1. Let them know that any amount counts – 58% of respondents said their single largest gift was less than $150. They are likely to give smaller amounts to several organizations rather than a lump sum to one organization. Let them know that even a small amount will have an impact so they can feel confident about their contribution. Donor satisfaction will increase their chances of giving again in the future.
2. Optimize your online giving page – 49% of Millennials who donated last year gave online. 58% of surveyed Millennials said this is their preferred method of donating. So it’s important to provide this option along with a smooth and easy transaction when they give online. Make it a secure and user-friendly experience.
3. Develop a compelling and specific cause – 85% of Millennials are motivated to give by a compelling mission or cause. Let me know exactly what their money will be going towards and provide updates on progress being made by your organization.
4. Focus more heavily on the ones that have a personal connection to your organization – 56% of Millennials are motivated to donate by a personal connection to the organization. You could benefit from investing more in those that have had previous contact with your organization (i.e. – solicit them for frequently than those who have had no prior contact with you).
5. Encourage peer to peer solicitations – 57% of Millennials gave in response to a personal ask. This kind of solicitation can be face to face or through social media and could be a very powerful and cost-effective tactic.

Don’t miss out on contributions from this generation! They are willing to give but need to be approached a little differently than other generations. Click here to read the full report from Achieve and JGA.

So where do you begin? Your donors and prospective donors are going to differ in their giving history, giving patterns, income, etc. so first determine out how you want to segment them. For example, one segment could be people who have donated $1-$999 to your organization in the past year. You can go after this group a little more aggressively giving them a variable ask amount that may be higher than your non-donor segment. Or you could give them an ask amount that is variable depending on their last donation – it could be either the same or even a little higher than their previous donation. Do not risk losing donations by asking too little or too much. Using variable ask amounts will help you to avoid this. You don’t want to miss out on a donor who doesn’t think $10 is enough so they choose not to give. Let them know it is.

1. You brand is not being clearly communicated across all channels. – Branding is just as important for nonprofits as it is with any other organization or company. With direct mail, email, websites, social media sites, etc. it can be difficult to maintain brand consistency across all the channels. Take a look at all elements of your fundraising campaigns and make sure everything matches as far as imagery, messaging, logo usage, colors, and your brand’s overall identity.
2. You do not have concrete goals. – As a nonprofit you probably do already have future fundraising goals in place, maybe for the next year or the next five years. But what about what you intend to accomplish with every phase of your campaign? Are you trying to reach a certain monetary goal? Do you want to increase participation by a certain percentage? How many non-donors do you want to convert to donors? Make a list of specific goals you’d like to accomplish
3. You are unsure of the best way to connect with donors. – To make sure you are targeting the right people it’s important to build relationships with your audience so you understand them and know how they prefer to communicate with your organization and what kind of messaging resonates best with them. You can achieve this by opening up two-way communication either by leading them to personalized landing pages where they answer a few questions or by opening up conversations on social media sites.
4. Your messages are not donor-centric. – Your organization may be accomplishing wonderful things, which is very important to communicate, but focusing too heavily on that and not enough on your donors may cause donors’ interest to wane. Your messaging should revolve more around the benefits you can offer donors rather than what they can do for you. View some examples of donor-centered copy here.
5. You haven’t established your niche. – There may be other organizations out there like yours or very similar to yours. Are you clearly communicating what makes your organization different from the others? What can you offer donors that other organizations can not?

It is not necessary to start over from scratch if all five of these items pertain to you so please don’t get overwhelmed.  You can start improving your fundraising today just by focusing on one change at a time and planning small steps that will guide to achieve it.

The tangibility of paper makes this medium, and its message, more real to recipients. It creates a connection and memory that other channels do not. Digital of course still has advantages over paper such as interactivity and the potential for more sensory appeal but the tangibility of paper still creates an impact. Which, again, denotes the importance of using multiple channels.

A blog post from Neuroscience Marketing goes into more of the scientific details on digital versus paper.

