How To Successfully Launch A Digital Fundraising Campaign For Your Nonprofit

The heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own Read More

The heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people, you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect. We provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect. We provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by by phone, chat or email, they’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked, What do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people, you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback.

Hello, everyone. My name is Jonathan Bulacan. And I’m a technical support representative for DonorPerfect. Welcome to Juliette Campbell session how to successfully launch a digital fundraising campaign for your nonprofit. Here’s a little bit of information about Julia, named as a top thought leader and one to follow by Forbes and LinkedIn for nonprofits. Julia Campbell is a nonprofit digital consultant, speaker and author on a mission to make the digital world a better place. Host of the acclaimed nonprofit nation podcast. She’s written two books for nonprofits on social media and storytelling. And our online courses, webinars and talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking. Before I hand the session over to Julia, I’d like to address a few housekeeping items. All presentation slides are attached to the Details section of each session and can be downloaded for your review. Please be sure to add your questions to the q&a tab so we can see them and get them answered for you. And lastly, all sessions are being recorded and will be available on our DonorPerfect website following the conference. So let’s give a warm welcome to Julia. Take it away.

Thanks, Jonathan. I am so excited to be here today. I am thrilled to be at the SPARC Community Summit. Thank you so much for inviting me. And how’s everyone’s day going how of the other sessions then? I know you’re hearing from two of my really good friends. Two of my favorite speaker is to Shana Palmer and Mallory Erickson. So you’re in for a treat there. So we have a lot to cover today. I have a lot of slides and a lot of examples that I really want to share with you. So we’re gonna go pretty quickly. I’m not really going to read my bio because Jonathan’s so wonderfully and graciously read my bio. But what I wanted to say I think something that’s very important to know about me is I am a former development and marketing director. I’ve worked in the sector for going on almost two decades now. And I’ve been in multiple roles, pretty much almost every role except for executive director role. So I understand what it’s like to be resource strapped and time starved and have a million things on your plate. And I’m so proud of all of you for coming and taking time out of your day. To do some professional development. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Julia Campbell, love to connect there. So I started my journey into digital fundraising actually, when I served in the US Peace Corps. I was in Senegal, which is a country in West Africa. And this was in the year 2000 2000 2002. And this is before, there were any fantastic online fundraising tools, like DonorPerfect. So we had to write emails home and letters home and actually get western union money sent if we were doing a project or working with other NGOs. But this is how I really sort of cut my teeth in fundraising, and storytelling and marketing. And it really helped instill in me a passion for missions. And for, you know, changing the world. So that’s how I got started. And today, we’re going to talk about all of the fantastic ways that you can raise money in a digital fundraising campaign today, right and 2020, for how to use your website, how to use email, how to use social media, and then we’ll talk a little bit about metrics at the end. So you know, things might seem hopeless, I just want to sort of, say, right now, I understand there, there’s a lot going on in the world. And I really want to just say that I hope we can all come together right now, for this moment and just say, we are doing great things, our mission is important. Everything that we are doing is important, from the little library, to the food bank, to the International Relations organization. Your mission is critical. And everything you’re doing matters right now. So what do we know about donors? Well, they love to give online, this isn’t surprising. But the top three preferred methods of giving our online bank transfer and direct mail is actually third, that’s a global trends and giving report. What holds us up is that we tend to think, Oh, our donors won’t give online, like our donors, our donor file. Well, that’s not necessarily true, right. So you can’t assume that boomers and older generations are not participating online. And they’re not banking online, and they’re not shopping online. And they’re not giving online, because that is just not true. It’s not just for the younger generations. Another thing I really want to impart to you today, is that digital fundraising fits into your overall fundraising plan. It doesn’t replace things that are working. And it’s certainly not groundbreaking, right? The principles of what works in fundraising are still the same, the tools may have shifted and will continue to shift. There’s no perfect one size fits all secret. There’s no silver bullet, but you can do it. It really works best when it’s incorporated with things you’re already doing. So what does successful fundraising campaigns have in common on their fundraising campaigns? Well, they are specific, achievable goals, there’s a sense of urgency to participate, that’s maybe your matching gift, or maybe it’s a deadline, or maybe it’s a special project. Very importantly, trust built up before you launch