Christine Ward Looking at donor retention stats and the costs associated with recruiting new donors, it makes sense to prioritize post-donation communications. It’s much easier and less expensive to convince a past donor who has already shown their connection to your cause and willingness to give than it is to reach someone who has never given and may not even know who you are or what you do.
Are you reaching out to past donors on a regular basis to stay top of mind? Or are you leaving that money on the table?
Create a Donor Communication Strategy
The mistakes that I’ll outline in this article are based on what’s in your donor communication strategy – your plan for keeping in touch with donors after they give in the hopes of convincing them to give again. It’s more than a receipt for their gift directly after it happens, but rather an ongoing communications plan to stay top of mind.
And if you don’t have a plan for reaching out to donors, it’s time to create one. A solid donor communication strategy is the first step to standardizing your process after a donation is made. Plan out things like how often, when and with what messaging you’ll reach out to previous donors so that no one falls through the cracks.
An Integral Piece of Your Donation Process
Your post-donation communications are part of a larger donation process or donor flow that each of your donors works through, from the content that inspires them to give through your donate page and donation form to everything that happens after they give.
As you get comfortable with executing your strategy and get to know your donors better, you can begin adding complications and optimizing your donor flow based on what donors are responding to and what they’re not. To see if your current process is up to snuff, use a tool like the Donor Flow Optimizer to grade what you’re doing and identify quick wins to help you raise more money.
Read the Full Post
This article was originally written by Wired Impact for the Salsa Labs blog. Check out the full post to learn the five post-donation communication mistakes we see all the time:
- Forgetting about digital marketing channels
- No long-term follow-up
- Boring, generic or repetitive emails
- Lack of personalization
- Strategies that don’t talk to each other
Have other post-donation communication mistakes that you’ve seen (or made)? Feel free to drop them in the comments below.
Comments