Future Fundraising Now

How to make more effective donation pages

Your donation page just might be barriers to your donors' generosity.

They are for many.

Want some insight on making your donation pages work better? Check out this new study from NextAfter and RaiseDonors: The State of Nonprofit Donation Pages (downloadable; registration required).

Here are the topline findings of the study:

• Everyone has room to improve their donation page.
• Nonprofits aren't giving donors a great reason to give on their donation page. (Only 1 in 3 organizations have a strong value proposition on donation pages.)
• There is too much friction on donation pages -- distracting links, unnecessary fields required, etc.
• Online recurring giving remains a big opportunity for nonprofits.
• The mobile giving experience is improving, but can still be improved.
• Many donation selection and gift array strategies are similar.
• The thank you/confirmation page remains an underutilized asset in the donor journey and online giving experience.

Improvements to your donation pages can yield great results for your online fundraising. Put some quality time and thought on this!

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How to make Facebook ads work with your fundraising

Finding and cultivating donors with Facebook ads just might work for you. But you have to know what you're doing. Here's a great post from the Hubspot Marketing Blog that can help: Facebook Advertising Advice: 10 Tips:

1. Keep track of qualitative metrics. "Vanity metrics," such as shares and likes, shouldn't be what you're after on Facebook (see #8), but pay attention to them, because they are connected with success.
2. Take advantage of Facebook's precise Ad targeting. Target specific people on your list (by uploading their email address, or tightly defined groups as defined by geography, demographics, and interests.
3. Test different creative assets for best results. Test everything!
4. Pay attention to what visitors do after they click. That coveted click on Facebook is just the beginning. Make sure you know what happens after that, so you can turn those clicks into donors.
5. Don't force new trends into your Ad strategy. Shiny new objects are constant on Facebook. Some will be great. Before you grab the new, make sure you understand what you're already doing.
6. Find inspiration from your competition. Steal smart.
7. Publish videos that are short and sweet. 30 seconds or less is best.
8. Don't fixate on vanity metrics alone. Big mistake that will force bad decisions.
9. Focus on the mobile experience. Mobile is where most of the action is. Make sure whatever it is you want donors to do, it's easy on their phones.
10. Experiment with video. Try different things.
11. Diversify your ad format. There are many different ad formats; not all will work for you.
12. Pay attention to load time. If it takes more than 7.5 seconds for your website to load, you're in trouble..
13. Convert high-performing content into ads. Your best stuff already exists. Take what's working elsewhere and turn it into Facebook content.

11 things that make your website ineffective

If you're not getting much action from your website, the problem could be self inflicted. This post from Wired Impact, 11 Web Design Issues That Hurt Nonprofit Website Conversions, might help you uncover things you're doing that are making it not work as it should:

1. Making text a low contrast color.
2. Hiding your links. Make sure they are underlined, in a visible color, and easy for people to see and identify as links.
3. Not having a responsive website. Make sure you know immediately if anything is broken.
4. Setting a pop-up to show immediately. Pop-ups that load immediately when someone lands on your page are disorienting. Have them show at least 10 seconds after someone loads a page.
5. Adding a prominent image carousel. Rotating images on the homepage are bad news. Don't do it!
6. Not using the homepage to say what your organization does. Make it what you do inescapable to visitors.
7. Using poor quality images.
8. Long, detailed forms. The longer your forms, the less they work.
9. Using generic button text. Have buttons say what they do, like DONATE, GIVE, or SAVE A PUPPY. Not SUBMIT.
10. Writing content that’s hard to scan. Use short paragraphs and plenty of headlines to make reading easier.
11. Not prioritizing your calls to action. Have only one CTA on any given page.

3 boring ways to dramatically improve your email open rate

Email is a difficult way to raise money. Open rates are low. Response rates are often microscopic. You can improve your chances by doing three rather unexciting things with every email you send, from How to Boost Your Email Open Rate on the Shortstack blog:

1. Focus on the Subject Line First. The subject line has more impact on open rate (and thus response) of anything you do in email. Spend about half of your writing time writing the subject line. Always make a list of 5 to 10 or more and choose the best one.
2. Your Preheader Text Comes Next. The preheader text is visible under the subject line in many email clients. It's a chance to expand on the extremely limited space you have in the subject line. If you don't write a preheader, people will likely see some kind of default that has no power to get the message opened.
3. The Sender Name. All recipients look at the sender name as they decide whether to open, ignore, or trash an email. Make sure what they see is that it's from a real person at a real organization.

