How to boost your online fundraising results with online giving.
6 May 2021While traditional fundraising – like face-to-face, snail mail, or phone calls – is still the preferred way for fundraisers to build relationships with donors; online fundraising is offering a new easier, quicker, and more convenient way to interact with supporters. In fact, online giving revenue has grown over 40% as new techniques and online donation options become popular within fundraising.
Online giving has the potential to increase your donor acquisition, engage with your supporters or increase your recurring donations, among other benefits.
Whether you are using a sophisticated online fundraising platform, or more simple technology like a landing page, there are certain techniques you can use to boost your online donation rate.
1. Create an online communication strategy to better interact with your donors.
Identify your different donor types, and the way they interact with your organization, and you will be able to deliver specific targeted messages. Special thank you “gifts”, newsletters, reminders, campaign activities, always make sure your communication messages are the most adequate for each donor type.
For example if you have recurring donors, you can target them only for specific campaigns, but you don’t want to ask too much. Or when you have donors already registered, but they have not donated yet, you can retarget them to influence their decision making.
Email marketing is a very powerful technique as well for targeted online communication. You can bulk message your donors by creating lists and segmentations. You can find more information here on how to use email marketing to increase your impact here.
2. Offer them clarity and provide social proof.
The number 1 reason why donors don’t donate is that they don’t know how their gift is being used (link to the source).
Providing full information on how their funds will be used in conjunction with visual proof will increase the credibility and the likeliness of people donating.
Videos are one of the most powerful digital tools to influence decisions and create impact. They will support your storytelling and provide proof of how their funds will be used.
You can decide which is the best technique for you to present them with this type of information: Break down in statistics how and where their funds will be used to offer more clarity; showcase previous campaigns with similar objectives; show them the campaign in progress so they can see in a tangible way their impact.
There are multiple ways you can achieve this, make sure you use the one that suits you better.
3. Simplify your donation request for a quick and on point experience.
Online interactions are made to simplify people’s lives. That is what people expect when they interact with your nonprofit in the digital space. Make sure you are offering your donors an easy and rewarding experience, and that the time of the transaction is reduced to the minimum viable.
Limit the interactions, and create forms where data collection is as reduced as you are able to. Offer autofill options and data saving, so your donors will not have to go through that process every time.
Provide preset options for giving, and present them with alternatives to choose from, so that they do not have to spend much time on the actual transaction.
The more time and more complexity your form requires, the more chances they will abandon the transaction without completing it.
4. Be strategic when presenting giving options.
Offering a pre selection of giving options is a great way to ensure your donors are presented with easy selectable options to donate. There are certain strategies you can keep in mind to maximise the impact of this technology in your favor.
Look at the amount of your most recurring giving and slightly increase it. Set this as the default option for your donors to directly increase your donations.
Also, did you know that when people are presented with multiple options they always tend to choose the middle range? If you are using a multi-giving option, use your most recurrent donation in the middle, accompanied by a lower and a higher price, so that they will feel they are choosing a fair gift.
Do not overwhelm your donors with a vast amount of options, 3 options is best. Avoid giving them the chance to select their own amount for more control over your giving.
5. Always, always, always keep mobile in mind.
Currently, 70% of online traffic is coming from mobile, not ensuring proper accessibility through these devices is automatically translated into a donation loss.
Adapt your campaigns to be easily accessible through mobile phones and make sure to optimise your donation and registration flows, to increase donor conversion and fundraiser engagement!
There are different tools and platforms that offer you services to personalize and improve your donation form.
Talk to us today and let us know how we can help you increase your giving.