the campaign, you can’t just sort of come out of nowhere and just have a digital fundraising campaign that’s going to be successful, you do have to have some kind of trust built up before you launch. There’s infrastructure in place, we’ll talk about that. And that there’s a great donor experience. I mean, those are really all the building blocks of a successful digital fundraising campaign. Now you’re going to get a workbook, a checklist, a calendar, there’s all sorts of great materials for you. And they’re all available also on my website, but you will get the slides and you’re going to get all these materials. So don’t worry about it, you’ll be able to play on your campaign after this quick sort of session. So don’t do anything that you don’t enjoy their nonprofits doing. I’m going to talk about pop ups, I’m gonna talk about paid ads, I’m gonna touch on a little bit of everything. But if you don’t enjoy doing it, if you don’t like it, you are the expert, right? So you check in with your intuition. This is simply to give you some ideas and inspiration, and some best practices, but it is certainly not prescriptive. Every organization is different. And every nonprofit, you know, has a different voice. So we’ll talk about the five phases today of a digital fundraising campaign, building, launching, promoting, follow up and thanking and measurement, analysis and improvement. So building the campaign. Well, you don’t want to be like the people in this particular cartoon. You know, we’re going digital. Okay, what are we going to do? I don’t know, we’ll figure it out later. You really want to make sure that you have a goal for your campaign. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and time bound. Okay, that is a SMART goal. So what does that look like? Here’s some examples. You know, we want to raise $5,000 in 24 hours. That’s very specific, measurable, maybe attainable, relevant and time based. You know, maybe you want to increase social media engagement. You want to get new day honors, you want to increase average download donations, you want to increase recurring donors. So when you’re running a campaign, it’s very important to pick one goal. You know, there are going to be other great things that happen when you run the campaign. But we cannot get overwhelmed with too many goals. I like to think about goals when we present them to the public, in terms of an impactful so in side your organization, you can say, we want to raise $25,000. But to the public that might seem not attainable. They don’t really necessarily understand what the money is going to write. So what about saying, build 25 schools or we want to raise enough money for 700 bikes? Those kinds of goals, when you present them to the public, are little more understandable and tangible for your donors. Then you want to choose a theme. You know, there’s all sorts of cars and awareness days, there are definitely different celebrations. There are milestones, anniversaries, why do your donors love you? Right? You want to really capitalize on that? What’s your vision? Like? What’s interesting and unique about your approach? What do you do? What can you do that no one else can do? This is really going to help you stand out. So this is a Myra incorporated one of my favorite organizations. They did a virtual event in 2020. To raise money for their new home opening in Connecticut, they sent several of us I’m a monthly donor. So they sent me some stories. They sent me some information about this campaign that I could then share online. And they had a very specific goal. It was a very specific SMART goal. And they had very specific instructions. So the theme was one day, six stories, extraordinary impact. Now, they do not share names and faces of clients. They don’t interview clients on their website, they talk to the chief program officer, or they take quotes and anonymize them. So you can run a digital fundraising campaign. Even if you cannot share the names and faces of your clients just follow Muira. Anywhere they are online, because they do a fantastic job. So some tips on choosing a theme. Think about, you know, the who, what, when, where and why, like, what do people care about? What’s going to get them excited? Why did they support you already, really think about your audience and your donors. When you’re thinking about the campaign. Look at promotional events, look at Pinterest. I mean, I would look at Pinterest anyway. But I have Pinterest Pinterest board that I compile of online campaigns that worked Instagram or X, you can look up on various hashtags, do a lot of research and get a lot of examples and get some inspiration online. When you’re building the campaign, that’s the critical piece is determine the length of the campaign. So you know, Indiegogo found that their campaign length, the most successful campaigns are in 3039 days that might seem very long to you, I always recommend usually two weeks. Um, and the reason is because you want to be all hands on deck, raising money for those two weeks when we’re talking about, you know, additional fundraising campaign. This is not, you know, your regular fundraising that you’re going to be doing all year. So then you want to set up your your, what I call your campaign hub, this is going to be the place is probably on your website, where all of the information and the donation form is housed. You can house it on an outside website, you can have it on DonorPerfect, you can have it on your website, a specific page dedicated to the campaign like Amira did. Also Boys and Girls Clubs Schenectady, they had a campaign called I want to be, and they have a very specific page on their website, you can create a trackable link for sharing on social media to make sure that you measure where the traffic is coming from. But you do want to make sure you have a way you know your place to send people.

