Enthusiasts direct a high share of their giving to your organization, but their overall giving Capacity is more modest. They are the donors who have already decided you are a priority — the relational alignment is in place; the constraint is simply the size of the budget. On most Aprize Donor Insight Reports, Enthusiasts have the highest average Affinity of any segment.
The Enthusiast profile
An Enthusiast scores above the median on Affinity but below the median on Capacity. Average Affinity in this segment commonly runs into the double digits as a percentage of the donor's total giving — in some Aprize reports, the average Enthusiast directs more than a quarter of their annual philanthropy to the recipient organization. That is a remarkable level of preference, and it is why this segment is so often underestimated by capacity-only screens.
Most Enthusiasts also sit at Warm or Hot Favor, meaning they give more than their statistical Parity would predict. The relationship is, by every measurable signal, healthy. The strategic question is not whether they care; it is whether your team is making it easy for them to act on the care they already have.
Strategy: Promote and Nurture
The recommended posture for Enthusiasts is to nurture the existing commitment and create channels through which their growing Capacity can flow to you first. Concretely that means inviting them into deeper engagement — volunteer leadership, planned-giving conversations, multi-year pledges, board service — and ensuring that when their Capacity expands (a liquidity event, an inheritance, a successful business exit) your organization is already top-of-mind.
Capacity growth in this segment multiplies a commitment that is already in place. That makes Enthusiast cultivation more efficient on a per-dollar basis than equivalent growth work in Juggernauts: you do not have to win the affinity argument first, because it has already been won.
Reading the Trend signal
Enthusiasts whose Capacity Trend is positive year-over-year are the most consequential subset of the segment. They are the population from which tomorrow's All-Stars are drawn. Aprize Trend arrows on the Donor Portfolio Analysis chart make these candidates explicit, so your team can begin All-Star-level stewardship while the relationship is still in the Enthusiast tier — before a peer organization does the same.
Donor-loyalty research synthesized in Penelope Burk’s Donor-Centered Fundraising and granting data from Fidelity Charitable’s 2024 Giving Report both point in the same direction: the donors who graduate fastest into transformational levels are the ones whose loyalty was recognized and reinforced in the years before the gift.
What Enthusiasts are not
Enthusiasts are not “small donors.” The dollar amounts may be smaller in the current year, but the commitment ratio is higher than in any other segment. Treating Enthusiasts as low-priority because the absolute dollar value is moderate is the mirror-image mistake of chasing Juggernauts whose absolute dollars are large but whose share of giving is trivial.