Holiday Fundraising Boot camp – 5 Strategies to ensure fundraising success

Date: November 4, 2014

Name: Holiday Fundraising Boot camp – 5 Strategies to ensure fundraising success

Presenter: Steve Rio

Holiday season is important time for nonprofit and charitable organization to maximize their fundraising activities. It is important to ensure all nonprofit organizations to make use of their fundraising capacity. NetSquared invites Steve Rio, the CEO and the lead strategist of Briteweb, to share fundraising strategies that can help charitable organization. This seminar will help all organizations to develop effective fundraising events to improve their donation for the holidays.

Rio works with nonprofit organizations for over 10 years. He believes all charitable organization is facing the difficulty of fundraising every year. Charitable organizations are selling products that their customers do not actually need. Therefore, they are in the business of explain why their work matters. Currently, the best ways are to optimize organization’s website to explain their mission and vision.

Rio will share five strategies to save energy and raise more money for charitable organizations.

Strategy #1: Focus

Rio believes organizations need to identify their customers. It is impossible for organizations to please every target market. Organizations need to change their layout to attract their target market. When charitable organizations are small, they need to focus on how they can appeal to their donors and clients. Organization websites need to raise awareness, provide executive summary with statistics, and have simple and clear call to action message.

Rio suggests charitable organizations to answer these 3 questions to help their organizations to focus.

• Who is your most comfortable pitching live in a room?
• Who are you talking to?
• What is the story?

Strategy #2: Simplify

Rio believes charitable organizations need to explain what they do using simple language. Organizations should implement simple model that show simple and direct description of the company. People will be driven by the impact. In addition, organizations need to simplify their asking. Therefore, it is important to direct their action requests.

Clients and donors are looking for easy way to give. By providing obvious link for donation, donors will know where to donate. Charitable organizations should show the donation link when people are emotional. It is essential to have clean forms and pre populate the option. The less work donors need to do, the higher chance the donation will be made. Therefore, online forms should only ask for necessary information.

“Ask little as possible”

Strategy #3: Personalize

Rio believes personalize involves with the language. Different word choices will help audience to visualize the impact. It is important to create impact experience for audience; therefore, it will give tangible result. Charitable organizations need to have social proofs to identify their reputation. It is important to make it human and show the organizations are connecting to the audience. By creating opportunities to share and give using social campaigns, people will have opportunities to share and recognize the message from the charitable organizations.

Strategy #4: Analyze your data

There are many tools organizations can use to analyze their donors information. By using the right tools, organizations can figure out who are following their campaign. It is important to determine the common giving amount. Organization can use the sweet spot and to improve the donation rate. Organizations can provide the higher amount and lower amount, but make the sweet amount default.

Organizations should know who visit their websites. Organizations can utilize this data to invite them to future events. Rio believes organizations do not say what they do, other people do. Therefore, compare data with similar organizations to enhance the current system model.

There are many analyze tools available for nonprofit organizations. Google Analytics can help organizations to determine the demographic region from their target audience. Hootsuite can help organizations understand what the current audience is thinking and saying. Quantcast will have the entire statistic breakdown in details. The Attentive-ly software application can take the current email list and search for social media profiles. This will help to identify the influencers.

Strategy #5: Follow up

Rio believes follow up is extremely important for nonprofit industry. Manners people is important and it is mandatory to send thank you letters. Rio suggests all organizations to follow up regularly and tell the story to keep them inform. This will make people feel special. Many charitable organizations are using videos, chapter’s events, gathering events, and provide honorary status for all donors. By helping them celebrate together with the organizations, they will feel appreciated. Organizations need to recognize their efforts to ensure their donation can continue in the future.