Part 2 of The Ultimate Guide to Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits
As we saw in Part 1 of the Ultimate Guide, "digital" is not a channel, but a universe of channels, applications, technologies and strategies. If you're new to digital, it's easy to feel overwhelmed about where to start.
If you're stuck and unsure about how to move ahead, this is the place for you. You can use the eight steps in this article as a template for your digital program, to make progress and get some runs on the board.
If you think I’m missing something, please drop me a comment at the bottom of this page.
Contents
1. Start with a framework – the Digital Fundraising Staircase
To prepare for your digital fundraising journey, you need a map for the path ahead. This is provided by the Digital Fundraising Staircase, a framework I first saw used by excellent Irish fundraiser Simon Scriver.
My version of the Staircase looks like this:
In this version, the Staircase progresses through foundations then a number of layers with a logical sequence of activities, as follows:
Foundation level:
Organisational and fundraising objectives – these are the foundation of all your strategy and planning
A (simple) digital fundraising strategy
A clear and compelling fundraising proposition
Digital fundraising program version 1.0: The starting versions of your foundational digital fundraising channels, including:
Website v1
Email program v1
Google Ads Grant v1
Organic social v1
Digital program version 1.1: Your multichannel content program, including stories and engagement pieces repurposed across blog, social, visual, video and other formats, and sometimes integrated with appeals
Digital program version 2.0: More advanced activities, requiring more resources and investment, that should generate more return on investment (ROI), such as:
Responsive/emergency campaigns
Lead generation and 2 step campaigns
Community and peer-to-peer campaigns
Digital legacy campaigns
Digital-integrated multichannel campaigns
More sophisticated and engaging versions of your version 1.0 and 1.1 channels and activities.
It’s important to understand that none of your digital fundraising channels or activities are ever “finished”. They should start simple while your ROI is limited, then evolve as your program and online communities grow to represent greater opportunity.
On top of this, your digital fundraising program needs to keep evolving because the digital landscape changes constantly. You need to keep learning and adapting your program to reflect this.
Digital fundraising program development doesn’t need to look exactly like the Digital Staircase for all nonprofits, and many organisations that have already invested in digital will have developed their own path and vision. But the Staircase is a useful framework for those starting out, who want to envision what their program development may look like in the first one to five years.
2. Ensure your foundations are in place – objectives, strategy and proposition
The foundations of your fundraising program are:
Clear organisational and fundraising objectives
A basic digital fundraising strategy and
A compelling fundraising proposition.
Setting these foundations well provides the clarity needed for team harmony and productivity – and so makes for digital fundraising success.
Let’s explore these three areas in turn.
a) Clear organisational and fundraising objectives
Well-articulated organisational objectives clarify what’s important for your nonprofit and what you’re trying to achieve. At the whole-organisation level, these may include objectives for:
Core programs, eg:
Implement new child literacy program
Reach more regional areas with suicide prevention services
Stop new oil drilling projects in eastern seaboard region
Upgrade capacity of bear sanctuary
Fundraising, eg:
Grow yearly revenue by 15%
Increase long-term income security
Advocacy, eg:
Achieve stronger environmental protection laws
Encourage more corporate workplaces to adopt anti-discrimination and harassment policies
Awareness, eg:
Grow brand awareness in key regional fundraising markets
Grow key online communities
At the fundraising level, objectives should align with your organisational-level objectives and expand on them. So if your organisational-level objective is to grow yearly revenue by 15%, your fundraising objectives should set more detailed milestones for achieving that, for example:
Recruit new monthly donors
Increase upgrades of one-time donors to monthly donors
Increase retention of mid-level appeal donors
Recruit new one-time donors
Build legacy program (confirmed and interested legacy donors)
Build emergency response readiness.
Objectives at all levels should be clear and well-articulated, and should avoid being too wordy. They also each need one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) attached to them. A KPI should identify a clear metric and a target for that metric. So for example for the objective “Increase upgrades of one-time donors to monthly donors”, the KPI could be “165 upgrades (50% increase from 110 last year)”.
