Soliciting monthly sustainer gifts during the holidays

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Wendy Marinaccio

Our research on behalf of our clients has shown us that the lifetime value of a monthly donor is higher than that of a single gift donor. Blackbaud’s 2013 Online Marketing Benchmarking Study for Nonprofits found sustainer giving grew by 27% last year, compared with overall online giving growth of 11%. Yet many organizations avoid requesting monthly gifts during the holiday season, since single gifts offer a higher average gift and nonprofits are counting on the huge year-end bump in fundraising the holiday season brings.

Here’s how to capitalize on the year-end surge in generosity and grow your group of supporters who invest in your organization during the holidays and throughout the year.

Clear the path to organic gifts: Ensure your donation forms include the monthly giving option and that it is easily accessible on the page. You can likely use built-in functionality for this. Simply providing this option next to the single gift option will result in many “organic” monthly donors to your program. If you’re comfortable being a bit more aggressive, you could have the monthly donor option automatically selected or list the monthly donor option first.
Send a dedicated email: Send an e-appeal specifically requesting monthly gifts during the holiday season. We recommend our clients send a dedicated monthly giving message at least quarterly. This message should communicate the positive impact of monthly giving on the organization, the convenience of monthly giving, and any benefits your organization offers. You may or may not wish to offer a premium. To alleviate potential givers’ anxiety, you should mention that donors can change or cancel their monthly gift at any time. During the year end period, your dedicated email could offer a special matching challenge. Consider working with a Board member or corporate partner to provide a matching challenge of $100 per new monthly donor, or a match for the entire first year of monthly gifts for new sustainers.
Piggyback on what you’re already doing: Promote monthly giving in your e-newsletter articles in November or December. Include a monthly giving “buckslip” in your acknowledgement letters. Provide a monthly giving checkbox on your direct mail response form. You don’t have to go too far out of your way—just consider what you’re already doing and determine how to incorporate a sustainer ask.
Increase your ask amounts: People are more generous during the holidays. Take a look at your monthly giving ask amounts and consider increasing them. You may also want to change the pre-chosen gift amount (the donation amount that is checked when the person arrives on the donation form) to a higher amount.
Monthly donor upsell lightbox: The monthly donor lightbox allows you to retain your regular donation form. It adds a pop-up once donors press the submit button on their gift, offering to make their gift monthly. The lightboxes we build for our clients calculate an upsell based on the amount of the originally planned single gift, and they allow gifts over a certain amount to be processed uninterrupted (for example, $1,000 gifts or more). They also securely carry the credit card information through and apply it to the correct gift. Click here to view an example from Share Our Strength.
Update your welcome series: If you already have a welcome series, you should consider altering it for the year-end period (for example, eliminating a message to reduce the period of time people are suppressed from other messages). Many new online donors will be joining your email list, and many of them will receive the welcome series. Consider creating a welcome series specifically for new donors and adding a monthly giving appeal to that series. If you don’t have time to create an entire welcome series of messages, you could create a triggered email that is automatically sent under certain conditions; within a few weeks of an initial gift is a ripe period to ask single gift donors to become monthly donors.
Get the data right: It’s important to get your target audiences and suppressions correct during the holidays. Ensure you are suppressing current monthly donors from dedicated monthly giving asks. Check that you’re on top of any suppressions you want to create for donors during year-end so they don’t receive another appeal immediately after making a gift. If you have a new donor welcome series that includes a sustainer ask, make sure you aren’t sending it to new sustainers.

Finally, don’t forget to ask your current sustainers to make an additional gift at Year End. You can re-purpose a message you’re sending to the full list to recognize that the person is a monthly donor and ask for a special additional year-end donation. Some organizations call it a “13th month” gift.

Wendy Marinaccio is a Senior Account Executive at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company.

Five challenges to effective integrated marketing for nonprofits

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Eric Overman

Integration is not only a common buzzword these days, but also a goal of many nonprofit direct response and development plans. And, while many organizations work in multiple channels, many are still working to integrate their entire program. Also, there are many challenges to building and maintaining an integrated program, including five common ones I’ll introduce below.

