Fundraising Market Research Services

Campuses throughout the United States have turned to RNL to become more data-informed in their decision making. Our comprehensive research capabilities and extensive consulting experience help you make the right choices for fundraising innovation, engagement, and growth.

Fundraising market research for key donor populations

By studying key populations, your institution can make more informed decisions on how to connect constituents’ passions with areas of impact and greatest need on campus. Our unique research methodology will help you better understand constituents’ perceptions and desired engagement for key populations. Our experts have extensive experience in higher education research and can provide the optimal approach for your research interests.

Young Alumni Engagement

Young alumni are powerful influencers, a significant market segment in fundraising today, and your future philanthropic pipeline. Our experts can help you uncover young alumni engagement strategies with survey projects unique to your institution, allowing for the creation of custom questions, specific segments and cross tabulations, a qualitative response analysis, and benchmark data to peer institutions.  Plus we can compare your results to our national young alumni database of more than 40,000 survey respondents.

Campaign Market Research

What topics motivate your alumni, donors, and other key constituents to be engaged through volunteering and/or giving? How can we leverage these interests to identify campaign fundraising initiatives? Market research can help answer those questions by discovering the interests of key stakeholders, where your institution fits in, the likelihood of their philanthropic support during the upcoming campaign, and your best opportunities to engage with them.

Planned Giving

Although people tend to think of planned giving at later stages of life, it is never too early to start to understand the passions, goals, and expectations of your constituents. What topics motivate your alumni, donors, and other constituents to be engaged through volunteering and/or giving? How do they want their legacy to be remembered? What types of gift plans will effectively accomplish their goals? Our research will help institutions align their planned giving program with the passions, goals and expectations of their constituents.

Lapsed Donor Research

Why do donors lapse? Are there specific segments of lapsed donors who care about different topics?  Is the messaging donors receive from your institution not resonating? Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, your RNL research team will work to discover overall reasons for lapses and will search for trends within different alumni segments to inform future engagement.

Custom Market Research for Key Constituents

Need to study a specific group of constituents or topics of interest to them? Our experienced market research team can conduct custom research that targets specific groups or topics you need to examine. We can help you determine the scope of the project, methodology, and assessment of the results so you have actionable data to guide your decisions.