3 Easy Ways to Improve Your Online Fundraising This Year

When you’re in the day-to-day work of fundraising, you might find yourself doing the same old things. But there’s almost always an opportunity to improve your fundraising by trying something new. And you can see positive results without necessarily needing to spend a lot of time.

Let’s look at three simple ways to improve your fundraising this year.

1. Optimize Your Donation Page

It’s not unusual for fundraisers to set up a donation page on their nonprofit’s website and then not touch it again. But optimizing your donation page is one of the simplest, yet most impactful, things you can do to boost your fundraising. 

Review your online donation page and consider making some of these adjustments:

• Test your donation page to make sure it looks good and works well on mobile devices.
• Use your constituent relationship management (CRM) or online fundraising software to specify dynamic ask levels (based on each donor’s last donation level) to encourage each donor to give more.
• Tie giving levels to what the funds will provide for your organization. You can even set up a virtual shopping cart to help illustrate what donations will help your organization accomplish.
• Set up a pop-up box that asks donors to make their gift a recurring (monthly or quarterly) donation. 
• Use a matching gift tool to make it easier for donors and your organization to take advantage of corporate matching programs.
• Offer a range of payment options, including ACH, Amazon Pay, cryptocurrency, donor-advised funds, PayPal, and Venmo.

While you should offer PayPal as a payment option, avoid using it as your donation platform due to limitations around branding, styling and overall look and feel. Instead, use options with no monthly fees, like Donorbox, Fundraise Up, Funraise, Givebutter or Qgiv. 

2. Review Credit Card Expiration Dates for Your Recurring Donations

Once donors sign up as sustaining donors they don’t always remember to update your organization when their credit cards expire. This leads to declined transactions, and then you’re left to follow up with donors to update their information — possibly missing out on months of sustaining gift donations in the process.

However, there are some approaches for proactively reviewing sustaining gift credit card expirations so you don’t miss out on those donations.

Send reminders. The use of a monthly email campaign can automatically send sustaining donors a reminder that their credit cards will expire soon. Remind your sustaining donors via email as many as 60 to 90 days before their credit cards are set to expire to give them time to update their information.

Create an online portal. An online portal allows sustaining donors to log in to view and update their sustaining gift information and details.

Utilize a credit card updating service. A credit card updating service automatically updates sustaining donors’ credit card renewal dates. Many merchant service providers offer this as an add-on service.

Many online marketing tools on the market today will support these approaches. Check with your software vendor to see if their product includes these capabilities. 

3. Use Donor Prospecting and Artificial Intelligence Tools

Multiple software platforms for nonprofits use artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies to make it easier to learn more about your donors and other constituents. Using multiple data points, they go beyond simply uncovering wealthy constituents to show you how likely your constituents are to support your cause (aka their propensity to give).

These platforms include boodleAI, DonorSearch, GivingDNA, iWave and Windfall. Additionally, some of these platforms offer data enrichment updates as needed with a price per record, while some offer real-time integration subscriptions with CRM solutions, such as Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, Neon One, Salesforce and Virtuous.

Don’t wait for another year to go by without trying new ways to improve fundraising for your nonprofit. Use these approaches to start seeing results right away.

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.