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Fundraising Tuesday: What’s the Message TODAY? 3 Examples

May 10, 2022 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

You’re sending a message to your nonprofit audience in every email, every social media post, every newsletter article you write. But is it a message they want to hear?

If you know your audience, you can tell there are some topics they’ll always be interested in, no matter what season it is or what else is going on in the world. We call those evergreen topics. It’s good to have a well of those you can dip into at any time. Posting them is a service to your audience, and it does well by your nonprofit, too, because it keeps your donors and potential donors interested.

There are also some topics that matter at a particular time and not so much at others. We’ll call them seasonal topics. Ideally, you’d like your message to stand out in your audience’s mind. Well, what’s a better way to make sure they do pay attention than to write about something that’s top of mind for them already, right at that moment?

Mother’s Day Messages

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. It’s a time of celebration for some, and a bittersweet time for others, depending on their relationship to their own mothers and (perhaps) to their children if they’ve raised any. One thing it is for everybody, though, is virtually inescapable: it’s mentioned in all the media.

How did nonprofits tailor their messages to Mother’s Day?

Example 1: It’s in their name

MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization and feminist fund, had an easy connection to the day. Their organization’s name means “mother,” in Spanish.

MADRE made good use of Mother’s Day by 1) sending my wife an email that said:

Dear Rona,
Happy Mother’s Day! Today we celebrate all who care for families and lift communities in joy.Make sure you’re honoring the MADREs in your life.It’s not too late to send someone special a thoughtful Mother’s Day e-card!​In celebration,Yifat Susskind
Executive Director

MADRE pop-up messageand 2) by putting a pop-up on their website that says, “Honor mothers everywhere. For Mother’s Day, you can send an e-card with your gift to support feminist initiatives around the world. Give Today.”

These messages hit the spot. They might not make a difference if MADRE weren’t routinely great at telling stories that move the hearts of their audiences. Within a stream of donor communications, however, the Mother’s Day messages grab readers’ attention and call on them to act.

Example 2: From one mother to another

re Power Mother's Day message

re:Power took a different approach. Formerly Wellstone Action, this organization works to “build a future of inclusive politics where decisions about our communities are made by our communities at all levels.” In other words: run for office, mama!

For Mother’s Day, ED Karundi Williams laid out how being a mother and being and activist go together. In a long, thoughtful email, she shared these reflections:

Becoming a mother required me to establish some boundaries, out of a sense of responsibility to my daughter and her needs. 

At the same time, motherhood clarified my life’s work. It sharpened my focus and reignited my passion for this important work. 

Clearly, re:Power looked at where it was in relation to its audience and saw Mother’s Day as the right time to deepen and personalize that relationship. The message is consistent with what they would say every day of the year, but it’s couched in language that resonates with readers on Mother’s Day.

Example 3: Mothers are stronger than borders

RAICES provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees, especially at the Mexico-Texas border. They do not have “mother” in their name, like MADRE. Their mission is a hard sell to people in the U.S. who are skeptical about allowing more immigrants to enter the country. So, how did they use Mother’s Day to win their audience over?

 

RAICES Mother's Day message

Today, we honor Ms. N, pictured above with her children. We concealed their faces with flowers grown in Afghanistan for anonymity

 

They focused on mothers’ love for their children as a reason why immigrants come to the U.S.

“Mothers provide a deep love — a type of love that borders can’t contain.

This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the immigrant mothers and parents who will do whatever it takes to give their children a safer and brighter life.”

RAICES presented the children in the photo as a bunch of flowers, a typical gift for Mother’s Day. Both the photo and the language of the email they sent me put all the emphasis on family, on love, and on hope. The most hardened anti-immigration advocate might be moved–let alone the people on the RAICES mailing list, who already care about the future of immigrants and their children.

Mother’s Day is past now, but what’s the next date that your audience will be thinking about? Is it the date of George Floyd’s death? Memorial Day? Shavuot? The end of the school year? What message can you send them that they will pay attention to, and will it make them feel close to your organization, and give?

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Fundraising Tuesday: Give to Get–the Donor’s Mailing Address

April 19, 2022 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

When you meet someone you’d like to date, you ask for their phone number. When you meet someone you’d like to see become a donor to your nonprofit, you ask for their mailing address.

That’s right, post office mail. U.S. mail. Fondly referred to as “snail mail.” Because it works.

Across all age groups, direct mail fundraising appeals work better than email appeals, and far better than asking for money on social media. Even when a donor goes to your website and gives online, she is more likely to give because she’s already seen your letter in the mail.

The question is, why should she trust you with her address, any more than she’d trust you with her phone number? The answer is, because you have given her a reason to.

Give to Get the Mailing Address of a Donor or Prospect

What can your organization give your actual or potential donor that has to go through the mail?

Example 1: Something timely to read.

HIAS mailing addressHIAS is an international agency whose slogan is “Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.” Although it helps and gets help from people of every background, it was founded a hundred years ago to aid Jewish immigrants, and a significant number of its donors are still Jewish.

So, I was impressed when, the week before Passover, I got a card in the mail containing this special reading that I could add to my Passover seder:

We extend our hands in welcome to those who continue to seek asylum in our country, and we remember the danger of what happens when ordinary people do not stand up to those in seats of power. Now, we join hands to recognize that the work of welcome is the work of each of us and all of us and that we are strongest together.

