Impact statements provide transparency where the money goes
With the evolution of crowdfunding, the ability to be transparent about what a supporters donation is (or will be) put towards is a massive advantage. Younger donors especially want to know that their money is directly going to a specific cause they’ve chosen.
The product a nonprofit offers is ownership of the direct impact they have made in furthering the organization's mission. It’s being a part of the story - the proof of which is backed up with evidence of the impact your organisation is making. And that evidence is what will drive supporters to share their direct impact with family and friends.
How can you package up and deliver your product in a way that surprises and delights your donors?
Hopefully your team will have uncovered some pain points from speaking directly with supporters so you can move quickly to build in ‘features’ to your organization’s product that take your supporters through a seamless journey of falling in love with your organization's work and in turn become your advocates. And by focusing these features around growth you’re building in the opportunity for your supporters to easily share their passion and role in that story.
Surprise and delight your online fundraisers
Some features to consider adding into your site to deliver those ‘surprise and delight’ moments for your supporters fundraising for you include things like the following...
1. Triggered Rewards
Reward someone based on how their fundraising is going during an event - this can be as simple as a badge or an icon that gets triggered at a certain fundraising amount. Or you could activate them when the fundraiser performs certain actions on your site such as adding a profile pic, customising their profile page, asking for support from friends and family, sharing socially, and much more. Here’s a great example Act For Peace used with Funraisin in their Ration Challenge campaign.
2. Personalise a supporters onsite experience
Use marketing automation tool to recognise donors when they return to your site and thank them. Give them a hand by directing them to some relevant content you have online. You can do this a number of ways that don’t require any coding skills. Three tools that are awesome and worth looking into for this are:
Autopilot: Using their Headsup feature, if a supporter is a contact in your Autopilot account (if you’re a Funraisin customer you can use the Autopilot integration to connect your donors and supporters automatically to your Autopilot account), then you can create a Headsup message that recognises them by name with customised copy to prompt them towards a goal relevant to their lifecycle or stage in your event. Here’s an example and you can see it in action here.
- Drip: An alternative to Autopilot (and what we use for our business), Drip also lets you create sliders to enable on your website. Using the sliders you could prompt supporters to navigate to specific content or encourage them to register for an event. In this example, you’re looking at how our Tips, Tricks and Strategies email series form is contained in a widget that slides out from the left hand side of specific pages on our site such as the Funraisin’s Full Features.
- Drift: Drift is a Live Chat messaging app that you can also use to prompt people to specific pages or goals on your site. Not only that but you can chat in real time to supporters on your site and help them in real time. Drift also has an integration with Drip if you’re using Drip for your marketing automation but if you want to send contacts coming through Drip to your CRM platform you can just as easily use Zapier to connect them. For those keen to get a little more advanced with Drift, check out our article on linking Adwords and Live Chat where you’ll learn how to customise your slider prompts based on the Adwords message your supporters have clicked through on.
3. Get creative with your automated emails
Within every peer to peer fundraising event there’s a bunch of automated, or transactional, email which get fired off at certain points (new team creation, new member joining, forgotten passwords, personal donation, registration receipt, card expiry reminders, and the list goes on. Don’t let them be standard, drab comms that feel impersonal and irrelevant.
Add a little of your personality to emails with animated gifs that can spruce up a seemingly routine email connection with a supporter. If you’re a Funraisin customer you’ll already know you can change email templates and add imagery to your emails so it’s a great change to inject a little more personality and turn a tough topic into a positive experience. Here’s a great free tool called Giphy to grab awesome gifs or create your own quickly. What about this for when someone achieves a fundraising target?!
Don't forget about your sponsored donors
You can also inspire donors who are sponsoring fundraisers to help them hit milestone targets.
On Funraisin we call it donation uplift messaging, and based on some simple formulas you’re able to prompt a sponsor to increase their donation so that the fundraiser can hit their target there and then with that donation.
For example, let’s say you’re giving away tickets to a prize draw for a new surfboard, courtesy of a corporate partner, for all fundraisers who raise over $500, you can set a donation uplift message to be displayed to all sponsored donations which are within $50 of the $500 milestone.
Assuming I’m the fundraiser and have currently raised $440, my brother visits the site and donates $40 (putting me within the $50 range) he’ll get a prompt along the lines of ‘for an additional $20, Courtney can enter the draw to win a new surfboard’.
Chances are he’s going to add that extra $20 to his donation to help me achieve my goal and get a chance to win. We’ve seen some great results with this feature.
What's your story?
Work out the ways you can make the donor and supporter journey integral to being part of your organisation's story and you'll be on your way in turning supporters into advocates.