But first, let me give a loose definition of what I mean by “integration”. Specifically, these challenges address building a direct response program (even if you start with just one campaign) with the goal of enhancing donor engagement and driving conversion with messaging and planned timing across multiple touch points. In other words, ensuring communications are centered on the donor’s experience with your organization as she consumes information — and responds — in what has become a very multi-channel way. But, admittedly, this isn’t always easy.

Here are five common challenges along with some hints at what you can do to make sure you are up to the task of meeting them. (And, the good news is that it is usually worth the effort!)

Challenge #1: Where to Start?
Maybe you are firing on all cylinders when it comes to building an integrated program. But if not, determining where start, or make your next investment, can be challenging.

Is your organization crawling, walking, or running when it comes to integrated marketing and donor communications? And be honest, because knowing what level of complexity is realistic at the start will help build a stronger program faster in the long run.

Remember, no matter where you start, integrated marketing requires some level of increased complexity and activity. The question is how much. If you are just starting, don’t get overly complex. Pick your biggest segments/program areas/campaigns and start there. And if you run into an obstacle, which you likely will, get as far as you can. Next time, you’ll go further!

A great program area to consider for your next integration project is a Sustainer/Monthly Giving program. A good Sustainer program can become a cornerstone of your direct response program (if it’s not already), and multi-channel efforts have proven particularly effective in converting donors to sustainers. Plus, many organizations prefer their sustainers be driven online or converted by phone to encourage the use of credit cards instead of checks.

On the campaign side, the biggest direct response campaigns should be the first targets for building out or improving your integrated efforts. Year-End or your highest performing campaigns are a good place to start because your return will be higher by optimizing what is already successful.
What you can do:

Identify and accept your organization’s life cycle stage and plan accordingly.
Pick a recommended campaign/program area/segment and start planning 4 – 6 months in advance.

Challenge #2: Messaging & Content 
As mentioned previously, it’s not good enough to be just working in multiple channels. It’s important to integrate your messaging across channels and platforms so that you can provide a donor-centric experience. That doesn’t mean using exactly the same words, but the theme and feel should be consistent across communications, all the way through the end of the desired action (i.e., donation/conversion). This also means additional planning — possibly working with multiple internal departments, as well as possible development of additional content and stories highlighting the impact the donors have through your organization.   What you can do:

Plot out Messaging and Content Strategy at beginning.
Take stock of resources (tech, staff, photos, budgets) early.

Challenge #3: Data & Tracking 
This can be a big one. While using and looking at data by channel may be familiar, more complex integration requires that our data provide a “holistic view” of what the donor has received and what actions she has taken. It is this information upon which many integration plans are built.

Might sound easy enough, but as many of us know too well, data often exists in different silos and platforms. Even for those systems that sync, the information flow must be understood to make sure we are getting the right message to the right donor at the right time. The same can be said about looking at the results: Make sure you look not just at the channel by itself, but also by the segments of what they received.

What you can do:

Diagram existing data flow across channels, and look for where work-arounds would need to be built to sync the data or modify plans accordingly.
Plan out results tracking procedures in advance.
Don’t despair, just work within the constraints you currently have and try to fix them over time.

Challenge #4: Organization Buy-In & Participation 
As if you are not working hard enough making this all happen, whether walking or running, you probably have to “sell” others in your organization on this concept as well. You may need more resources and time from others in your organization to start pushing out or increasing integrated campaigns. And, the more complex both your organization and your program are, the more that involvement is needed from across your organization. And often, this means proving that it’s worth it. Fortunately, the benefits of integrating marketing are well documented.