Together, objectives and their KPIs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
With clear, SMART fundraising objectives and KPIs defined, you can then focus on how you’re going to achieve them with digital – namely, your digital fundraising strategy.
b) Your digital fundraising strategy
If you’re starting out, or even if you’re not, you should keep your digital fundraising strategy as simple as possible. There should be a one page version of your strategy, then if you need to distribute it, there can be a longer one with some explanatory notes (but not too much!).
Your one page digital fundraising strategy explains how you’ll help achieve your fundraising objectives with digital channels and activities. For me, the strategy document should include three levels, with clear continuity between related items. It also needs an calendar to indicate when things are going to happen (subject to change as time progresses of course). Together, this looks like:
Fundraising objectives – with KPIs attached
Strategy – How you’re going to deliver on those objectives (without getting into too much detail)
Activities – The specific campaigns, communications and programs you’ll run to deliver on that strategy, along with their KPIs
Calendar.
So following on from the example above:
Objective: Increase upgrades of one-time donors to monthly donors
Strategy: Convert one-time donors with a diverse mix of approaches:
Dedicated upgrade campaigns
Responsive survey campaign
Personalised upgrade prompts in donation forms.
Activities:
2 x segmented upgrade campaigns – April and September
Email-led, personalised landing pages, incentivised with value exchange
Responsive survey campaign – February
Delivers on multiple objectives including engagement and legacy prospecting
Includes a question whether donor would consider a regular gifts. If ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’, form is served
Personalised upgrade prompts in donation forms
Proven approach, after a one-time donor has nominated a gift amount, offer to make it a monthly gift of around 25% the nominated amount. Incentivise with value exchange
Implement A/B testing with web developer support.
Your calendar plots all your activities them out on a visual graph. This gives your team and internal stakeholders a simple, single-look reference for understanding what’s going to happen when throughout the year.
For extra points, you’d have a vision for your digital fundraising program above the objectives to provide a single, aspirational future state that you’re aiming for. But you may not yet have that if you’re starting out.
Need help with your digital fundraising strategy? I've helped nonprofits around the world develop their strategies, grow and succeed with digital. I'd love to hear from you. Book me for a free 30 minute call now. |
c) A compelling fundraising proposition
A fundraising proposition is a concise and inspiring statement that describes the impact of a donor's gift to your organisation. It should be clear, concise, specific, ideally unique, and should answer the question "Why should I give to this specific cause?"
The fundraising proposition is equivalent to “value proposition” or “unique selling proposition” used by commercial brands.
The Fred Hollows Foundation has a powerful and straightforward fundraising proposition. It’s expressed in its most basic form on its website: “Help Restore Sight – End Avoidable Blindness”.
The Fred Hollows Foundation historically used the more specific “$25 can restore sight to one person”. This was an extremely powerful proposition as it made the outcome of the donor’s gift very direct and tangible. While this $25 price point is still visible on their website, it has been generalised a little – possibly due to the organisation’s evolving work – and is not always used in top tier, most visible spaces.
Defining a clear and compelling fundraising proposition has several benefits. It communicates to your potential donors what their impact will be in terms they can understand at a glance. It facilitates consistent communication of that impact across donor touchpoints, channels and over time, which aids donor education and message recall.
And a clear and compelling fundraising proposition aligns your internal teams behind a message they can manifest across all their donor engagement and campaigns.
3. Prepare your “version 1.0” digital fundraising channels
Armed with clear organisational and fundraising objectives and a compelling fundraising proposition, you’re ready to get started on your version 1.0 set of fundraising channels:
a) Website
b) Email program
c) Google Ad Grants, and
d) Organic social channels.
Let’s explore each of those in a little more detail.
a) Website v1 for fundraising
Your website is supremely important to your organisation’s fundraising program. It’s your home online and the anchor to all your online channels.
Your website needs to inspire your visitors to trust your organisation and its impact. This will encourage people to make donations both (a) directly online and (b) via other offline channels. A supporter may prefer to donate via direct mail, for example, but still google you and browse your website to assess and make their decision.