1. Simplicity- Tweetathons mostly rely on hash tags to get word out (which are the phrases that start with a “#” making it easy to search on Twitter). This means to spread awareness all you have to do is send out a tweet using the respective hash tag. You can do that in 140 characters or less and in less than 20 seconds. Also, for a Tweetathon, donations are typically all online so with just one click of a button (literally, if you are using PayPal and all your credit card information is already saved there) you can create your impact.
2. Speed - This one obviously goes hand in hand with the simplicity. Everything is so simple and it’s all done electronically so everything can be done in less than 2 minutes from spreading the word to making a donation.
3. Ease of transaction - There is no mail to open (although I am by no means discounting the impact of direct mail), no check to write, no postage to worry about. All of your philanthropic efforts can be done in one place…on your computer. You can discover the cause, donate, and help spread the word all within one social network, Twitter.
4. Community-like vibe - You’ll notice that people really seem to come together during a Tweetathon, even strangers. Through the use of the hash tags (mentioned earlier) people who have donated or spread the word can find one another and come together for conversation…and they typically do.
5. Immediate results - I recently participated in a Tweetathon that utilized Chip In which I think is a fantastic tool. Chip In visually shows the progress being made with each new donation and allows you to see the direct impact your individual donation has made and how much more is needed until the goal is reached.
6. Impending deadline – Tweetathons typically last 12 – 48 hours. This places a sense of urgency on potential donors and lead most of them to make that donation now.
7. Information at your fingertips – Say you have never heard of a particular cause or campaign but you see someone use a hash tag relating to it on Twitter. So what do you do? 99% of people would probably Google it and why not? They are already at their computer and spending time online. If the situation were to occur offline people may forget about it by the time they reach a computer or interest may wane by the time they have access to online resources. The more you know about a cause the more willing and likely you are going to be to donate. When you utilize Twitter or other social media sites to fundraise you are reaching people in the arena where they are most likely to donate in a short amount of time.

With all of this taken into account not to mention the growing popularity of Twitter it’s no wonder Tweetathons have proven themselves to be a success. There is also no direct monetary cost of running a Tweetathon. There is of course time that goes into it and possible costs associated with any extra elements you may add (i.e.-a raffle or prize). But if you are a nonprofit and have not taken this option into consideration yet maybe it’s time to look into Twitter as a valuable resource.

Almost all of the organizations we work with are looking for ways to save money.  How do we cut corners?  What pieces of our program can we eliminate?  How can we use our reduced budget to bring in enough donors to support our increased goal?  Questions like these are common with almost all of our customers and I’m sure they are things you’ve questioned as well.

Fundraising expert Mal Warwick has spoken at countless conferences and authored several books that try and teach fundraisers how to utilize their resources in a way that will yield a higher return.  Capturing the RIGHT data and utilizing it for future success can be a long process – and if you aren’t capturing all of the pieces that are necessary it can take an organization up to two years to draw conclusive results.

Here are three ways that you can set up your organization for long term cost savings:

1. Include more information in your donor database and use it! Databases in today’s fundraising world need to track more than just whether or not a donor made a gift.  In a world that is widely multichannel, organizations need to track all interaction with the institution and how that donor or prospective donor engaged.
2. Consistently integrate technology into your overall strategy. Online giving continues to grow year after year and many middle and higher end donors are making their yearly contributions online.  Web based tactics provide you the opportunity to share your success stories with donors and prospects and has been proven to draw more donations. By utilizing web tactics you have clear insights as to what motivates your donors and how they prefer to make a contribution to your organization.
3. 3. Analyze the data you’ve tracked and apply that learning to your fundraising program. Once you’ve tracked all engagement methods (donation, open and click through rates of e-mails, followings on your social media sites) you are able to determine who is engaged and donating and how they prefer to be communicated with.  You can take that information and stagger the number of direct mail pieces and the frequency based on segment.  Gone are the days of sending a direct mail piece to your entire prospect pool every time. 