What you can do:

Start Cross-Departmental Communications and Planning well in advance
Be prepared. Here are some good resources:
- Integrated Multi-Channel Marketing by Convio and Edge Research
- Mobile Matters, Artez Interactive
- eNonprofit Benchmark Study, NTEN/M&R Strategic Services
- 2012 Charitable Giving Report, Blackbaud

Challenge #5: Increased Complexity & Activity 
The first four challenges all add up to our fifth challenge: the increased complexity and activity that can come with an integrated program. So, make sure you plan for this fact. You’ll need to dedicate more time (and likely resources), and so will others within your organization.
What you can do:

Build an organization-wide communication calendar (view a sample basic multi-channel calendar).
Start planning well in advance.
Look for easy-win “value adds” to fold in (ecards, print gift cards, sustainer upgrades, thank you videos, ecommerce).

The good news is that integrated marketing frequently pays back returns. Not to mention, and largely in part because, it helps you drive an experience where your donor feels more aligned with your mission and impact.

Editor’s note: This article is reprinted with permission from the Integrated Marketing Advisory Board.

Eric Overman is the Vice President for Digital Strategy and Integrated Services at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company.

Grow your email list without spending money

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Wendy Marinaccio

Many nonprofits understand the importance of growing their email list but simply don’t have the funds to invest in list-building efforts. We’ve compiled a guide to the best free strategies to build your file without spending a dime.

Organizations must consistently build their housefile email list to counteract list churn—the inevitable people who unsubscribe, get a new job and leave the email address they used to subscribe to your list, or just stop opening your messages.

Clear the path to signup on your website

Your home page likely has many calls to action and calls for attention, so it can be difficult to make the case to include email signup in your website masthead and on the home page. In addition, so many people now visit your site on mobile devices that it may be hard to access those fields even if they exist. A best practice is to place the organic email signup box above the fold on your home page—top right is a typical spot.

In addition, you may want to consider an email signup lightbox on the home page that pops up to request people join your list.

Any internal Web pages that receive a lot of traffic should also have an email signup box. In addition, pages like the News & Information page and the E-Newsletter page should offer a signup box.

Finally, take a look at your email signup survey itself. Is it a length that discourages completion or are the data entry fields below the fold? A best practice is to simply ask for name and email address and gather additional information later, once you have the person signed up.

Example from Food & Water Watch (click to enlarge):

Example from Human Rights Campaign (click to enlarge):

Online actions

For any actions your organization is already conducting online, ensure email address is being captured (petitions, pledges, etc). It’s also important to make sure you are overtly communicating that a person is being added to the house file, and will receive ongoing email messages. You may need to work cross-departmentally at your organization to accomplish this.

A great (yet time-consuming) way to promote email signup is to create a fun contest, quiz, or raffle. You will need to use your organization’s resources of partnerships and staff time to promote the quiz or contest as widely as possible once it has been created. An added bonus is that these efforts can be shared with friends who may also be inspired to join the list.

Example from No Kid Hungry (click to enlarge):

List exchange

List exchange is a technique whereby like-minded nonprofits will each send a message to their lists on behalf of one another. The size of the lists exchanged should be equal, and typically organizations choose to suppress donors from these messages.

An example of a list exchange: the San Francisco AIDS Foundation would send a message to its constituents promoting a Project Open Hand. Recipients would be encouraged to sign up for Project Open Hand’s initiative or action, thus signing up for their email list. A few days later, Project Open Hand sends a message to its list promoting San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Typically these messages include some sort of action to be taken (signing a petition, etc).

The organization with the smaller list goes first and then that number of email addresses is matched by the other organization. The two organizations compare lists at the beginning to exclude crossover. These exchanges are usually done through a third party agency (like Donordigital), similar to the way direct mail lists are exchanged through a list broker, to ensure that everything is carefully coordinated.

Chaperoned Email

Chaperoned emails are sent on your behalf by a corporate sponsor or other community partner to its own house file or employee list. The message would talk about the great work of your nonprofit and why that organization supports you, or could be a “forward” message from your nonprofit to their list.

Examples of chaperoned emails:

A local business sends a message to its own email list describing the work of your nonprofit with a personal story explaining the reasons why the owners/staff are involved. They invite their customers to join them in some sort of action on your behalf and ask them to join your email list, with a link to your website email signup form.
A community partner sends an email to its list introducing a “forward” from your nonprofit’s Executive Director. Their message would explain why they support you and why they think their house file should read your message. The “forwarded” portion of the message would describe your work and a recent issue and invite people to join your list to stay up-to-date.
A corporation sends a message to its internal employee list describing its support of your work over the years and recommending its employees sign up for your email list; everyone who joins will be entered into a raffle for a chance to win something provided by the corporation.