That you that is really just one kind of central hub. When you’re writing your pitch. It’s really all about why this why now right? So you want to put the most important information first, you really want to be compelling and conveying the most important pieces, the why why are we raising money? What is it going towards? What is the difference is going to make in the world and Why are you raising money now? And if you can do a specific breakdown of where the money goes great, but you don’t have to, you could say we’re building this we’re doing this or we want to increase our services or we want to you know, a lot of people will say you know, we want to provide new services to 25 people Whatever it is, just make sure that it’s a compelling and very clear reason that you’re running this campaign. Spelling and grammar are important, be sure to proofread. Because that’s distracting. Like, there’s a lot of typos and grammatical errors, people are gonna get focused on that and not get focused on the actual campaign. I break long text intersections, because you’re going to use this pitch everywhere, right? So the give love campaign like you, if you have a campaign like this, you’re going to use this campaign pitch in a video that you might create in your website and your email in your social media posts. So it has to answer the following questions why this? What problem are you solving and why now, right? Why now, campaigns with a video, raise four times more funds, it does not have to be a produced video that is 20 minutes long and costs you $10,000 It doesn’t have to be that it could be you holding your phone, and just simply talking through the campaign pitch. So what I recommend is just to make a short video, 30 seconds, one minute no longer, that’s gonna hook someone in and make me understand why this is so vital, and why this is so urgent, you know, invite your audience to join a movement to make an investment in a better future. And then ask people to give this is where I think we get hung up. And we we sort of we don’t really do the best work that we can do. Because we tend to say, join us or get involved, but not actually say, give like give us money, make a donation, make an investment, you know, join our movement today with your contribution. And then this is a video that you can use kind of pretty much everywhere. So Amira Incorporated, they have a short video that they did for their campaign, I will let you watch it, you know, at your own leisure, it’s a little bit longer than one minute, but they did a series of reels also. And they did a series of just 32nd Post is just all staff members. Like I said they don’t share client names and faces on their social media. This is one that the Night Ministry did on GivingTuesday. They had a campaign give serve advocate. And it was the president of the board that simply did a pitch to why he supports the Night Ministry. And then sort of how you can support the Night Ministry and their work. There are so many DIY tools that you can use to create these short videos, you could just use your phone of course, you could use cap cut, like right on your phone. Or you could use Animoto lumen five Canva I just wanted to give you some sort of free and low cost tools that you can use just to create this DIY video. It’s so important now to you know, to really be grabbing attention. And to incorporate video into any digital fundraising campaign. The best campaigns share a variety of stories throughout the campaign. So it could be your story, and your founder story, your board chair story, a donor story, a volunteer story, a client story lists some story ideas, some stories that you could use during the campaign. Now, of course, a client story, an impact story is the most compelling type of story. But a lot of my examples that I’ve shared are not those kinds of stories. The important thing is that the story catches attention, you know, what’s the hook? Why am I why do I care? And how is it going to explain the purpose of the campaign? Is it going to elicit an emotion? Is it going to inspire sharing with others? How is it going to really convey the purpose and the premise of why you’re raising money? And the purpose of the campaign right now? And can you transfer it to a video maybe not. Maybe it will just be a caption, maybe it’ll be a blog post, maybe it’ll be in an email. So these are some examples, you know, fundraising stories during a campaign or campaigns shared stories shared during a fundraising campaign. These are impact stories. You know, this is St. Baldrick’s Foundation. On the right hand side, that’s Plummer youth promise, a foster care agency that I work with in Salem, Massachusetts, but they’re not long. As you can see, they’re they’re not very long. They’re a couple of paragraphs. They just simply convey the purpose of the organization, Boys and Girls Club Boston. They’re always constantly talking to community members, talking to volunteers, talking to families that they’ve served and getting sort of their words and their perspective. Maybe just share a quote. I mean, it doesn’t really They have to be a full story with a full story arc and the hero’s journey, sometimes just a really great image, and have really compelling quote, can tell can tell a story. I call these like mission moments. They’re a little mission moments. Now, recruiting social media ambassadors, this is different than working with influencers, because working with influencers can be like a 90 minute webinar all in itself. I just mean, figure out who’s already on your list. This could be your board members, these could be your volunteers, this could be staff members, this could be people that come to you came to your events. But you want to make sure that you’re giving them the information about the campaign, and that you’re also really explaining to them what you want them to do. Do you want them to share this out? Do you want them to share? Where do you want them to share? What do you want them to share? Where’s the link? Where is the graphic that you want them to share? And recruit with intention. So this is an example email, this is what Mayra sent me. You know, in 2020, and I thought it was really simple, really genuine came from the heart. And I thought it would be a great template for you. So of course, you’re going to be getting these slides. So you can have this template. You know, I love at the end, I’m reaching out to ask if you would consider being a hope date influencer attaches in more information, let me know, you know, no pressure, I greatly appreciate it.