• Broad alumni participation establishes a culture of philanthropy
• A community is only as strong as the people who support it
• Alumni participation is often used to decipher alumni satisfaction
• Corporations and foundations consider alumni participation when making funding decisions
• Parents and students consider alumni participation rates when deciding where to enroll
• Alumni participation is a key factor in determining college and university rankings

Do you think your alumni have a solid understanding of these points? They play a very important role in motivating alumni to both participate and donate.

Here are 3 steps you can take right now:

1) Engage donors - The average person is exposed to 5,000 messages a day but only remembers four. If you are not taking proactive steps to engage your donors then chances are your message is one that is easily forgotten. One of the ways you can engage donors is by reaching them through several channels including direct mail, email, and social media. Seeing a message in more than two channels increases the response rate by 10-15%. Another way to engage donors is through conversation. Find out more about them simply by asking (you can use PURL’s to do this) and apply that to future communication so you are reaching them on a more personal level.

2) Build relationships – As mentioned above, use whatever information you can find out about your donors and apply it to future communication so the messaging is relevant. Relevance is the largest lever on response in marketing and fundraising and is therefore key in building genuine relationships. Also, keep in mind that relevant messaging can receive a response rate 3 times higher than messages that are just personalized with a name. This is not just a once and done thing though. It’s important to maintain communication with appropriate timing and frequency to keep building that relationship.

3) Track results and utilize data – Tracking results is almost always done with fundraising but actually applying the data from the results to future fundraising initiatives is something that often falls through the cracks. Utilize data and make necessary adjustments to make sure you are achieving optimal ROI. 67% of marketing expenditures could achieve significant improvement in results without significant changes and without an increase in investment. These changes could apply to the messaging (perhaps you’ve noticed a change in donor motivations), marketing mix, and/or integration of different channels.

All in all, you want to ensure that the right person gets the right message at the right time and in the right way while applying the aforementioned strategies. If you keep doing this you can ensure fundraising success for your nonprofit both in the short-run and long-run.

Coca Cola and Ocean Conservancy have launched a social media campaign on April 14th in honor of Earth Month. They are hoping to raise $200,000 to support Ocean Conservancy’s efforts in keeping oceans and rivers clean and help raise general awareness of their marine debris programs.  This campaign involves a Facebook application where you can upload a photo to “oceanize” yourself and then use that photo as your profile picture in which case Coca Cola will then donate $1 to the Ocean Conservancy in your honor. Sounds all good right? Well there is some good, bad, and ugly here.

Good:

• There is incentive to share the photo and raise awareness for this cause…but mainly because you have to share it by making it your profile picture in order for Coca Cola to make the donation in your honor.
• There is the potential for this to go viral. Eyebrows will certainly be raised when your “friends’” profile pictures are of them snorkeling, swimming with sharks, or getting cozy with a dolphin.
• The campaign is on the “Live Positively” tab on the main Coca Cola fan page where there are already over 5,000,000 fans (a.k.a. “likes”). This means Coca Cola did not have to worry about creating a new platform or audience. People are already there (on the page) and are ready and willing to listen.
• They make uploading photos easy because you can choose one that is already in one of your Facebook albums.
• Coca Cola is using cross channel promotion to get word out about this. They are using print and online advertisements all with the tagline, “71% of the Earth’s surface is ocean. Shouldn’t 100% of it be clean?” to create consistency.

Bad:

• Profile pictures are not to be taken lightly in the Facebook world. While it seems to be the perfect opportunity for creating a viral campaign and a perfect tool for generating awareness, how many people are actually willing to de-glamorize their profile picture and dedicate it to a tightly cropped photo of their head in a wetsuit on a body that isn’t even theirs? So while there is great potential for success if people embrace this concept, there is also great potential for this campaign to be much less accepted than Coca Cola may have originally anticipated.

