Christine Ward If a handful of easy fundraising updates could give online donations a boost, you’d make them, right? Sometimes all it takes is a few quick changes to give your organization’s online donations a leg up.
Other times it takes a lot of planning and work to re-think aspects of your fundraising process, but I’m here to talk about the easy wins for now. We can save the big fundraising lifts for another day.
Easy Fundraising Updates
Online fundraising can be a fickle beast. But it comes down to ensuring that our online fundraising processes check two boxes for our supporters:
- Simple
- Compelling
Luckily, there are lots of updates that you can make to your fundraising process to make the online giving experience easier and more compelling for your supporters. We’ve broken some easy fundraising updates into two categories for you: updates to your website content and updates to your marketing processes.
Website Content Updates
Give your website content a quick refresh, while keeping your donors in mind.
- Make your Donate page easy to find: Online donors should not have to do much searching around on your website to find the Donate page. It should be placed logically within your website structure. Perhaps even linked directly in the main or secondary navigation.
- Use a powerful photo: The photo on your Donate page should tug at supporters’ heartstrings and make them feel good about supporting your cause. Powerful imagery can work magic, especially on this page of your website.
- Keep the form “above the scroll”: Supporters should not have to scroll very far down the page to find your Donate form. Aim to keep the content on that page strong and concise.
- Offer giving levels: Consider listing giving levels for a range of donation sizes to offer supporters a picture of how their gift will help. For example, $50 feeds 5 school children for a week.
- Add links to your Donate page contextually: Link to your Donate page from other pages of your website wherever it makes sense. For example on your Mission and Vision page, you might encourage visitors to support your mission and link to your Donate page for them to do so.
- Use stories: Within content focused on encouraging donations, add stories to give your call to action a personal and impactful touch. And, if your story arsenal is running low, check out these ways to collect more stories and testimonials about your work.
Marketing Updates
These adjustments to your marketing can help to bring in more donations from email, social media and around the web.
- Segment fundraising emails: When announcing a fundraising campaign or encouraging email subscribers to give, send a separate email to donors that includes an acknowledgement of their past gifts. Don’t lump them in with the rest of your list and send everyone the same email.
- Automate your thank you email: Save yourself time and stop missing thank you emails by automating the process. If your email service provider or form builder can send automated emails, take advantage of the tool with an email (or series of emails) to thank donors after they give.
- Enable donate buttons on other sites: Enabling donate buttons in places other than your website helps capture people in places where they already engage or feel an emotional reaction to your content. See how to enable buttons on Facebook, Google, YouTube, Guidestar and GoFundMe.
- Share fundraising content on social media: You can and should ask followers to give on social media. It just shouldn’t be the only thing that you post about. See our tips for creating a plan for fundraising on social media sites.
How does your website content and marketing fare? Making even a few of these easy fundraising updates can give your donors a better experience giving online.
Re-Working Your Online Donation Process
It’s possible that your online donation process needs a little more work than the “easy wins” category allows for in this post. That might include things like moving your donate form from a third party website and housing it directly on your website, overhauling your donate form fields or integrating your form with other tools that you use.
Or maybe you’re not sure how sound your process is and are hoping for an objective opinion.
With the Donor Flow Optimizer for Nonprofit Websites, you can answer key questions about what you’re doing to grade your process in three stages: before, during and after a donation. You can then start optimizing each phase based on personalized recommendations for your organization.
Not all of the updates will be easy. While some online fundraising updates may require a great deal of time, thought and potentially budget, it’s a worthwhile effort to ensure your online donation process offers donors a good experience that keeps them coming back.
Have you tried any of these easy fundraising updates on your nonprofit’s website or marketing efforts? Did you see a boost in online gifts as a result? I’d love to talk about online fundraising with you in the comments below.
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