Social Media

Promote your email list on Facebook and Twitter. Request email signup in social media posts, and include an email signup component in anything you create that is sharable on social media.

Add a sign-up within Facebook if possible so that people do not need to leave Facebook to join your list. If you have created an action, quiz, or contest on your website with an email capture component, you can promote it on Facebook as well using “iframes” technology.

In-person efforts

Add email capture to your office receptionist’s and membership assistant’s script to gather email addresses when supporters contact you by phone.

Re-write your donor acknowledgement letters to mention your email list in thank-you letters and ask them to join. Also add an email address line to mailed donation response forms, with opt-in language setting the expectation that person will receive email from your organization. If these efforts are slow to take hold, you may consider offering a small incentive (like a decal or temporary tattoo) that can be easily mailed to the person if they submit their email address.

Ensure staff, volunteers, and others working out in the field on your behalf are gathering email addresses and getting them back to the office. If you have a physical location the general public will visit, include an email signup box there. You’ll need to be sure there is a procedure in place for email addresses to be hand-entered on a regular basis.

Search

All efforts that increase site traffic are likely to improve the chances of the signup box being successful. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will help in that regard and can even be geared toward list building as a goal. You can direct more people to your website by optimizing use of your (free) Google Grant (or paying for search terms if you do not qualify for one). If the email signup box is easy to find, this should result in additional organic signup.

You can also adapt your Search strategy to direct people to sign up for your house file. You may want to create a special search landing page explaining your work and why people should sign up for your list, with a short email signup form.

You can also request email signup directly in a Google Ad, like this example from Crate & Barrel (click to enlarge):

Third Party Sources

Look into campaigns with organizations that allow you to gather email signups for free on their site. SingleSignOn.org, Change.org, CARE2 and Causes are community Web portals that allow you to create actions on their site and will send you contact information for the people who sign up.

Once your organization is ready to make a financial investment in growing your list, working with co-registration vendors like Change.org and Care2, placing paid advertising, and sending chaperoned messages with publications like Mother Jones and Alternet are a great way to continue building your list and create a good balance of organic list members and people who would not otherwise have known about your work.

Follow Up

It’s important to keep tabs on your own house file and know your own benchmarks. As you increase your list-building efforts and conversion efforts, you know what to continue to invest your resources in, whether that is time, requests of partners, or financial.

Recommended benchmarks to set and then keep an eye on are the number of new list joins per month and new list abandoners per month as well as email performance metrics (open, click-through & unsubscribe rates) for your new constituents. Plan in advance so you have a method to identify how people are joining the list. Source codes in URLs are a good method.

Once you bring new folks onto your email list, you’ll need to have a stellar “welcome series” of messages ready for them right away.

Tune in to a future edition of the Donordigital newsletter for ideas for how to reduce churn on your house file.

Wendy Marinaccio is a Senior Account Executive at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company.

BOOK: How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals, Third Edition

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Michael Stein

How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals, Third Edition
By Mal Warwick, with Eric Overman
Published by Jossey-Bass (2013)

Includes Sample Letters, Real World Examples, Style Tips, New Chapters on E-mail, Websites, Social Media, and More…

Now in a completely revised third edition, this classic book shows how to create winning appeals that will realize the full potential of direct mail and online fundraising. Written by fundraising guru Mal Warwick, with assistance from Eric Overman, this comprehensive resource gives nonprofit fundraising staff the information needed to write compelling fundraising appeals for any medium. If you follow Warwick’s guidelines, your direct mail and online fundraising campaigns will produce better results, year after year.

