308: Using Donor Matching to Grow Impact and Community with Pooya Pourak

What if the best way to raise more money is not just to find new donors, but to help existing donors give more meaningfully?

Today, let's explore how matching campaigns can turn fundraising into a shared experience that builds trust, excitement, and community.

Pooya Pourak is an industrial and systems engineer, human-centered designer, host of The Nonprofit Lab podcast, and the founder of MatchNice. His career began in consulting, where he created human-centered solutions for health and human services programs that support families through Medicaid, foster care, food assistance, and childcare. Passionate about creating social impact, he built MatchNice to help nonprofits, businesses, communities, and donors work together to make a bigger difference.

In this conversation, Pooya shares how the COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of MatchNice and why donation matching is a powerful but often overlooked fundraising approach. He explains how matching works, why transparency and urgency motivate donors, and how nonprofits can engage everyday supporters and mid-level donors as matching partners. Through real examples, Pooya shows how matching campaigns can increase donations, bring in new supporters, strengthen donor relationships, and help nonprofits create greater impact.

In this episode, you will be able to: 

• Explain how donation matching boosts fundraising.

• Understand the psychology of matching gifts.

• Identify different types of matching donors.

• Engage existing donors as match sponsors.

• Create milestone-based matching campaigns.

• Use progress tracking to motivate giving.

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

Support for this show is brought to you by Donor Perfect. Our friends at Donor Perfect really understand fundraising on so many levels.

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If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point.