6 ways to drive donors away from your website

Reality check from The Daily Egg: 6 Ways to Make Your Prospects HATE Your Website. It's aimed at commercial marketing websites, but these things apply very well to nonprofit websites too:

1. Make Your Website Go Really Slow.
2. Make Sure Your Forms Crash Regularly.
3. Don't Talk about How You Help People -- Focus on Numero Uno. Bragging is not fundraising -- it's boring and unconvincing!
4. Make Baseless Claims. Remember that donors are mainly older people who weren't born yesterday. They are suspicious of hype, or even things that seem like hype.
5. Bury Your Most Important Information.
6. Write All of Your Content for Search Engines. SEO is great, but make sure your writing sounds human.

10 ways to make your nonprofit website more effective

If you want to make your website more effective, a lot of what you should look into is pretty undramatic -- making it work better and serve donors more directly. Here are some great tips for commercial websites you can use to improve your nonprofit site form the Duct Tape Marketing Blog at 10 Things to Consider About Your Website in 2019:

1. Kill the Sliders. (They're bad user experience.)
2. Start With a Promise to Solve a Problem. (In fundraising, show how the donor can solve the problem.)
3. Bring Whitespace Back.
4. Provide Fewer Choices. (Too many choices leads to a lot less action.)
5. Put Strong Calls to Action in a Number of Places.
6. Build More Landing Pages. (The more specific and relevant the page people first land on, the better.)
7. Create Hub Pages. (Like quasi-homepages around specific things your donors are interested in.)
8. Consider Mobile First. (As much as 80% of your viewers are their via a mobile device.)
9. Assess Load Speed for Pages.
10. Address Security Concerns. (Make sure people aren't getting security notices when they visit.)

3 things that can improve your fundraising emails

Raising funds by email is tough. But important. Here are some tips from Constant Contact that might help, at 3 Email Trends to Ensure Success:

• Personal, relevant messaging reigns. (This might mean segmenting your list to more narrowly define what donors are interested in.
• Automation is becoming standard. (Emails automated by donor behavior -- such as cart abandonment -- or donor timing -- birthdays, anniversaries can meaningfully improve engagement. Also, resend to non-openers to boost your open.
• Referral marketing continues to grow. People are more likely to take action based on recommendations from friends or family members. Just ask.

Digital fundraising crash in December?

This might be disturbing. For the first time in a long time, December online fundraising was down, at least for many.

M+R Lab notes What the heck just happened? Riding the December digital fundraising rollercoaster: exciting, scary, a little nausea-inducing!:

December was not quite the celebratory, champagne-popping, record-breaking year-end digital experience that many nonprofits have grown used to over the past few years.

Was it down for you?

Some possible explanations:

• The new tax law.
• The stock market.
• Political fatigue and/or noise.
• The increased focus on Giving Tuesday.
• Technical challenges, especially email deliverability.
• A return to normal after a very strong 2017.

Or some terrible combination of these things. Or something we don't even know about yet?

If you experienced a weak December, you are not alone. Stay tuned as the number-crunchers work on this!

How to thank your online donors so they keep on giving

We're getting smarter all the time about how to treat donors who give online. Here are 7 Best Practices for Donor Thank You Emails from the Nonprofit Marketing Blog:

1. Say Thank You Within a Week of Receiving a Gift
2. Send From a Recognizable Name (not a sender that seems to be a bot!)
3. Make Your Subject Line Specific (say "thank you" or something like it)
4. Keep the Focus on the Donor (don't brag about your org)
5. Acknowledge Previous Gifts
6. Share the Impact of the Gift (with a story or testimonial)
7. Say Thank You More Than Once (you can't say thank you too much)

Let me add one more: If you have the donor's postal address, also send a postal thank you. This can go a long way to encourage multi-channel engagement, which gives you the best of both worlds: The high average gift of online and the superior retention of offline.

5 reasons fundraisers should never buy an email list

What are you doing to grow your email list?

I'll tell you one think you should not do: Don't buy an email list! Don't even think about it!

Here's why, from the Daily Egg, at Why You Should Never Buy an Email List:

1. You won't get qualified contacts.
2. You'll increase the chances of get marked as spam.
3. Your contacts won't be exclusive.
4. The engagement rate won't be high.
5. Bought email addresses might have a negative impact on brand awareness.

There are ways to build your list. But they aren't easy. You have to go through the hard work of figuring out what people actually want and then brilliantly offer them (the right group of them!) exactly that.

You can't get there by buying the names!