5 Tips to Energize your Fundraising Efforts
These 5 tips will energize your fundraising efforts!
With more nonprofits than ever before vying for the support of a shrinking pool of donors, it’s essential to create an impactful fundraising appeal that will help you secure the funding you need. If you want to stand out from the crowd, keep these 5 tips in mind:
1: MailChimp and Constant Contact don’t work
Why? Because these services are usually caught in email services and either doesn’t get delivered or go into a promotion folder. Alternative email services like Yesware are text-based and come directly from your email host so it appears as though it is a highly personalized email. The reason that open and clicks rates are higher is that Yesware puts a limit on how many emails you can send daily. This service integrates with Gmail and Outlook. Yes, it’s a pain but we use Yesware and it’s increased our open rates from 15% to between 40% and 80% (yes, 80% depending on the list and the subject line.)
2: Your donation page must compel people to donate.
Without a story, without strong motivation to donate, and reasons why the trigger to donate might just not happen. Here is a great example of a donation page that increased by over 150% over the old, no-story donation page.
3: Personalize your emails
- Using “friend” in your emails can decrease your donation and integration rate. Personalize your emails (when you have the first name of your addressee.)
- Segment your messaging email based on the type of donor.
- Never, ever forget to thank your donors in your communications.
4: Be specific in your emails
Using generic and general terms in your emails shows can negatively impact click and donation rates. For example, “Join our Fight” is not as descriptive and unique as “Please help us continue to provide hungry children with food resources.” A few fabulous tools that I have found are:
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- https://www.copy.ai/ (I used this to write the beginning of this blog post!
- https://keywee.co/ Helps write ad copy and emails
- https://app.grammarly.com/ Helps check grammar
5: Start Focusing on converting your donors to recurring donors
Recurring donors can become some of your biggest funders. Focus your messaging on them in order to increase the likelihood of recurring donations.
Bonus A/B Testing to Energize your Fundraising Efforts
One more idea that is easy to implement is A/B testing. What that means is to create multiple emails. or email content and send it to different lists. Have different versions of your donation page and identify which helps increase your donations. Test different ad copy on Facebook and see which converts more. There are so many things to test. Just pick one and continue to learn from your efforts. NOTE: please make sure you have Google Analytics on your website. If you need help with that, please contact us!
