Part 6 of The Ultimate Guide to Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits
Emergency response fundraising campaigns react swiftly to the outbreak of natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies to raise funds and mobilise them where they’re urgently needed.
When a major, unforeseen and shocking event occurs, the media saturates the public with high rotation coverage. The general public is shocked and emotionally engaged by this coverage – which presents relevant organisations with an opportunity to raise funds (and acquire donors) to help those in need.
But to seize that opportunity, you need to be fast.
The media’s saturated coverage of a major emergency generally lasts a few days, after which the frequency and priority of stories steadily declines. As that coverage declines, public engagement also declines – and so too your opportunity to maximise fundraising to help people in desperate need.
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To visualise this trend, we can consider Google search around a subject as a proxy for public engagement. Taking the devastating August 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut as an example, we see related worldwide search suddenly jump on the day of the explosion (4 August), peak on the following day (5 August), then steadily decline to prior levels over the next 3-4 days.
In this context, you must have your initial communications – a landing page where people can donate, a first email, Google ads, social posts and ads – within 12 hours, or 24 hours maximum. Any longer than this and your audience will be donating to more agile organisations instead.
Responding in under 12 hours is a challenge for a busy nonprofit whose fundraising and comms teams are already fully committed to other work. But it can be done. Let’s take a look at how.
How to create an emergency response fundraising campaign FAST
You need two things to turn around solid emergency fundraising campaigns in under 12 hours (ideally even less!):
Templates – to help you rapidly assess the situation and create quality, well-structured fundraising comms in a flash
Processes – to get the right team together instantly and re-prioritise work according to its assessment.
Let’s take a detailed look at both of those.
1. Emergency response fundraising templates
You need two types of templates for emergency response fundraising: (1) A situation assessment matrix and (2) communications templates.
Your situation assessment matrix lays out a number of tiers of response, and the characteristics of the event that would put it in each tier. So for example, a high tier event may:
Have had a shocking impact on beneficiaries and require urgent response
Be situated in a location where you have current operations, or otherwise highly relevant to your programs
Be receiving heavy media coverage and community or social media engagement
Your situation assessment matrix sets the parameters in advance, and so helps your team objectively and rapidly assess the situation and allocate a tier of response and avoid time-wasting disagreements based on subjective interpretations.
The tiers in your situation assessment matrix should also dictate what communications are published. So for example:
A high tier response may involve publishing a donation landing page, 3 emails to your list over 4 days, a Google ads campaign, 5 social posts over 4 days and a social ads campaign, while
A low tier response may involve a donation landing page, an email to your list (with a possible later update) and 2 social posts over a week.
Once you’ve settled the tier of response, you need to create those communications – and fast. That’s where your communications templates come in.
While copywriting is an artform and copy always needs to be accurate, the fact is that in an emergency, speed matters most. You must have your emails and social ads out to your prospect audiences as soon as possible after the event breaks. These comms need to be factual and clear, of course. But it doesn’t have to be the best quality prose you’ve ever created. The shock and engagement of your audience – and your presentation of a way to act on that engagement – will do far more for donor response than artfully crafted words.
In advance, you should prepare copy and design structures for key channels, including landing pages, emails, Google ads and social posts and ads. Get as close as possible to pre-written template communications that just require you to drop in the location and type of event, a quote and some specifics.
Here’s an example of such an email template:
A complete set of pre-approved templates across your key channels can shave precious hours (or even days) off your response time and set you up to maximise your fundraising for people in need.
So, templates are vital to your emergency fundraising efforts. Templates however don’t use themselves. In order to wield these templates for fundraising, you need your team to come together fast and in a coordinated fashion to prioritise and execute work. This is where your processes come in.
2. Emergency response fundraising processes
The first thing you need to do on event of an emergency is decide whether your organisation will respond, and how. As already shown, this needs to be done rapidly, ideally within an hour or two of news breaking. You need for this is a situation assessment process for this.
Your situation assessment process needs to identify the cross-organisational team you need to meet for the assessment and how they will get in contact and meet. You’ll use the situation assessment matrix template to allocate a tier of response, and you’ll need at least one person on the team with the authority to sign off on the decision and commit communications and fundraising teams to it.
Once the situation has been assessed and a response level assigned, stakeholders in the relevant teams need to drop other work immediately and mobilise for the response. To do this, you need a process to reprioritise work immediately, with communication to all internal “clients” that other work is getting pushed back for an organisational priority.
These processes of course need to be communicated to the whole organisation in advance so everyone understands that work and schedules may be disturbed during exceptional emergency events.
Sadly, disasters and emergencies do happen, and it’s the role of nonprofits to respond to those events that impact their beneficiaries. With the right emergency response templates and processes, your organisation will be able to respond with best practice fundraising campaigns rapidly and get help to where it’s needed.
Full Contents: The Ultimate Guide to Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits1. Introduction to the Ultimate Guide 2. How to Build Your Digital Fundraising Program in Eight Steps 3. Email marketing for nonprofits 4. Lead generation for nonprofits 5. Peer-to-peer and community fundraising for nonprofits 6. Emergency response fundraising campaigns for nonprofits (you're here now) |
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