Most nonprofits know this, but it seems like most of them spend a larger amount of their resources on acquiring new donors instead of keeping their current donors happy.
Plus, the lifetime dollar value of a happy donor is way more than the value of a donor who only gives once. Continue reading →
Leverage the power of #GivingTuesday to raise awareness & funds
Today charities, families, businesses and folks like you will come together to help create #GivingTuesday. This creates an opportunity to join a massive trending conversation on social media that will surely create more awareness for your cause.
This year I’m going to take a vertical rather than horizontal approach, and identify several important types of tools you’ll want to consider when raising money online – either through your website or on a social network.
Shareable visual content, like the photo at top, relates to several important facets of social media fundraising: Is it easy to share on social networks? Does it link back to a page with a donation form or other action? Can you track who likes the content in your content relationship management system, if you have one? Continue reading →
Getting an army of Facebook fans for your nonprofit is not an easy feat. It takes lots of planning, hard work, and time. But just because you have a lot of Facebook fans doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to meeting your fundraising goals. Especially if you’re unknowingly creating barriers.
When potential donors go to your donation page, is it immediately clear how they can donate and what amount they can donate? Do they have to search around your site? How many mouse clicks does an entire transaction require?
7 things to keep in mind
Show Them Impact – One thing that worked very well during the Tweetsgiving campaign was showing people what their donations would buy. It created a direct line of site between donation and impact.
Make It Fun – Red Nose Day is a huge hit in the UK, precisely because it’s so much fun! Think of creative ways to make sharing fun for your fans.
As the Web becomes more social in nature, people grow to expect more social behavior on your website. Have you thought about how that affects you? Or how it affects the way people give online through your site?
Here are a few things to get you started. Hopefully they’ll give you ideas about how you can make the online giving experience more social for your donors! Once you’ve put some thought into it, I’d love to hear what you’ve decided to do (or please share a link in the comments if you are already doing some of these things).
Social Media Challenge is a leading example of micro-giving
When you think of organizations and nonprofits that have made effective use of Web 2.0 technologies to raise funds for a cause, DonorsChoose.org should be near the top of a very short list.
And October is once again the month when bloggers step up to the plate for the Social Media Challenge, now in its third year. Last year, bloggers big and small raised $270,000 to provide 65,000 students with the resources needed to learn. This year, Twitter has joined the fray.
At Socialbrite, we’d like to call on our readers to support students in public school classrooms in low-income areas. The cool part? You get to decide which projects to support — and you’ll be able to hear directly from the students who received your donation.
Meantime, if you’re not familiar with DonorsChoose, the idea is a simple one: It’s a site where public school teachers could post what materials they were lacking in the classroom. Requests stay up for five months or until they’re fully funded.
Interview with founder Charles Best
I recently buttonholed founder and CEO Charles Best to get a first-hand account of the groundbreaking charity and its model for funding public school projects around the country. Charles thought up the site during a lunch conversation with colleagues at a public high school in the Bronx where he was a social studies teacher for five years, and his students volunteered to help start the organization. They hope individuals will contribute around $17 million this year for books, field trips, art supplies and technology needed by classrooms in low-income areas.
• During the 2007 Blogger Challenge, he said, “we saw that a handful of bloggers who wouldn’t appear on the Technorati top 100 list and don’ have huge readerships were actually capable of raising the most money from their readers because they have a personal relationship with their followers.”
• With micro-giving, “someone with $10 or $25 to give can be a philanthropist. and get the same kind of accountability and vivid feedback that bill gates gets when he gives $1 million,” he said.
• The main reason it works is that you get to see how your donation was spent, you get photos from the classroom, and you get a personal reply from the teacher or students.
• There are 12,000 to 14,000 classroom project requests on the site at a time. About two-thirds get fully funded before they hit their expiration date.
• DonorsChoose is a great target for companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility programs. “Companies have a new ability to empower their customers to be philanthropists, to open source their philanthropy and let their customers or employees participate as grant makers,” he said.
• Long term, DonorsChoose wants raise $100 million a year for public classrooms this way.
Photo by zizzybaloobah on Flickr
Acquiring a new donor is more expensive than keeping a current donor.