Then you want to give these people like I said, give them the graphics, don’t expect them to create their own graphics. Don’t expect them to create their own videos, give them the information. This is sort of the when you sign up to be an influencer on this particular campaign. Yeah, we did get several emails. And you know, I had signed up. So it was completely permission based, but it was very clear what I needed to do each day of the campaign. So additional fundraising tools, you know, these can help you raise more, but I really wouldn’t rely on them. They’re just tools in your tool belt like Facebook, Instagram, fundraising, YouTube text to give mobile payments, they’re all things you can incorporate. But of course, don’t rely on them. So with Facebook and Instagram, if you decide to integrate these tools, you know, you can encourage your community to raise money for you for this particular campaign. I see this, of course, all the time on Giving Tuesday. Very easy to set up very easy to do. You can also just use these tools to promote the campaign. You don’t have to use Facebook fundraising tools at all. And Titus people by updating your link in your bio, create graphics specifically for Instagram, there’s text to give tools. There’s a lot of ways to promote your campaign, using these tools, and encouraging other people to do so as well. This is how Make A Wish America does it. This is how the British Heart Foundation does it you know you can support us on Instagram helped fund life saving research. You can add donate stickers to your donation, you can donate stickers to your stories, that’s an easy thing to do. You don’t have to do that you can send people to your website if you want. Or they can make a donation right through the tool itself. YouTube fundraising tools, if you sign up for YouTube, for nonprofits, it’s completely free to do you can put links on your video, there are a lot of fundraising tools available to you there. So you want to register if you’re interested for a free account. And these are just sort of some technical, some technical instructions around signing up for that. Like I said, these are not things you have to do. They’re just simply other ways that you can raise more money during the campaign. Tax to give could be a good example. I know that for a lot of people, there are just there are restrictions. And in different countries, there are a lot of restrictions on text to give. But it’s just a tool in your tool belt. In the UK, it’s super popular and they actually use text to give quite a lot. So it’s something that you know, you might want to explore if you are doing a lot of maybe event fundraising because it’s very easy for people to text to give at a physical event. It’s very easy for them to text to give if you’re doing a virtual event. So just tools in your tool belt. There’s also of course, Google pay Apple Pay, just make sure you’re making it as easy as possible for your donors to be able to give you money in the way that they want to give the great example of Salvation Army when they realized you know, especially during COVID No one was giving them change anymore in cash anymore. They started to use the tap to give an apple penguin We’ll go back. All right, now we’re going to talk about launching the campaign. So, once you’ve set everything up, you want to really, really plan a lot for launch day, because campaigns do raise the most money in the first and last days of the campaign. So there’s gonna be a lull, and that’s okay. But you might want to consider what can you do to grab attention and make a big, big splash on launch day? Like, how do you maybe you’ll go live, live video gets a lot of attention, it beats the algorithm, it gets a lot of engagement. So you might want to consider going live, announcing the campaign live, choosing the format, maybe you interview someone, maybe you are just talking about the campaign and everything, and you’re so excited, make sure you’re promoting it. And let us you know, letting your followers know what you’re doing. And letting them know sort of about the exciting news. So we’ve got some examples there. Email people tell them the campaign is launching. And make sure that the subject line is very compelling. You want people to open the email act on the email, the first email you send about this campaign is going to be your most opened and acted on. And then your social media checklist. If you are incredibly, overly ambitious, you probably want to create maybe some graphics, change the graphics on all of your channels, get everybody on board to maybe share a post that day, you know, have a plan to use all of your different channels. So launch day for your campaign is your most important day, Giving Tuesday. I mean, the if you’re just doing GivingTuesday, I know a lot of people use GivingTuesday as a launch for year end, or they raise money, you know, sort of beyond giving Tuesday. But make sure that you have information on your website that people can access, make sure you have information on your social media channels, you’re sending out information in your emails about what you’re trying to do. And that goes into step three, which is promotion, promoted everywhere. So sometimes, I will get one email from an organization about a campaign. And that’s it, I’ll just get one email. There’s nothing on their social media, there’s nothing on their website. There’s nothing anywhere, it’s just the one email, don’t rely on just one channel. Do not rely on just one channel, promote it everywhere, put it in your email signature, put it in your out of office message, put in your voicemail message at work. Everything should be talking about this campaign, getting people excited, you know, scheduling posts, during the campaign, if you use extra Twitter, depending on where we what you use, right? You don’t have to be on here. But if you’re using it, if your audience is using Facebook, if they’re using LinkedIn, you want to be communicating with them there. So just make sure that you’re not just sort of posting once, sending one email, and then kind of forgetting about it. Now this is where your stories are going to come in. Your stories that you’ve collected, are going to come in, like Julia from the development team, on GivingTuesday wrote about PBS six museums inspiring mission, right. So make sure that you are communicating throughout the day, with all of these different messages that you’ve sort of been creating. And then using pictures and videos, show campaign sneak peeks show, you know, a check that you received. And you know, you’re really excited to get this check or your very first online donation or someone converted to be a monthly donor. Get excited, like show this excitement, share these stories, share these graphics share what’s going on in your organization to really convey this compelling puzzle. Your organization is a puzzle. And all of these posts are pieces of the puzzle that are going to help your donors determine whether or not they want to support you or not. And you can create all of these graphics for free in Canva, right? Create All of them for free in Canva. If you are running a campaign, that’s a very limited time, maybe consider paying for some ads, so that more people see them maybe on LinkedIn, maybe on Facebook, maybe on Instagram, that’s what No Kid Hungry does the Greater Boston Food Bank, just so that they get more visibility in the timeframe. And of course don’t ignore other platforms. If you’re on them. You don’t have to be everywhere. I don’t want you to be everywhere. Show your progress. You know, thank people. Encourage people Post about giving. And you might want to, you know, this is the stuff you want to do in the middle of the campaign, when you might have a little bit of a lull, you know, this is what they did on the thankful wall. At one of the organizations that I work with, and it’s just an update, to show that there’s community show people are participating. So there is an online fundraising campaign calendar that you’ll be able to download when you download the materials. So we’ve talked about, you know, building up the place where you’re going to locate the campaign activity or the campaign information, then launching, promoting. So what do you do after the campaign is over? Well, follow up. And thank people, make sure you’re posting on social media, thank you, thank you, thank you, here’s what happened, here’s what we did, we could not have done this without you without your support. None of this would be possible. Because of you. Norma got the support, she needed to reclaim her dignity and rebuild her life. Just make sure that you were using this kind of language.

