As the fundraising landscape shifts with the new tax law and total donations to all nonprofits is projected to drop 5% in 2018, it is critical that your fundraising efforts are wisely and effectively directed. But how do you know what’s wise and effective - and what’s all wrong?
Here are six key steps to ensure that the fundraising decisions you’re making are the right ones to fund your mission:
1. Cultivate an attitude of inquiry
Much of learning is putting oneself in the mindset to learn, and developing habits that embody that mindset. Just by choosing to read this article, we know you’re already most of the way there. So we’ll keep this one brief.
Whenever you hatch a plan to tweak or wholesale overhaul of what you’re doing now, ask yourself: how will I know at the end if it has made us more or less effective in funding our mission? Answering that question and using it to guide your implementation is key to learning and iteratively improving your fundraising efforts.
{loadposition blog-ad-general}2. Use Google Analytics
Described simply, Google Analytics is a free service that tracks traffic to your web properties. More expansively, it holds the answers to millions of question you never even thought to ask that can tell you volumes about your web visitors and the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts. If you don’t have it or haven’t implemented it on your online donation forms, stop reading this and do so now.
No, really. It’s okay. We’ll wait until you’re done.
3. Master inbound marketing codes
Web traffic generated from links in every tweet or Facebook post or email appeal or skywriting message you send can be tracked. This is done through the near magic of inbound marketing codes called Urchin Tracking Module parameters, or UTM for short. These little strings of letters and numbers can be used to uniquely identify the link someone clicked to get to your site so you can analyze what outbound messages are generating the most - and most successful - inbound traffic.
4. Use targeted campaigns to test outbound messaging
In addition to attaching UTM codes to specific call to action links in marketing messages that take a variety of users to the same URL, you should consider creating different donation pages for different marketing campaigns. Instead of just pointing folks to the one main donation form on your website, get specific with your language both in your appeals and on the campaign-specific donation form so you’re speaking to directly to your intended audience in both your outbound messaging and on the form itself. Adjust elements of the form - suggested donation amounts, recurring vs. one-time options, etc - to correspond to the goals of your individual campaign.
Beyond allowing for a more unified message throughout the user’s experience, campaign-specific donation forms can aid in evaluating the success of a campaign relative to others.
5. Concoct A/B testing for online donation forms
When creating a donation form, should you have the one-time or recurring option as the default? Should the suggested donation amounts be aggressive to target higher end gifts or lower to encourage a greater number of donors? In what order should the suggested donation amounts appear?
These questions and many more can be addressed through the process of A/B testing different options. Google Analytics empowers you to do just that. In Google Analytics, you can create an experiment which allows you to define a control donation form and one or more variants. It then directs traffic randomly to each version of the page so you can evaluate which is most effective.
When creating experiments and the variants that help define them, be very specific and targeted with your changes. The more you focus on one item that is the difference between a variant and the control, the clearer an understanding you’ll have as to what works and what doesn’t so you can adjust accordingly. And once a given A/B test is completed and you’ve incorporated your learning from it, run the next one to answer another key question!
6. Capture marketing intelligence in your donor database
These tricks and tools are valuable on their own for gleaning valuable data on your effectiveness. When they are captured in your donor database as well that brings your fundraising game to a whole new level. Gaining visibility into the UTM codes, specific campaigns, and particular A/B variants that produced specific donations allows you to run advanced analysis across a number of factors related to your donors and their individual donations. It takes you from Pee Wee Herman smart to Einstein smart and opens new possibilities for refining and improving your fundraising efforts.
For more information on maximizing your fundraising results through these six steps, watch our webinar, Six Ways to Get Smarter with Your 2018 Fundraising. We get knee deep in each point and pull the curtain back on some valuable tools and tricks you can use in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack to become a smarter and more effective fundraiser.
Supporting Resources
- WEBINAR RECORDING: Six Ways to Get Smarter with Your 2018 Fundraising
- BLOG POST: Six Ways to Get Smarter with Your 2018 Fundraising
- SALESFORCE HOW-TO BLOG POST: Track Online Donation Form A/B Test Results with Salesforce Campaign Hierarchies
- SALESFORCE HOW-TO BLOG POST: Create a Salesforce Report to Evaluate A/B Tests of Online Donation Forms for One-Time and Sustaining Donations
- SALESFORCE HOW-TO BLOG POST: Create a Salesforce Report to Evaluate A/B Tests of Online Donation Forms for New and Existing Donors
- SALESFORCE HOW-TO BLOG POST: Create a Salesforce Dashboard to Display A/B Test Results of Online Donation Forms
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