

Next up: we’re diving into the task that keeps nonprofit leaders up at night – grant writing and proposal development with AI.

Up next: In the next lesson, we’ll dive into Grant Writing and Proposal Development.