To help acquire supporters with a higher intent to fundraise and a higher activation rate, you could try anticipating and tapping into trends and audiences that connect to your cause. By harnessing data insights, you can create more targeted initiatives that capture your audience’s attention, and ultimately raise more for your cause.
In this article we’ll take a look at how you can dig deeper into your Funraisin platform data, as well as SEO tools including Google Trends and AlsoAsked.
We’ll cover:
- What’s trending right now?
- When is the best time?
- How can you capture your audience’s attention?
- How do you enhance your site’s SEO?
- How can we help you become more relevant?
- Key takeaways
What’s trending right now?
By diving into Google Trends, you can search for any topic and track its popularity over any given period or region - as well as comparing it to other topics. For example, we picked ‘health’ and no surprises, January is when search for health is at an all time high worldwide, with a downturn over the festive holidays. This is based on Google search trends for 2022.
Mondays are when we get started - Or New Year’s Day - and weekends are when we cool off and relax. The UK is typically more consistent, but search interest - and perhaps motivation - wavers towards the end of the month, especially after week two.
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To stay up to date with your chosen search topic, you can set up Google Alerts to find the latest mentions across the web.
We’d recommend setting them up as a minimum for your charity name, your key campaigns and events, and related topics you’re interested in targeting.
When is the best time?
You can do the same digging for any topic or search term using Google Trends, and compare using your own event and campaign history to ask:
- When is the best time to get supporters to sign up?
- When is the best time to ask for donations?
- When is the best time to nudge supporters so they keep going?
You can find this in your Funraisin insights dashboard by heading over to your chosen event, then Insights, and from there you can see your day by day registrations and donations.
For your platform as a whole, you can head over to your Entrants and/or donations module, then Insights, where you can see entries by day, hour and best referrer. You can also see trends in your fundraisers behaviour over the year, such as how many have self donated, average donations, average donation, who have thanked donors, shared their page, created an update and added a profile picture.
Then pair this data with scheduled emails to nudge supporters to take action at those pivotal moments, combined with behavioural triggers throughout your event to encourage participation.
How can you capture your audience's attention?
Once you’ve picked your chosen topic, look for related searches. For example, as we know health is trending in January, another opportunity could be researching other questions people might be looking for with a ‘fitness plan’. This can validate (or not) a search trend that is happening.
What else could supporters be looking for? Let's use fitness plans to outline an example
Look for how you can capture search intent with relevant content. For example, your DIY fitness challenge could include a blog on the ‘10 best exercises’. Whether you’re targeting prospective supporters, or giving existing ones educational content, it will help either way to increase your event participation and engagement - whilst also building your SEO.
How do you enhance your site’s SEO?
You can apply your keyword research and trending hot topics within your platform’s coding.
- Create relevant urls to your chosen data niche for your site pages.
- Categorise your content pages into an easy to follow site architecture and make sure you don’t have any floating pages that aren’t associated with an existing navigation path or category.
- Create a community hub to centralise your SEO efforts and focus your rank-building. Make sure to link to your hub from your main brand site too.
- For repeated year on year events, maintain one central url to maintain link authority (funraisin.co/events/eventname), and add dates to historic urls (funraisin.co/events/eventname-2022) to archive past content without cannibalising your site traffic.
- Apply our SEO metadata fields to target your pages with a title, keywords and description optimised from your research.
How can we help you become more relevant?
Here’s a few ideas of how you could apply your research.
Idea 1: Create dynamic content based on previous behavioural data
Pre-populate a donation form with personal details and suggested donation amounts. Show specific content within content blocks on the page that matches a supporter's previous area of interest - such as 'building fund', 'education', or 'medical equipment wishlist' etc. Personalise the content within the copy of the page to make it more relevant to the supporter.
Idea 2: Welcome back supporters so they can pick up where they left off
Create personalised acquisition pages with content such as ‘welcome back Sarah’ (with a previous profile picture), thanks for raising £567.89 at last year's event etc. Also have registration forms with the personal details of previous participants from your database, or use data captured during registration where the participant does not complete the entire registration flow. Using incomplete registrations in this way can really help boost your participant numbers - and fundraising.
Idea 3: Create related products in your Shop
Sell branded merchandise that adds value to your audience and their fitness or wellness goals. Group your products into categories that relate to their interest area for higher visibility and cross-selling with other suggested products they might like. For example, a fitness searcher might be interested in a laces or water bottles, or a wellness searcher might be interested in a journal or activity tracker. Make sure to add SEO tags to each individual shop item for more targeted indexing by Google’s spiders.
Find out more about creating a shop or adding shop products
Idea 4: Create related content via Assets and Blog articles
Once you’ve done your keyword research and data analysis, create related content to be the best answer for your searcher’s questions. Consider creating desirable downloadable assets or blog articles to help supporters when they’re exploring ideas, or to help keep them engaged in your campaign. You can also increase desirability by making content exclusive and only available within a supporter’s logged in dashboard. Make sure to track all downloads to see which is the most popular.
Idea 5: Create a social fundraiser via Facebook
Tap into your supporters’ networks and maximise your reach and activation by creating Facebook-One Click fundraisers. These are acquisition forms to create interconnected web and Facebook fundraising pages - making the most of multi-channel fundraising wherever your supporters’ networks are. You can connect your supporters and build your community by integrating Facebook Group invites into your triggered emails and fundraiser dashboards. This way you’re building momentum by helping supporters to keep going too.
Key takeaways
- Understand and build upon your data toolset from your Funraisin platforms historic behavioural trends as well as trending topics and related searches
- Become relevant by creating content matched to your chosen keyword research and trends
- Become discoverable by apply SEO best practices and coding your content with metadata
Your say
We’d love to hear which trends you’re tapping into and which tools you find helpful. Comment below or drop us a message. Or if you want to explore turning the hottest trends into your next campaign, get in touch with us so we can help your supporters take action.
