Monthly Archives: October 2011

3 Places You Should Be Listening to Your Donors

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Ear Anatomy

November is quickly bearing down on us and you know what that means? End of Year Fundraising Campaigns.  I know many of you are in the middle of planning your campaigns or creating the letters, emails, and websites to support your campaign. So as we enter a season where we will be pushing a lot of messages to our donors, let’s take a moment to remember the ways they send messages to us.

  1. Email - If you’re sending your series of campaign emails to your database over the next 2 months, be prepared for donors feedback. Be sure to be diligent in reading the feedback you get—especially after your first email send. Don’t be so married to the flow of your campaign that you don’t make adjustments along the way.
  2. Social Media - Make sure you have a healthy balance of conversational posts that are not always “telling”. If you’re using a tool like Hootsuite to schedule Twitter and Facebook posts, make sure you’re not overdoing it.  You can’t automate these relationships, and Facebook and Twitter are places you learn about what makes your constituents tick – so be sure to listen . Instead of saying “give to us”.  Talk about a beneficiary and then in the conversation discuss with the fan base the way donations can support that beneficiary.
  3. Phone - As we talked about in our recent webinar, 5 Fundamentals of Successful End of Year Campaigns, phone solicitations to your donors is not out of date. Consider using email or postcards to alert your donors that they will be getting a call. When you’re on the call, don’t forget to listen. If you get a “no”, remember that it doesn’t mean “never”. You’re still building a relationship after all.

*image courtesy of: http://www.stanprokopenko.com/blog/2009/07/draw-ears

2 Donation Pages We Love

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For a website visitor, donating to an organization can be cumbersome and annoying.  When donors come to your page to give you want to make it easy, fast, and visually appealing like the rest of your site.  There are of course challenges given the required information for transactions online.  However, there are different ways to design a page to achieve what you need without sacrificing the experience for the donor.  Here are two donation pages that we think look great:

Amnesty International
With this donation page, instead of doing the usual single line form build, they chose a two column approach.  It reduces the length of the page, provides great white space, and is easy to navigate.  All within several clicks below you can give quickly.

Amnesty Donation Page
Charity Water
This page is very basic in nature and provides an easy way for donors to get through the form.  It has bold words, colors, and instructions to follow in order to complete the transaction.

Charity Water Donation PageWhat do you like most about these pages? Do you have any donation pages you think simplify the giving process?

Facebook is for Conversations

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by Isaac Pellerin, Digital Strategist & Consultant

It’s not too hard to find organizations and businesses scrambling to figure out how to capitalize on Facebook. With people spending more of their time (average of 8 hours per month) in the environment, it is certainly a natural impulse for organizations to want to find ways to capture some of that time and attention and turn that into revenue.

It’s time to face the fact. Facebook is for conversation

We get the most when we approach it with a “what can be bring” rather than “what can we get” or worse yet, “how can this make money for us.”

While it may seem incredible that Facebook users spend an average of 8 hours a month on the social network (compared to Google, coming in at 1 hour and 46 minutes), it should not surprise us that we love spending time on a website that shows us all the things we care about. The upcoming release of Timeline for Facebook solidifies the idea that the “story of me” is what keeps me (and millions of others) signing in day after day. I fill my profile with the people, places, and activities that matter to ME.

As organizations we tend to think, “Facebook is great because we can get people to tell our story to their friends.” But that thinking misses the greatest opportunity we have with social media. Facebook tells us as individuals to write our own stories, therefore it is a privilege when someone chooses to write our organization or brand into their story for a moment in time.

If all we do is ask for people to “like” us on Facebook, we’ve gotten no more than the schoolboy who found out a girl “likes” him yet can’t figure out for the life of him why she won’t talk to him (not speaking from personal experience).

However, if we give people a reason to engage, provide them with a shareable resource, ask them their opinion, or give them a chance to take a more meaningful action, then they have something to talk about. It’s now a conversation. And it’s their conversation.

Time for a commercial…

We worked with Forte, our Technology Partner, to design Campaign Builder. Campaign Builder helps nonprofits create conversation pieces that provide their constituents, donors, and fans with resources and engagement activities while leveraging the strength of remaining in the Facebook ecosystem—sharing conversations.

To learn more about Campaign Builder visit www.facebook.com/campaignbuilder
To learn more about Forte visit http://www.forteinteractive.com/

The Untapped Nonprofit Resource: LinkedIn Groups

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by Justin Brady, Client Associate

Having been a member of LinkedIn since it was first created, like many I never fully understood the value. I generally use Facebook personally and Twitter professionally for networking and sharing content.  As a Hootsuite user, I do occasionally link my tweets to LinkedIn if I feel the content might be valued. But I honestly assumed no one ever read it, so I stopped.

Then a couple months ago I ran into a fellow nonprofit professional at a networking event and he said he missed my updates because he thought they had been helpful. At first I was confused, assuming he followed me on twitter, which I post on daily. When he said he wasn’t into twitter and only used LinkedIn, I realized there was a whole network I was missing out on.

I recently gave LinkedIn another chance and found many professional development and networking opportunities I was missing.

Linked-In Groups

The biggest thing differentiating LinkedIn from other social media is the very active discussion groups. Wondering how you could better use social media? Need a new fundraising event idea? Is your board being difficult? You aren’t alone. Tons of nonprofit groups exist with similar discussions going on right now.

A few groups that you might be interested:

  • Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations 22,245 Members
  • Philanthropy Network 5,481 Members
  • On Fundraising, Hosted by AFP 12,101 Members
  • Non Profit Technology Network 2,741 Members
  • Non Profit Marketing 10,074 Members

How to make the most of these groups, without spending a lot of time:

  • Spend 15 minutes a week scanning the most recent discussions.
  • Find a topic you have an opinion on and leave a quick comment.
  • Needing help but can’t find an answer? Don’t be afraid to ask a question. There is an active network ready and excited to help work through the challenges they have also experienced.
  • Find groups in your geographic area or nonprofit sector.  For instance if you work in animal welfare join the Animal Health & Nutrition Network.
  • Have a success story? Share that too. Actively sharing and responding to threads can help make your organization an influencer on topics where you have expertise.

Want to connect? Find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jfbrady.