Most nonprofits that we work with utilize a four pillar strategy. Their efforts are focused on awareness for their organization, sales of tickets to their marquee event, recruiting volunteers and what we are discussing today, increasing online donations.
Increasing online donations is no longer optional. Today, online donations should be a substantial part of your fundraising mix. The 2018 M+R Benchmark Study says that online giving increased 23% in 2017 after 15% growth in 2016 and monthly online giving grew 40% from the previous year.
Now more than ever online donation generation is extremely important for nonprofit organizations. Here are three ways that you can move the needle for your organization’s online donation generation. These strategies can help you get to 10X growth in your online donation generation.
Clearly Define Your Donation Prospect, Because Targeting Works
When you have a very detailed picture of your ideal donation prospect you will get better results. We call these pictures personas. We want to know what is it about your organization that people have liked so much that it motivated them to donate. When we find that motivator, we can use it to help get more donations from new donors and existing donors.
Our strategy to define our donor prospect personas is to meet with the leadership of the organization and discuss what characteristics they think make up the ideal donor prospect and those donation motivation factors.
We also like to survey existing donors. Sometimes the donors will shed a lot of light on their motivations with a very simple survey. These insights can make or break your online donation efforts.
Utilize Google Ad Grants For Nonprofits
Google Ad Grants give nonprofits up to $10,000 per month of free Google Ads advertising. The good thing is that Google Ads gives your organization the opportunity to super target your donor prospects.
The not so good thing is that, recently, Google changed the requirements to keep a Google Ad Grants account up and running. You can see those requirements here. Google will shut down your account if you don’t continuously meet the requirements.
The best thing about using Google Ads to generate online donations is that you are in front of a donor prospect when they have indicated that they are ready to give. When you can be in front of your ideal donor prospect when they are ready to give, you will easily 10X your online donations.
Track Conversions, Evaluate And Test
Doing a great job up front with ads is only the first step. Once you get someone to click through to your donation page it’s important to be able to track that actual donation back to the ad that the person clicked to get to the page.
Tracking conversion of donations will only help you improve your performance. You can then focus on expanding your winners and move away from your losers. Analyzing your results and making changes in strategy helps you improve your results every month.
A side benefit of tracking donation conversions and evaluating your results regularly is that you also meet two of the Google Ad Grants requirements, conversion tracking and regular tweaking of the account.
Like any marketing effort, generating online donations requires a strategy, execution, and evaluation. By testing and learning you can greatly grow your online donations, often getting huge increases in online donations of 10X and beyond.
At Peak Inbound Marketing we help nonprofits increase donations, sell event tickets, gain awareness and recruit volunteers online. If you’d like to see how we help nonprofits grow click here.
