How to Increase Donation Efficiency

Nonprofits can learn a lot from the corporate world, particularly concerning their approach to development. While the majority of successful for-profit organizations have robust mechanisms for generating profits, many charities find themselves unable to effectively fundraise without begging for donations.

An increasingly large percentage of charities are coming to the same conclusion: that approaching development with a service-oriented strategy can create a sustainable revenue stream for charitable donations. At Kars4Kids, we’ve done just that.

With this strategy comes a great deal of responsibility, particularly when it comes to the efficiency involved in generating charitable donations. To the benefit of nonprofits, their donors and the causes they serve, increasing donation efficiency can be tackled in surprisingly straightforward fashion.

Optimize Everything

From the conversion rate on your online donation form to the open rate on your emails, tracking any available metrics that relate to your organization’s success will play a major role in your ability to build upon efficient development programs and do away with those that aren’t working. At Kars4Kids, we’re constantly testing, optimizing and iterating on our process, whether it consists of split testing different subject lines for our email campaigns or removing non-essential fields from our donation form.

While the quantitative takeaways generated from tracking these metrics can be extremely valuable, they’re unlikely to generate lasting changes in an organization’s operational flow without a creative touch. Encouraging staff to think outside of the box and come up with improvements in the organizational workflow almost always generates better results than driving home an “it’s always been done this way” mentality.

Invest in Your Employees

Employee turnover is, to some extent, inevitable—and always expensive. Spending time to properly train employees, going above and beyond to ensure their satisfaction and providing competitive compensation packages might seem like a tall order at the outset, but it’s well worth the expense if you’re then able to increase effectiveness and limit turnover.

ROI, ROI, ROI

It seems obvious, but bringing advertising back to the return on investment is crucial—and not always emphasized as much as one might think. If an advertisement can’t be tracked, it shouldn’t be placed. And relying on generalized ideas is a surefire way to run unsuccessful, inefficient development campaigns. At Kars4Kids, we often get the impression that it’s time to move on from our famous jingle, largely from anecdotal hearsay. The data, however, tells a different story. Any time we enter a new radio market, we keep a careful eye on ROI so we can base our decision-making on the actual performance of a given segment.

In Conclusion... 

Americans gave $410 billion to charities in 2017, up 5 percent from the prior year. It’s clear that charitable giving isn’t going anywhere and that donations will continue to stream in to nonprofits that run effective development campaigns and use their donations in an efficient manner. We owe it to all involved stakeholders to optimize our donation processes and, through a concerted, data-driven effort that values employee satisfaction and emphasizes ROI, we continue to find new methods for collecting donations and passing them along to people in need.