Your website also needs to inspire emotional connection between your supporters and your beneficiaries and illustrate donor impact clearly. Trust is great, but if people aren’t emotionally and personally engaged, they won’t donate.
Further, website visitors need to see donors and supporters as the people creating the change, not your organisation. That places the website visitor directly in the narrative of change and illustrates their direct impact on the problem you’re solving.
Lastly, your website needs to be intuitive and usable. People need to be easily able to do the things (a) they want to do AND (b) you want them to do on the site, especially tasks that impact fundraising, like donating and email signup. Every little bit of friction in the donation process will reduce your income.
If donating is easy AND your donation page is inspiring and emotive, you’ll maximise your digital fundraising income.
b) Email v1 for fundraising
Email is your most important direct marketing channel. In time, if you build your email list and keep your subscribers engaged, your email program can become a fundraising powerhouse for you.
The first thing you’ll need is to create an account on an email platform, like Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor. There are many good platforms, just make sure assess your needs before making your decision on which to go with.
Once you have your account, set up an email template. My recommendation is to keep it simple and not overly-formatted or heavily structured. The more your emails look like real messages from real people – as opposed to advertisements – the more people will engage with them.
Many nonprofits fall into sending multi-story newsletters because, well, that’s what other orgs do or that’s what staff did at their last job. But personally I prefer single story emails to newsletters. With a single story email, you’re confidently telling the supporter what the most important story is right now, and the single thing they need to do about it.
With your email platform and template established, it’s a good idea to set up a simple autoresponder for new subscribers. It can be plain text or include a photo of your beneficiaries or team and should warmly thank and welcome them, reinforce the impact they’re having by being part of your community and invite them to join you on social media. Nothing crazy, but an important and warm acknowledgement.
There’s a LOT more to email than that, but this is a good place to start, and you shouldn’t try to be too sophisticated when you’ve got a list of only a few hundred or thousand. At this point, it doesn't represent all that much opportunity. But as your list grows in size, your fundraising potential also grows, so you should progressively invest more to increase the frequency and sophistication of your email program.
I call this process “progressive investment”. It’s a great principle for your program growth and development.
You can read more about email marketing on my Email Marketing for Charities and Nonprofits page.
c) Google ads v1 for fundraising
Over 90% of web sessions start with a search, and over 90% of search happens on Google. This is why Google Ads is such an important advertising channel for fundraisers.
Google ads connect you with people who are inherently qualified by searching for your brand or cause-relevant topics. This audience is already interested – they just need to be connected with you.
The “Google for Nonprofits” program offers registered nonprofits a grant of up to $10,000 per month in free search ads. This Google Ad Grant is a great opportunity for fundraisers to connect with potential supporters.
To start, you need to sign up to Google for Nonprofits. Google will take some time to verify your charitable status and brand ownership, normally a number of weeks. Once you’re accepted, you’ll activate Ad Grants following Google’s instructions, then you’re ready to being advertising.
Now Google search account management can get technical and sophisticated and require time and knowledge to manage. With the idea of progressive investment in mind, if you’re managing it in-house, you should start with a simple brand campaign to drive brand-related search traffic to your website. It’s fairly straightforward to do, but if it’s your first time in Google Ads, you’ll need to do some extra blog and video guide research to work out how it all works.
Add some sitelinks to your first brand ad to deep link to important pages on your website.
Importantly, you must regularly take a minimum of time to go into your account and actively manage it. If you don’t do this, Google can and will remove you from the Ad Grants program due to disengagement. It can be as little as 20-30 minutes every week or two to go in, assess reports and tweak a thing or two. But make sure you’re delivering this minimum threshold.
d) Organic social v1 for engagement and fundraising
Organic social content is the posts, tweets etc that that you publish on your social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc. It’s hard to raise funds on organic social channels without paid ads to reach more people unless you’ve got:
A killer, unique proposition
A big, engaged community and/or
Great content and community interaction.
If you’ve got one or more of these factors, it’s possible, but many charities don’t.
That doesn’t mean social channels are of no use though.