Written in an easy-to-read style, the book is filled with practical techniques, proven approaches, and illustrative examples of both successful and unsuccessful appeals based on the authors’ wealth of experience fundraising for hundreds of nonprofits. Step-by-step and appeal by appeal, the book shows how to navigate the fundraising appeal process with ease. To meet the demands of today’s socially connected donors, this new edition explains how to mesh today’s online technologies with direct mail to produce optimal fundraising results. You’ll learn how to use e-mail, websites, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile technology to recruit more donors and raise more money. The book includes current research on timely topics such as online vs. offline behavior, online giving statistics, demographics, and best practices in integrated fundraising.

If you’re a nonprofit professional eager to master the latest methods in fundraising, or simply need to write direct mail appeals for your organization, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals will help you hone your skills and create appeals that will hit the mark every time.

Available for purchase on Amazon.com and other retailers.

2013 Marketing Awards for eXcellence & Innovation

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Dan Doyle

Wednesday night (July 31, 2013) at the annual Direct Marketing Association of Washington conference, Mal Warwick | Donordigital and our clients were recognized for our marketing and fundraising excellence. Together we walked away with a five awards. We won awards in the acquisition, renewal, special appeal, and telephone fundraising categories!

We are honored to share these awards with the Human Rights Campaign, PETA, Ocean Conservancy, Brady Campaign, and Project Bread. For these current and past clients we received the following honors:

Human Rights Campaign – Nonprofit Renewal – HRC Renewal Zero – Silver
PETA – Nonprofit Acquisition – PETA Postcard Acquisition – Silver
Ocean Conservancy – Nonprofit Special Appeal – Guardians Year End – Bronze
Brady Campaign – Nonprofit Appeal TM – TM Conversion Campaign – Silver
Project Bread – Nonprofit Special Appeal – Thanksgiving Appeal – Bronze

Established in 1979, the MAXI (Marketing Award for eXcellence & Innovation) Awards program recognizes and honors outstanding achievements in the field of direct marketing. The criteria for MAXIs illustrate the difference between a MAXI and other contests in that a campaign’s results will carry more weight than any of the other scored criteria. All entries are judged on the following six criteria: results, strategy, copy, design/format, production, and innovation.

Congratulations to everyone for this well deserved recognition and great results!

Dan Doyle is the President and CEO of Mal Warwick | Donordigital

Facebook rolling out changes to its Advertising services

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Laura Domingo

At Donordigital, we manage Facebook Advertising projects for several of our clients. In early June 2013, Facebook announced plans to streamline the number of advertising units from 27 to fewer than half of that, and they’ll be rolling out these changes over the next five months. Let’s look at the current landscape of Facebook Advertising, while touching on anticipated changes, and how it might impact nonprofits using Facebook.

Currently, Facebook Advertising belongs to one of two categories: Ads or Sponsored stories.

Ads – Voice of the organization

For Facebook ads in this category, you as a nonprofit advertiser are in full control of all creative elements of the ad. This means you control the title of the ad, the imagery and any text that goes with it. The two most common distinct formats for ads are:

Standard ads: A standard ad is the traditional Facebook ad you find on the right hand side across the site on dedicated ad placements on Facebook. That means the right-hand side of the Facebook homepage, events, pages, user profiles, apps and next to photos in photo albums. Standard ads pointing to Facebook Pages are also eligible to show in the News feed on desktop and mobile devices.
Page post ads: Page post ads are Facebook page posts that are promoted in order to increase their reach. Due to their nature, they are eligible to show on all Facebook placements. This includes the News Feed on both mobile and desktop. Turning a page post into a page post ad by promoting it doesn’t change the original post in terms of appearance – only in terms of distribution. This means that Facebook users interact with a page post ad the same way they would with an unsponsored page post.

Sponsored stories – Voice of a friend

With sponsored stories, each time someone interacts with one of your Facebook entities a story is created. The content of the story can be that someone likes your page or one of our page posts, uses your app or is going to your event – to name a few. You could say a person’s action becomes a recommendation rather than an ad. For nonprofits, sponsored stories can be a powerful marketing message, since it shows a friend interacting with your content, which can be a big influencer. One big change expected in the next few months: sponsored stories will essentially disappear as a separate ad unit. Instead, these social context elements will be rolled into Ads, such as page post ads.