When you’re thanking and acknowledging. So you of course, want to thank and acknowledge people via email, people via mail, however you decide to do your donor acknowledgments. But you also want to be thanking people on social media, and maybe create a thank you video, from the executive director from the founder, talking about exactly what happened, and how much you raised or how many bikes you were able to purchase, or how many backpacks you were able to purchase, whatever it might be, and really genuinely thanking people from the bottom of your heart. Step five, is something we don’t do. This is the last step, we need to start measuring all of this activity, you’re spending so much time creating content and posting and promoting. And then it’s on to the next on to the next on to the next. We do not spend enough time in measurement and analysis and figuring out what worked, what didn’t work. Now for you, you have to determine your metrics. I can’t tell you what your metrics are. It’s based on your SMART goal. Right? It’s based on what you wanted to accomplish in the beginning. But then look at some other things, right? Maybe you got some brand new donors, maybe you didn’t reach your financial goal. But you got some new monthly supporters, some new online donors, some new social media followers, like really look at what, sorry, I’m gonna go back here, what some of the benefits were, that maybe you weren’t anticipating? And that way, you’re going to say, Oh, well, we got a lot of LinkedIn followers, this time, maybe we should be focusing more of our efforts on LinkedIn. If you’re not measuring what you did, you’re not going to be able to improve for next time. So this is your profitable digital fundraising roadmap, setting up the tech, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Creating the pitch the compelling ask, asking for the money, promoting the campaign, and giving meaningful timely updates. And making sure you You’re thanking new and current donors. Okay, so I’m gonna keep this up for a little a minute. And I know that was a lot of information. I’m happy to answer some questions, sort of in our last 10 minutes or so. And thank you. Thanks for having me, here today. Happy to take any questions.

