Building a financially generous and loyal base of individuals is essential for most nonprofit arts organizations. Not only will this group become a major income source, it will also provide opportunities for expanding your audience. In other words, most happy donors will also be happy audience members and will invite friends to become happy donors and audience members, and so on. So your relationship with individual donors has to be about more than just money and meeting your revenue goals. You have to excite them about your programming, offer them ways to become part of your inner circle and ways for them to bring in their friends and colleagues.
The range of contributions from individuals can be vast – from contributors who give little over the ticket price to major donors with deep pockets. One key strategy to remaining financially viable is to diversify your contribution sources optimally so that if one or two individuals drop out each year it won’t be disastrous. On the other hand, you don’t want time-consuming processes for handling a ton of small contributions so that all your income is eaten up by contribution maintenance.