Online Fundraising: Basic Strategy for Success
Effective Internet Marketing is a Key Ingredient to Online Success
Jun 5, 2009
2008 was a year of financial problems led in part by mortgage defaults, higher energy prices, and stock market woes. But consider this- even in a bad financial year, total online fundraising was up twenty-six percent over 2007, according to the NTEN 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study.
Why are nonprofits having success with online fundraising in a bad financial year? It has a lot to do with effective Internet marketing, a key ingredient to online success for any business or industry.
2008 Online Fundraising Statistics
NTEN’s study cited:
- Total number of online donations was up forty-three percent in 2008.
- Average online donation size was down seventeen percent- from eighty-six to seventy-one dollars.
The first statistic, the total number of online donations, is telling us the story for online fundraising in 2008: more donations over the same time period. This explains why online fundraising was up over twenty-six percent.
The NTEN 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study showed a month-to-month graph for 2008, which showed donations spiked in September, then declined sharply the rest of the year. This is contrary to the usual yearly pattern and accounts for the decrease over the previous year. Increasing online donations is largely dependent on marketing.
Marketing professionals are learning how to successfully run an online marketing campaign using traditional tools as well as those provided by online social media sites to enhance their fundraising efforts, especially during the lean years.
Market Share and Awareness
Even though average online donation size was down seventeen percent, that really doesn’t tell the whole story. When dealing with online donations, market share and awareness are big non-monetary factors. An article that appeared in the Washington Post on April 22, 2009 entitled "To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn't So Green" criticized a Facebook online fundraising application “Causes” saying that it was basically not producing donations effectively. The Post authors Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell cited the small amount per donor as the basis for their argument.
Allison Fine, author of “Momentum, Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age” was critical of the Post article in her blog saying, “The bottom line here is that Causes isn’t just about raising money, it’s also about raising friends and awareness, and in the long run turning loose social ties into stronger ones for a cause may be more important than one-time donations of $10 and $20 dollars right now.”
Online fundraising is on the rise and people are paying attention. Especially those donors in their 20's. They understand that together giving small amounts gets the job done.
Effective Internet Marketing is a Key Ingredient to Online Success
Success selling anything via the Internet takes a combination of tactics coupled together by an effective strategy. In the NTEN study, Brian Walsh, Associate Director of the Fundraising Division for Changing Our World, Inc. says, "Online fundraising strategy should be:
- Making people aware of the organization.
- Getting people to care about the organization.
- Encouraging people to support the organization.
- Keeping people connected to the organization."
Making people aware of the organization is a starting point, but it must be coupled with support, caring, and connecting to enable the message to become meaningful in the marketplace. Having a definitive goal or strategy up-front helps to keep the effort focused and resources held at a minimum, while moving the program forward.
Strategy is measured by return on time and money. Using social media as a tool to run nonprofits more efficiently becomes the industries' goal, as the return-on-investment needs to be met quickly.
Effective Internet Marketing Tactics
It takes two major ingredients to be successful on the Internet. First is valuable content and the second is marketing.
Valuable content is what people on the Internet are looking for in terms of information. Supplying content that is concise, factual and up-to-date will produce awareness in the market place.
What makes content valuable? Content that helps people care about the nonprofit organization is valuable in terms of persuasion. People want to feel that the nonprofit has improved their life significantly, as they are reaching out to help others. If content helps them care it will be easier to get them to support and stay connected to the organization for a long term.
When writing content make sure it improves the life of the readers, as well as the life of the clients who depend on the organization for their well-being. That will keep people returning and keeping them supporting the organization.
Marketing determines success or failure as much as content. It takes humans, and lots of them, to make online fundraising successful. Marketing is based on attraction. On the Internet, attraction translates into traffic. Traffic is comprised of people that find the blog or website through the organization’s marketing efforts and are then persuaded to make a donation or become a volunteer.
Success is about marketing and the traffic it creates. Employ tactics for persuasion with valuable content and drive massive traffic with marketing, the two major ingredients for online success with Internet fundraising.
Source Cited: The NTEN 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, May 2009, Authored by Karen Matheson & Marc Ruben of M+R Strategic Services and Holly Ross of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).
For more on nonprofit marketing see Nonprofit Blogging, Social Media Marketing for Nonprofits, and Are Nonprofits Using Twitter.
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