Julia, thank you so much. I found that really helpful, and really practical for a lot of the solutions that you’re offering. I do have quite a few questions that came in in the chat, which is really great. I love to see so much participation. One of the questions that I had the most response from is sort of challenging, or addressing the challenge of getting engagement when you’re doing a fundraiser. Yeah, that has a certain restriction. So let’s say you’re raising money for building 25 schools, is there a way to encourage donors to still give while keeping the funds unrestricted, because if you put a if you put something on it like restriction, it can be a challenge for the nonprofit?

Well, so there’s, there’s two things. There’s a there’s a campaign, right. So if you’re running a digital fundraising campaign, it’s for a specific thing, or Howard, at least you have that, you know, that’s what helps the most successful campaigns. If you are running just sort of year end fundraising. Then just keep it very mission focused. Just keep it very much on here is what we’ve did this year. Here’s what we want to still do. Here’s the gap. And here’s how of where the donor comes in, like to bridge that gap between our vision for the future, what we want to do, and what we are capable of doing right now, like we could be capable of doing so much more. So the message doesn’t have to be specific the message could be join us in our movement to end childhood hunger, one family at a time, you know, something like that. So that.

Yeah, really,

certainly given given meal, that might just say, it’s going towards our mission of ending hunger. That’s

great. Yeah. So it really in the way of how you’re phrasing it, because if they put a message on there that this is specifically for the school, that is restriction, but if they phrase it in a way that makes it more open, it’s a way to overcome that. Also, several questions have come in about struggling to have engagement from their donors via online methods. So let me pull this up here. So here’s a question that came in our donors are more senior and elderly and have not necessarily provided an email, or they’re not as engaged via email. So how do you what are some strategies for encouraging more email opt ins and communications?

Well, there has to be a reason. Like, you have to give them a reason to subscribe to your email list. Most people don’t want to subscribe to email lists. But if you can say, Join us to get impact stories in your inbox every month, join us to learn more about what your donation has accomplished. There are definitely ways to to be more compelling in our email signup asks, but the reality is that our donors are going to want communication the way they want it. So you might have to still send direct mail to older people. And you might have to start a texting program for younger people. I mean, we we have so many different generations that we are going to talk to, there’s not going to be really a one size fits all. But I think just telling them, the great things you’re going to be sharing in the email and making them feel like they might be missing out if they don’t join.

And so part of the challenge might be that transition where maybe they’ve had a donor base for a while. That’s primarily direct mail. Yeah. But yeah, they want to cultivate those donors that eventually it’s going to move more and more toward toward digital marketing, people are going to engage with social media, or email. And so that transition can be a challenge.

Absolutely. And that’s where you might just have to really like call people, mail people, postcard people at events, make it really easy to give their email. So yeah, there are ways but yeah, if you have a database with no emails in it, it’s going to require a lot of detective work.