Granted, I was already on their mailing list, so the card was more of a thank-you gift than a “give to get.” But if this were the first mailing they’d ever sent to me, it would make me happy. I would tuck the card away to use at my family’s seder–so much nicer than having to look it up on my phone!

And if they had emailed me and said, “We have this beautiful reading with a colorful illustration that you can use to make your holiday more special, and we’ll mail it to you–just fill in your street address here”? Yes, I probably would have. And then HIAS would have been able to send more communications, and appeals, to my home, through the mail.

Example 2: Something symbolic to wear.

Change Comes Now works to support women imprisoned in Florida. During the depths of the pandemic, they were the only group making sure that women inside prison walls had face masks to wear.

Providing those masks was an act of real solidarity. For people on the outside, Change Comes Now figured out a way they could show solidarity symbolically–and a way they could share their mailing addresses with the organization.

Change Comes Now created rubber wrist bands, marked with the name of a women’s prison in Florida: “Gadsden,” “Lowell,” “Homestead.”  On Facebook, CCN offered its followers the chance to get one of these symbols of solidarity through the mail. For a couple of bucks to defray the cost of postage, a family member, a formerly incarcerated woman, or simply someone who believes the prison system is inhumane could receive a wrist band through the mail.

CCN received their mailing address. By entering those addresses into its database, it made it possible to mail them newsletters and, eventually, fundraising appeals.

What can your nonprofit offer that will make people who follow you online (or get your messages in their email inbox) agree to share their mailing address?

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3 Strategies to Drive More Nonprofit Website Traffic

February 14, 2022 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

Say you’re standing in line at a coffee shop, waiting to get a cappuccino. To kill the time, you strike up a conversation with a stranger about your nonprofit. You tell them about your mission and recent fundraising events, and before you go your separate ways, you direct them to your website for more information. That’s where you want them to go, right?

Your nonprofit’s website is one of your biggest assets. But for many organizations, the challenge of leveraging this asset comes from figuring out how to boost website traffic and get people to actually use your website as a resource.

So, aside from suggesting to strangers in coffee shops that they check your website out, how can you drive more nonprofit website traffic? Here are three strategies that can help:

  1. Create high-quality content.
  2. Employ SEO best practices.
  3. Integrate your website with social media.

With these tips and a website building tool created for nonprofits, you can direct more traffic to your website, cementing it as a great resource for your supporters to get information about and contribute to your cause.

1. Create high-quality content.

One of the most important things you can do to boost website traffic is to ensure that you’re posting high-quality content on your website. After all, you want to give your audience a good reason to visit it. And, according to Morweb’s guide to the best nonprofit websites, having great content on top of a solid website design will do the trick.

Here are some ways you can ensure that your content is high-quality:

  • Create a donor communications calendar that outlines the website content you want to publish.

 

  • Consistently publish on your blog to demonstrate that supporters can come to your website on a regular basis for fresh content.

 

  • Incorporate multimedia elements into your content such as images, videos, interactive graphics, and audio clips or podcasts.

Whatever content you choose to create, be consistent in developing and publishing it. Consistency will signal to your supporters that your organization is actively moving its mission forward and interacting with its community of supporters.

2. Employ SEO best practices.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating website content that will help increase your visibility on search engine results pages. SEO can seem intimidating at first, but it’s actually pretty easy for anyone to improve their content’s rankings. Here are some actionable SEO best practices you can start using today:

  • Incorporate keywords into your content: Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines. Use relevant, non-competitive keywords throughout your content that will help you rank higher on search engine results pages.

 

  • Make your website accessible to everyone. In addition to helping you connect with more supporters, optimizing for accessibility can help improve your SEO rankings. Add alt text to graphics and images and provide captions and transcripts on videos so all users can interact with your content successfully.

 

  • Create useful meta tags. Meta titles are the titles that appear on a search engine’s results page. Similarly, meta descriptions are the text underneath the meta titles that inform a user (and a search engine) what your page is about. Make them specific and informative. Also, try to keep your titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 155 characters. Otherwise, Google might cut them off.

SEO may require you to take a few more steps in the content creation process, but in the end, implementing best practices will help you drive more website traffic as search engines will have the information they need to see your content is valuable to users and rank you higher on results pages.

3. Integrate your website with social media.

Connecting your nonprofit website with your social media profiles can create a stream of two-way traffic between these two tenets of your online presence. For example, if someone discovers your nonprofit through a Facebook post about an event, they might follow a link in that post to your nonprofit’s website.

Here are some ways to boost traffic between your social media and your site:

  • Share your website content on your social media profiles.
  • Include social media icons on each page of your website and encourage your website visitors to share those pages with their family and friends.
  • Add a live social media feed to your homepage so visitors can see you have an active social media presence and can click through to your profiles.

Getting your supporters moving between your social media profiles and your website will create a constant flow of traffic between them. This is also a great strategy for connecting with prospects you might not have had access to before, as you’ll be able to connect more easily with your supporters’ personal networks on social media platforms.

As driving nonprofit website traffic becomes a constant part of your marketing strategy, you can empower your nonprofit to raise awareness, welcome new supporters to your community, and pull in more donations.

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