We’d all heard the rumblings: since November, some nonprofits have been raking in donations. The weirdness then got a name: the Trump Bump.

Sorry, Vitruvius, I wasn’t willing to take it on faith and on rhyming that this was real.

But it turns out to be real. A new report highlights that intent to give is increasing on both ideological wings. For the left, it’s increasing to those institutions that it feels are under threat; for the right, increased security in the economy is causing increased giving to traditional groups like religious and veterans organizations.

Yay! Huzzah! Slaughter the fatted calf (mandatory for some religious organizations; forbidden for others and animal rights organizations)!

But let’s look ahead a moment, past the Trump Bump to once we’re over the Trump Hump into a Trump Slump in the Trump Dumps where we’re taking our Trump Lumps*.

Because the donors we’re getting in now may not look the donors we are used to getting. Someone who rage-donates because of the tweet that broke the camel’s back has a different reason for donating, connection to the organization, and personal identity than someone who has donated to you for 20 years despite, not because of, your ideological inclinations.

And treating one like the other will lose that one at best and both at worst.

So how do you craft a donor journey for an audience you barely know and barely knows you? One way is to listen to the webinar we have coming out tomorrow about creating identity-based donor journeys (and don’t worry about it if you are reading this after — it should be archived there; if not, drop me a line at nellinger@thedonorvoice.com.

One example we’ll talk about there that you can adopt immediately is an identity call-and-response. A health-care-focused nonprofit asked its new donors whether they had been a direct, indirect, or non-beneficiary of the nonprofit’s services. In doing so, they saw what may be obviously — those who were direct beneficiaries had greater lifetime value across channels.

What they didn’t expect to find is that the difference in why people gave went far beyond gratitude for the services they received. Those who had a direct connection to the organization gave to help support nurses giving medical care at home and nurses supporting the families of those they were treating. And they were looking for a greatest sense of connectedness to the organization through newsletters and volunteer opportunities. These were things that they had been promoting in all of the communications.

The trick was that those with no direct connection to the organization didn’t care about this at all. In fact, it was actively negative in some cases. These no-connection donors didn’t want to have a greater connection to the organization — they didn’t like all the mail they were getting — and they found in-home services to be a distraction from the greater mission.

Two different audiences with two different reasons for supporting the organization, but they were getting one system of communication. When they started customizing their communications, retention rates (and average gifts) went up.

So what if you tried this with your new donors — asking them what about them makes them want to give to you, then customized your pitches? My guess is even if your Trump Bump donors are fickle, you will be able to better retain them the more you know (and the more they know you know them).

* Launched in 1993, Trump Lumps, a licensed breakfast cereal, turned out to be an abject commercial failure.