Firstly, if you’re not ticking the three boxes above yet, you should aspire to. Develop a plan for producing awesome content, increasing engagement and growing your community. Work on your fundraising proposition/s, brainstorm hard to bring an inspiring product to market. Do those things well and your organic social results can become more impressive.
Secondly, social channels are like an entry ticket for raising funds online. They’re important indicators for potential donors checking your organisation out and deciding whether to trust you, whether or not these channels deliver direct ROI. And the more times you can touch someone with great stories on social throughout the year, the more likely they will be to support you at fundraising appeal time.
So where do you start with organic social media? Start by keeping it simple. To get anywhere on a social platform, you’ve got to post good content regularly, and this takes time to create. So profile your most important supporters and stakeholders and choose a limited number of channels – like one or two – that match those profiles. For example if women aged 45+ with an interest in animal welfare are a key donor segment, you might choose to focus on Facebook. If you’re developing a youth audience aged 25 and under, you might start with Tiktok.
While choosing where to focus, it’s still important to grab your organisational profile on other channels. Even if you’re not initially going to focus on Twitter, grab your org’s Twitter handle, create a branded profile with a short description that tells people where they can find you. Maybe do a pinned tweet as well.
To get the most value out of your work, you can repurpose content made for one social platform to others. This is a good idea. But make sure you’re taking into account the unique characteristics of each platform and make a real effort to reflect that in your content. Don’t just post the exact same text and image everywhere.
Lastly but most importantly, remember that good social content is, well, social. Always think of how your content would translate to a conversation between people at a party, and what the likely outcome would be.
For example, on one side of the room, Adrian constantly tells stories about himself and ignores the responses and non-verbal cues of those around him. On the other side of the room, Angie asks questions of people, considers and responds to what they say. She thinks about what’s interesting to them based on what she knows about them and lures them in with relevant, entertaining stories.
Which side of the room do you think everyone will be on by the end of the night?
Take that insight back to your approach to organic social content and you’ll be rewarded with community growth and engagement.
4. Focus on growth and engagement of all your supporters
One of the biggest mistakes I see fundraisers make in digital is focusing just on donors; the people who have already given to you. This is an important audience, for sure; probably the most important. But it’s not our only audience.
Donors are a subset of a nonprofit’s supporter base, which also include advocates, email subscribers, volunteers and other stakeholders. All of these people have engaged with you in some way, and so are somewhere on a “spectrum of engagement” with your organisation.
Good digital fundraisers understand the non-donor segments of your audience as future donors who are waiting for the right ask at the right time to make their first gift. Supporting this, I’ve taken part in a number of research projects showing that a group of new email subscribers will convert to donors over the months and years following their email subscription, provided they’re continually engaged.
For example, in the case of one charity I work with, a supporter made a AUD$300,000 donation as their first gift nine months after signing a hand-raiser (a type of lead generation campaign) promoted on Facebook.
Once you recognise this potential in non-financial supporters, you see that these segments act like a pipeline for your donor program, and as such, you want to grow them continuously. You do this:
By promoting email signup on your website and social channels, and
Via cause-related lead generation campaigns.
Need help growing your supporter-base and digital fundraising program? I help fundraisers grow their digital fundraising results, skills and confidence. Book me for a free 30 minute call now. |
But it’s not enough to just get people onto your email list. For sure, when someone subscribes to your email program or signs your hand-raiser campaign, they’re signaling their interest in your organisation, which is great. But from there, you need to work to continuously engage your supporter, build your relationship with them and grow their commitment to your beneficiaries, which you do with regular, compelling emails, social and web content. Do this, and in time you will develop a powerful digital revenue stream to fund your programs.
5. Increase investment and resourcing as you grow
You don’t want or need to start with a “bells and whistles” digital fundraising program. Quite the opposite. When you’ve got a small online community and donor base, your digital fundraising opportunity is relatively small. So you should keep it simple at first, building your version 1.0 program described above and keeping your small supporter base engaged with periodic communications that aren’t too time-intensive.
At this early stage, you should focus on and invest in growing your supporter base. But remember the principle of progressive investment mentioned above: As you grow that community, your fundraising potential also grows, so you should progressively invest more in the frequency and sophistication of your programs.
