10 ideas to improve your online fundraising
If you’re looking to set up or level up your fundraising forms, fundraising and
campaigning platform Impact Stack can help. With advanced features, optimised
page designs and many integrations available, it can save you time and help you
take your online fundraising to the next level.
But technology is only as good as your ideas on how to use it. These 10 ideas to increase your online fundraising revenue have shown significant improvements for other charities.
- Understand your existing supporters
- Tailor your messaging and asks
- Use engagement actions to warm up donors
and potential donors - Prepare well for urgent response
- Run a crowdfunder
- Plan your supporter communications
with other teams - Create supporter journeys to convert, upgrade
and retain donors - Avoid or tackle data silos
- Tailor your messaging and asks
- Declutter your donation forms
Understand your existing supporters
It’s always a good idea to try to find out more about the people you’re looking to raise
money from. What motivates them to give? What ways of giving do they prefer?
You might want to consider:
- Talking to some supporters one-on-one to find out what motivates them,
and how they prefer to give. You might be surprised at what you learn. - Surveying them on a larger scale.
- Analysing data you have on past appeals and giving patterns.
- Running some audience testing through Facebook adverts to see what they
respond to.
Tailor your messaging and asks
Make sure that what you’re asking for, and how you’re asking, reflects the knowledge
and interests of the group of supporters you’re contacting. Segmenting your
supporters will help with this too as different audiences will need and respond to
different messaging.
If you’re not sure what works for your audience, why not try setting up a test?
Not sure where to start? The ‘Optimisation Testing’ report can help.
Use engagement actions to warm up donors
and potential donors
Engagement actions like quizzes, interactive content, and message exchanges are a
great way to build knowledge and commitment to the cause. They’re also a good way to balance out fundraising asks and add richness to your communications.
If you want to take this idea one step further you can explore putting donation asks on the thank you pages of your actions.
Thank you pages from non-financial actions (e.g. engagement or campaigning) are a great place to ask for money. You already have someone’s attention and they have just taken an action showing they support your cause. To maximise impact here, make sure you connect the financial ask to the action they just took. How does donating increase the impact they’ve already made?
Prepare well for urgent response
Urgent appeals connected to well-known current events are likely to have more cut
through and wide appeal than anything you can schedule in advance. Organisations responding to emergency situations often find these are the biggest fundraising moments of their year. But to be effective, you need to respond quickly to the change; whether that’s a natural disaster or your issue suddenly hitting the headlines or political agenda.
To make a quick response possible, you need to get all of your technical and structural foundations in place ahead of time.
Typically this means:
- agreeing an emergency process so you can get unscheduled
communications out quickly - having good technology in place and staff trained to use it, so you can build
pages and launch emails in minutes, not days - making sure your tracking and data flows are set up so the data is already
where you need it, when you need it (see the free ‘Technology Integrations’
report for more information).
Run a crowdfunder
Raising a specific amount of money for a specific purpose can make fundraising
appeals more compelling. This is especially effective if you can connect the ask to
something the supporters have already engaged with, e.g. a specific campaign.
Plan your supporter communications
with other teams
Planning your communications with other teams can help you all achieve more.
For example, it might seem counter productive to raise more money by sending more campaign emails, but engaging supporters in a range of ways often makes them more likely to give and to keep giving.
Create supporter journeys to convert, upgrade
and retain donors
Supporter journeys are a connected series of communications you send to supporters;
and they’re critical for building and maintaining relationships. There are many
journeys that you might consider but generally the most important for fundraising
teams are:
- a journey to convert non-donors to donors
- a journey to get one time-donors to give again or become monthly donors
- a journey to increase the value of your monthly donors, through retention
and/or uplift
Thoughtful journeys are such a critical part of a good fundraising strategy, that they need their own report, you can download the ‘Great Supporter Journeys’ report for free here.
Avoid or tackle data silos
Having one single view on the data you have about a supporter is critical to creating great supporter experiences. You should be able to see everything a supporter has done and everything they have received from you in one view. Only through having this information can you design great supporter-centred and segmented communications and appeals.
If you’d like to learn more about how to integrate your supporter data, we recommend the free report ‘Creating Richer Supporter Experiences Through Integrated Technology’.
Tailor your messaging and asks
Make sure that what you’re asking for, and how you’re asking, reflects the knowledge and interests of the group of supporters you’re contacting. Segmenting your supporters will help with this too as different audiences will need and respond to different messaging.
If you’re not sure what works for your audience, why not try setting up a test?
Not sure where to start? The ‘Optimisation Testing’ report can help.
Declutter your donation forms
The less information you ask for on a form, the higher the percentage of people will
complete it. Carefully consider, what information do you actually need to collect
upfront?
Ask yourself the same question of content on the donation page. Is it helping people to complete the form? If not, consider removing or changing it. If you’re not sure, set up a test.