9 steps to employ now to ramp up end-of-year online donations

By Philip King

You may know that 40 percent of all online donations arrive during December. But did you also know that year-end online fundraising doesn’t just happen in December? It takes effort that you can begin today: e-mail list building, inspiring donors, cultivating them, testing and analyzing metrics to make the absolute most of year-end online donation opportunities.

At Artez Interactive, we recently hosted a webinar, “The 2010 Overachiever’s Guide to Year-End Online Fundraising: Nine Steps You Can Use Now to Raise More Money in December,” that featured two experts with years of experience in online fundraising.

Alia McKee, a principal at Sea Change Strategies, is an online communications and fundraising strategist with more than 10 years of experience developing successful online campaigns with groups like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Environmental Defense Fund, International Rescue Committee and Conservation International.

Eric Rardin, director of nonprofit services for Care2, helps nonprofits recruit passionate supporters. Care2 is an online social network of nearly 14 million people worldwide who want to make a difference in causes they care about. Prior to joining Care2, Rardin designed and executed integrated advocacy campaigns for environmental nonprofits for more than seven years.

They outlined nine practical steps in the webinar:

1. Do what your mother taught you
Always take time to say “hello and thank you.” Too often an online donor receives an unsatisfactory response after making a first gift. The e-mail response is often automated and deals only with cold, hard facts such as tax receipts. Worse yet, an online donor migt be asked immediately for an additional gift or encouraged to join a monthly giving program.

Take time to make sure your online donors know how much you appreciate their donations … and resist the urge to upgrade them immediately. Also, don’t forget about sharing the love with your online activists: Donors don’t constitute your entire online community.