Custom Audiences

Another recent addition to Facebook Advertising is the introduction of Custom Audiences. This service allows you to target your ads at people for whom you have email addresses. The Custom Audience tool will match up people on your list to their Facebook profiles based on email address, Facebook user ID or phone number; however, email address will most likely be the record information you will be using for the match. We’ve seen this used very effectively in multi-channel campaigns, whereby nonprofits can target people on Facebook that have received solicitations in the mail, assuming you have their email address in their constituent record. The Custom Audiences tool is accessed through the Power Editor, which is found in the Facebook Ads Manager. List files need to be the CSV or TXT format. Once uploaded, this list will be saved and can be used as a target audience for your next Facebook ad campaign (or can even be used as an exclusion audience!).

Laura Domingo is an Account Executive at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company.

Vote for our sessions at the 2014 Nonprofit Tech Conference

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Michael Stein

Donordigital is excited to have put forward ten session proposals for the 2014 Nonprofit Technology Conference taking place in Washington, DC, March 13-15.

We invite your support for our proposed sessions by casting your vote on the Nonprofit Technology Network website:

Where Do I Start? Hands On Tips & Tools to Jumpstart Your Multichannel Fundraising Program
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15407

Start at the Start: Using Storyboards, Wireframes, and Mood Boards
How to properly start an online design project.
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15120

Transform Blackbaud/Convio Modules to Present a More Dynamic User Experience
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15254

Be the Star of Any Screen: Design and Implementation in the Mobile Age
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15255

50 Live Online Tests
Where you should begin a testing program, and how to invest limited resources in the most valuable tests.
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15132

Become a Jedi Master of Persuasion - and get better conversion rates on your donation pages
Persuading a visitor on your donation page to complete the form and click the donate button is a top objective for any online program.
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15337

A Gift a Month, That’s All We Ask – Building and Sustaining A Monthly Giving Program
An interactive case study of the No Kid Hungry monthly giving program, The Hunger Core.
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15308

Peer-to-Peer Perfection – Taking your tools to the next level
Peer-to-peer fundraising is a rising star in the online fundraiser’s toolkit, and research is showing that it is delivering very strong fundraising results as donors get friends and family involved in their campaigns.
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15131

Managing the Changing Landscape of Facebook Marketing
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15307

Turning Slacktivism into Activism: ROI of Online List Building
http://www.nten.org/ntc-session/15336
Hear from a number of nonprofits about their experience building a program to convert constituents acquired from list building efforts to ongoing advocates and donors.

Michael Stein is a Senior Account Executive at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company. Contact: michael@donordigital.com or phone (510) 473-0364.

Mobile Fundraising: The impact of mobile technology on peer-driven fundraising campaigns

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Michael Stein

This is a very important and timely research paper by Artez Interactive which is one of the solution vendors that serves nonprofits in the U.S. and around the world.

They examined the success of 83,866 participants in a variety of fundraising campaigns to help answer the question of what impact the use of mobile technology has on peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. Peer-to-peer are campaigns where one fundraiser reaches out to friends, family, co-workers and neighbors to raise money for a cause that is meaningful to them.

There’s a good deal of evidence piling up that peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns on behalf of a charity are becoming as effective as regular appeals coming directly from a charity. And this report suggests that the use of mobile devices is having a positive impact on the success of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.

Clearly donors are inspired to donate to a campaign when asked by someone they trust. And the pervasive use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases the fundraising response rate within that circle of trust.

The Artez Interactive report discovered:

15% of traffic to fundraising and donation pages comes from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
23% of participants in peer-driven events and campaigns choose to use mobile technology to help them fundraise for good causes.
Participants who use mobile technology to fundraise in a campaign raise up to 2.95x more than those who do not.
The percentage of donations made on mobile web browsers has grown 205% in the last 12 months!
Event participants using iPhones raise just slightly more than participants on Android devices.

Download the Research Paper and learn more about Artez Interactive.