Hopefully this idea of progressive investment takes some pressure off time- and resource-strapped fundraisers developing your early programs. You don't have to do it all at once!
6. Add more advanced strategies to your mix
You’ve established your fundraising program version 1.0. You’ve started growing your email list with well-placed calls to action on your website and social media. Your social channels are also growing and you’re getting some traction.
Now, you can start exploring some more advanced digital fundraising strategies to your mix. These will help you unlock new income streams and funding for your nonprofit’s awesome programs.
You might consider trialing community fundraising, inviting your supporters to hold a fundraiser for their birthdays, or to raise funds from their friends by participating an upcoming fun-run.
Or you might double down on growing your community, testing different lead generation campaign ideas and building multi-channel conversion journeys to maximise early conversion of your new supporters. This I call “2 step campaigning”. You can find out more about lead generation and 2 step campaigns here.
You might also invest more in emergency response campaign readiness. Charities that respond quickly to unforeseen, high profile, external events (for example natural disasters or A list celebrity stories) that are relevant to their causes can raise serious money in short order for their causes. But it requires preparation and solid execution, which you can read more about below.
These possibilities and more are available to you as you grow your program. You should explore them with an experimental “test-and-learn” mindset in an order that fits your community profile, your organisational strengths and culture.
Importantly, you must keep a careful eye on your capacity and avoid over-committing. The digital universe offers limitless exciting things to try, but you must increase resourcing and investment as you take on more work, or you risk executing poorly and burning out your team.
7. Keep increasing investment, resourcing and results
As your results increase, you’ll learn a lot about digital and grow your experience and confidence. You’ll find out what works for your organisation, finding sweet spots and opportunities. And you’ll identify promising strategies and models to test.
Alongside this exciting education and development, its important to keep up momentum by gradually increasing investment in your program. Secure more budget and resourcing for (a) those areas that are working well and that you want to take to the next level, and (b) those new things you want to test.
In this way, you implement a continuous test-learn-optimise cycle as your digital program grows.
Importantly, this cycle never finishes – it keeps running as your program grows. In this way, you keep evolving your program and keeping it aligned with the evolving digital universe, its ever-shifting parameters and opportunities.
8. Get the right support to keep evolving
To stay in touch with the evolving digital universe and keep your digital fundraising program at best practice, you need a constant stream of input, ideas and learnings from other experienced parties outside your organisation. In this information age, there are plenty of sources of this:
Coaching and expert support: You can also work with a digital fundraising expert or consultant to help develop your strategy, review your program, campaign plan or creative, or help you elsewhere where you need it. I work with a lot of nonprofits in this flexible capacity, spending time just when, where and how it’ll deliver the most value. You can book me for a free 30 minute consulting call to discuss how we could work together.
Courses: There are some great resources out there on digital fundraising. I’ve created a Digital Fundraising course with the fantastic team at Moceanic, which we’re regularly adding up-to-date modules to. More broadly, you can find loads of great courses and training on digital marketing online. These are often more commercially-oriented than nonprofit-specific, but you can gain great insights on digital marketing frameworks and channels.
Webinars and conferences: Presentations from experts and peers can really open you up to new possibilities and ways of thinking about things. They also arm you with tangible examples you can share to educate people internally. Sign up to emails from a range of active fundraising bodies and associations, agencies and suppliers and try to attend at least a couple of interesting sessions per month.
Blogs, videos and podcasts: Same as webinars and conferences, experts and peers in the nonprofit space are sharing priceless insight and experience every day on blogs and in videos and podcasts. Subscribe to a bunch of them and filter in on the more useful ones over time.
Community input: You’ve got all sorts of people in your email, social and other communities. You can do more than just send them corporate communications. Feel free to share your real objectives, strategy and needs and open a dialogue about how people with different skill-sets and experience could help. They’ll self-select if they can help you!
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 (you're here now) 3. Email marketing for nonprofits 4. Lead generation for nonprofits 5. Peer-to-peer and community fundraising for nonprofits |
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