That’s great. Can you talk about? So with an online campaign? How do you provide enough content to keep the audience engaged or interested in donating? Can you speak a little bit to that? Yeah,

you want those stories. So you need I mean, there’s so much that goes on at your organization every day. But we’re so close to it, we just have to start thinking like journalists, if you were making a documentary about your organization, and what you do every day, what would go in that documentary, and those little pieces, those little anecdotes, those little stories and happenings. And, you know, maybe just taking a picture of you mailing envelopes and saying, you know, we’re so excited about the year end fundraiser, just giving people context, like, we think that people don’t want to see the behind the scenes, but they actually really do. And not everything also has to be so perfect and polished. Right now, what works on social media is authenticity. And sort of in the moment, like stories, videos on Tiktok, you know, reels, those are usually in the moment and not usually very produced. So what can you share, and we just we have to like get out of our comfort zone a little bit here. But if you’re collecting a lot of that information before the campaign launches, then you’ll have it during the campaign to share. So see what you can do on the front end, to sort of go through maybe your website, see what store reason what great information you can share. data points are great statistics are great. All of that is fantastic to share.

That is really great. Please feel free to enter in some more questions if anyone has any additional questions, not only in the live chat, but also in the q&a. We want to answer as many of those for you now as we can.

Yeah, I think a word on on Khan and think about the campaign and what you want to convey. But also think about what your audience would find interesting. Maybe it’s a did you know maybe it’s a wow, did you know that we also provide this service and a lot of you provide 25 different programs. And maybe people don’t know about all of the different programs and services, so shedding light on some of the things that you do, and and really talking about how it contributes to the overall vision and your mission?

Can you talk a little bit about addressing the challenge of when you get feedback that there are too many emails? And donors aren’t interested in receiving the emails? Can you talk a little bit about getting them interested? Yeah.

Well, two things. One, I’m willing to bet that was one donor out of 10,000. So we have to take that into context. Sure, if 90 donors out of 100 are saying that, yes, if it’s one donor out of 100, that’s one, that’s one person, look at your open rate, your click through rate, and your unsubscribes. And those are the most important things. So every time I send an email, I get feedback. Sometimes a couple of people, like why are you emailing me, but then I also get 20. People that love the email, and then my open rates are also very high. So I have to take everything sort of in context. So I would take it in context. The other thing is, I guarantee you’re not emailing enough 90% of my clients email once a month or once a quarter, I don’t think that’s enough. I think your donors need to hear from you, at least twice a month. Because then when you ask them for money, again, if they haven’t heard from you for half a year, they’re going to think of themselves as sort of a transaction, they’re going to think, Oh, you only come to me when you want money. So it’s a balance of providing that value in storytelling, and then also earning the trust and the right to ask when you’re doing a fundraising campaign. But certainly you should be sending more emails that are not focused on fundraising, that are focused on updating the donor and helping them understand more about where their their donations went. And then you’ve earned the right to ask again. So I think you know, and I just think that we are not our donors, like, we might hate getting one email a month from a nonprofit, but I I really think your donors do need to hear more from you to help them understand why they need to keep giving. This is why donor retention is so low, because we’re afraid to talk to our donors, and then they don’t hear from us. And then they think, Oh, well, they don’t need me, you know, they don’t need me. This mission is solved. So, you know, I think everything in context,

that’s really helpful because sometimes the that loud voice, we might think it’s representative of everyone that we’re reaching out to, but it’s really nice.

Ya know, I really do i It’s tough, especially if it’s a board member. And it’s like, well, our open rates are 50%. You know, we raise a lot of money. So clearly, like it’s working, like if you can, as much as we can use data to back up what you think is right. And certainly data might prove you wrong, as well. But I think looking at the data is the best way to go.

That’s great. Well, Julia, I hate to cut it off. Now that I see more questions coming in, please don’t hesitate to continue to reach out to attend the rest of our sessions. Thank you so much for attending. We hope you’ve had some great takeaways just like I have. The next sessions are going to begin in four minutes from now at 12:50pm. We have two tracks on track number one, we have Cherian Koshi, with the spark the journey, igniting donors passions for lifelong engagement. And on track number two, Scott Rosencrantz from donor search will be presenting AI and the future of fundraising. So no matter which session you choose, you’re not going to miss any content since all these sessions are being recorded. Thank you again so much, Julia. And we’ll see you in a few minutes.

Thank you. All right. Have a great day, everybody.