Nonprofit organizations can raise funds in a variety of ways, one of the most successful ones being fundraising. When planning a campaign, there is so much to think about from writing the campaign copy to reaching out to the right donors. While every fundraiser is different, there are some best practices that you can follow to ensure the success of the one you run. Follow the tips discussed below to ensure the success of your fundraising campaign, engage supporters, and reach your collection goals.
Do a Soft Launch
A soft launch is a small campaign that is meant to reach out to and raise funds from past supporters, powerhouse fundraisers and dedicated supporters of your nonprofit. The soft launch is supposed to help build momentum for the main fundraising campaign. Once the official campaign starts, people will be more inclined to donate to the cause if they see that you have already collected some money.
The early donors from the soft launch as well as the early adopters from the first round of donations will help give your campaign a lot of momentum and help it catch on with other like-minded donors.
Keep Consistent Branding
It is crucial that people know that a campaign belongs to your nonprofit upon seeing it. It can be confusing for someone to tell potential supporters that a campaign belongs to your nonprofit if your brand’s colors, logo, and other brand identification assets are not represented within the campaign’s materials. This is especially true if you are marketing and pushing the fundraising campaign across numerous channels such as social media and traditional media at the same time.
Ensuring consistency between your brand and fundraising campaigns helps build trust with potential supporters, encouraging them to donate as they know there is a trustworthy nonprofit behind a particular campaign.
Choose the Right Platform
Online fundraising platforms are a great option for nonprofits that want to attract supporters who are outside their direct locality. It opens up your efforts to supporters from all over the world, thus helping you reach your goals faster and sometimes even helping surpass them. When choosing a platform, it is important to ensure it has the right features. These features should include those that make it as easy as possible for people to support your cause, and for you to manage your campaigns. There is a lot available to non-profits and leading software provider zeffy is a free fundraising software for nonprofits – the software you decide to use has to have ease of use, as well as an all-in-one, simple experience designed specifically for nonprofits.
Another important criterion to consider is fees. You want to ensure that as much of the money you collect ends up in your account. Do not be duped by platforms that say they are free because some say so and then take up to 10% of the amount collected. Instead, rely on this list of free fundraising platforms for nonprofits that do not take any cuts of your donations. A great option among these free fundraising platforms for nonprofits is Givebutter. In addition to being completely free, the platform also allows you to create beautiful donation pages, host virtual events, create and embed donation forms, launch peer-to-peer campaigns and so much more.
Encourage and Support Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
Many nonprofits do not know about peer-to-peer fundraising. This is a fundraising strategy that includes a pool of supporters who run their own smaller campaigns alongside the main one. To ensure the success of your main campaign, encourage and support peer-to-peer. Ensure these supporters have all the tools and materials they need to run successful campaigns of their own.
You should create educational resources that provide all the details they would need to educate people about the campaign. Also give them the toolkits required to guide their efforts and ensure their success.
These educational materials could be tips on how to activate their campaigns, how to get friends and family involved, as well as what past supporters did to ensure successful campaigns. The toolkits should include everything they need to connect their campaigns to your brand.
These could include colors, logos, pre-approved images, and fonts. You can plan out all the assets everyone would need and then add them to a folder on Dropbox or Google Drive for all supporters running peer-to-peer campaigns to access.
Encourage Recurring Gifts
Most people donate only once to a campaign if there is no option for recurring donations. Recurring supporters are many times more valuable than single donors and so you should encourage people to become recurring supporters. Also, ensure it is easy to do so and people understand that their accounts will be debited a fixed amount every month or donation period.
It is also important that you encourage people to upgrade to recurring supporters as soon as possible. The reason for doing so is that people forget easily, and they might not do it once your fundraising campaign is no longer in their minds. A great way of doing this is making the option clear when you first approach a donor. Include a clearly marked link or button in your email encouraging them to do so. Provide further incentives like exclusive gifts for explaining how much better a recurring gift is to the cause than a one-time gift.
Make the Impact Clear
People are more likely to donate to your cause if they understand what impact their donation will have. You do not want people to become apathetic to the cause, which they can become quite quickly. To eliminate apathy, tie donations to real-world impact and always emphasize that any gift, no matter its size, will make a measurable impact in the world.
The impact of these donations can be made clear in your emails or other campaign material. Another great place to put this messaging is on your website where people will see it while they are close to the donate page.
Create a Campaign Video
Video is a very powerful medium as it can move people more than words ever can. A video captures people’s attention, gives your campaign life, can send a personalized appeal and be very convincing.
Raising funds for a nonprofit has become easier over the years as nonprofits have got more tools to run successful campaigns However, these nonprofits still need to move people to donate and ensure these donations keep coming. The tips above should help with both of these aims.