Ugly:

• Coca Cola missed an important segment. I am sure there are plenty of people who would have otherwise participated if they could have “oceanized” themselves but not been obligated to make it their profile picture. Not everyone may consider a $1 donation on Coca Cola’s behalf incentive enough to change their picture but perhaps some kind of stronger incentive would be enough? This segment should have been given more consideration so that Coca Cola could have better involved everyone in the campaign (not just one type of participation/engagement level).

Walmart and the ASPCA have launched the “Lend a Paw” campaign in honor of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Month. Unlike Coca Cola’s campaign, this campaign has a Facebook page all on its own with over 2,000 fans (again, or “likes”) but perhaps taking the Coca Cola approach (making it a tab on the company’s main Facebook page) would have been better. There are almost 1,000,000 fans on the Walmart page and these fans are more likely to find this campaign on the pages which they are already spending time on. Anyway, Walmart will donate $1 (up to $100,000) for each wall post spreading the message about this campaign. (There is a pre-generated message and all you have to do is click the “Create a Lend a Paw Post” on their fan page). So what’s good, bad, and ugly here?

Good:

• Instant gratification – as soon as you click “share” you see your post and know that it equates to a donation from Walmart. There is a tally on the landing page too that lets you know how much money was raised so far (which was $872 at the time this post was written).
• Participants (or anyone for that matter) can view overall progress at any point by checking out the tally.
• It’s setting the scene for peer to peer fundraising because the wall posts are meant to encourage others in your social network to keep spreading the word in order to keep those donations rolling in from Walmart.
• There is integration with Twitter as well so you can share the same message via Tweets.
• The simplicity of the campaign is nice…

Bad:

• But is it too simple? Is there enough going on to generate buzz? Probably not.
• I have not seen any cross channel promotion for this campaign.
• There is no mention of this campaign on the Walmart Facebook page or the ASPCA Facebook page.

Ugly:

• So many missed opportunities here. There is very poor promotion surrounding this campaign. As already mentioned, there are no links to the Lend a Paw page on either organization’s main Facebook Page but there is also no mention of the campaign on either of their websites either! How do they plan on getting 100,000 posts?? The lack of effort is not good on their part. Do they really care or is this just a half-hearted PR thing?

So while Facebook is becoming more widely used in fundraising, it is looking there’s going to be an adjustment period until people figure out what works and what doesn’t and that will be different for every organization. As for Coca Cola and Walmart, I think these organizations will figure it out by trial and error but having a full understanding before diving into social media fundraising is obviously ideal. You have to understand the network, the users, the demographic, and behavior before it can be a success. Using Facebook as a fundraising tool has already proven to be a success with one of our clients. Click here to check out the case study. Results from this campaign included increasing the number of fans for their Facebook page from 39 to 268 and raising over $1,000 in donations in a short amount of time. With the right understanding and preparation and forward thinking Facebook fundraising can indeed bring in results.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing fundraising expert Bernard Ross speak and have paralleled a lot of his tactics in the fundraising work I do with clients.  Integrating donor psychology with up and becoming cross-channel tactics have been the key ingredients to Pacesetter’s successful fundraising programs.  Ross has been featured in the February 25, 2010 edition of The Chronicle of Philanthropy discussing some of these tips.  I’ve outlined three simple steps that integrate these two approaches to ensure that you’re soliciting donations in the most effective way possible.

1. Identify what donors are responding to and market towards those areas. Yes, I said market.  Every fundraising professional is a sales representative for their organization/institution, and every contact has to be about making that emotional appeal.
2. Determine what mediums of communication your donors are responding to and incorporate tactics that fit the donors’ personality.  This can vary across your overall donor base – segment and attack.
3. Solicit donations when the donor is most likely to contribute. By analyzing donor history, you can cut down on marketing costs by sending heavy solicitations around the timeframe that the donor is most likely to contribute.

Overall keys to success – use smart segmentation and build upon that personal appeal each and every time.