Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Fundraising Tuesday: Every Day is Giving Tuesday

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Christmas cookiesYou’ve heard the saying, “It’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s–it’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas”?

Similarly, it’s not what you do for your donors between Halloween and Giving Tuesday that determines how much love they feel toward your nonprofit organization. It’s what you do all year.

Communications are the key to a good marriage. Your nonprofit’s communications are the key to a good relationship between your donors and you.

By next November, make your donors love you. Here are the four steps to win their hearts.

This winter, work on your email.

When donors or prospects give you their email address, it’s like they met you on a blind date and decided to give you their phone number. What they’re saying is, “I want to hear from you.” It’s a huge gesture of trust.

Be worthy of their trust.

  • Find out the kind of content they want to see, and send it to them as often (and no more often) than they want to see it.
  • Write great subject lines that signal, “I wrote this especially for you and I know you’ll want to read it.”
  • Personalize every email. “Dear friend” is not acceptable in 2019. It tells your donors they’re not worth your time.
  • Even better: make it personal! You can’t do that for every single email message you send, but every time you do talk to a person in a way that says “I know you,” they will remember it.
  • Keep your list up to date. There are good email tools out there: MailChimp and Constant Contact are two that many nonprofits use. There are also donor databases with email built right in. Buy one and learn how to use it. You–and your donors–will be glad you did.

This spring, take a good look at your website.

living room fireplaceYour website is your online living room. If you’re going to invite donors there, you want them to stay a while.

  • Make the lighting comfortable. Is the font size large enough for middle-aged eyes? Does it read as well on Chrome or Firefox as on Internet Explorer or Safari? Can donors read it on their mobile devices? Can they read it with their screen readers (if they have limited eyesight)?
  • Make the room easy to get around. Place navigation bars on the homepage and on every page. Clearly label your pages and tabs, and don’t get too cute: “About Us” or “Who We Are” are better than “The 411.”
  • Put out the treats.  Your donors need to find what they’re looking for quickly or they’ll leave your site. Be sure everything is within three clicks from the home page: for instance, 1) home page, 2) contact us, 3) email. If you’re inviting people to sign up for an event, consider using a landing page with its own URL.

This summer, spice up your blogging life.

Did you ever meet someone and think to yourself, “I love talking with him. I could spend all night just listening to him?”

Writing a blog gives your donors a chance to say that about you.

Blogging is better for those long explorations than email. It’s more of a conversation than the rest of your website. Blogging is for lovers.

This fall, finally get social. Listen and interact.

What would the love of your life think if when you were together, you only talked and never listened? Or if you only listened when he or she was talking about you?

Not very romantic, right?

But too many nonprofits think the reason to use social media is to have one more place to rattle on about themselves.

Social media are really more like social gatherings: parties, conferences, Chamber of Commerce meetings, public forums. You go those events to meet people and become an important part of the community.

You go on social media to do the same. Not to post. To meet people.

Over time, if you pay attention to them, people come to know, like, and trust your organization. They actually seek you out for information and advice and opportunities to volunteer. They start thinking of you as “their” organization. They fall in love.

 

How do you use social media to make donors love you?

I’ve been studying this subject for years, and I’m happy to share it with you.

social mediaThe No-Nonsense Nonprofit Guide to Social Media: How You Can Start Small, Win Loyal Friends, and Raise Funds Online and Off is your step-by-step guide to courting your donors.

Download it now, and by next fall, you can be happily engaged.

By next winter, you can be busy writing thank-you notes.

Online marketing for your nonprofit can be simple as 1, 2, 3

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A guest post by Kelsy Ketchum

All ages are online!

In today’s digital age, online communication is essential. Donors need to know exactly what your nonprofit is about and what they can do to help.

Most of them are looking to the web for that info.

Your digital communication strategy needs to encourage people to support your cause. You likely already have a traditional marketing plan, and the good news is that much of it can be adapted to the internet.

You don’t have to be a technological wizard for online communication to work wonders. Here are the three steps you can take to create an effective digital marketing plan.

Email campaigns

 Whether you want to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter, recruit volunteers and get them to stay, or start a new fundraising campaign, email is a cheap and relatively simple way to get the word out.

But you don’t want to just send out a quick message with a lot of text and be done. Your emails should be interesting and interactive. Think through their design to make sure it matches your organization’s brand, and provide pictures or graphics to support your message.

Reminder:

  • Avoid spamming inboxes with a lot of messages. Limit your communication to a few times a month and clarify why you’re sending each email.
  • Customize the email to your audience.
  • Is there a call to action you want people to follow? Emphasize it! People are more likely to participate if they know exactly what they need to do.

You’ll also want to track how your email campaigns are doing and manage your analytics, which can help you see where you’re succeeding and what your organization can do better.

Savvy marketing pros who need advanced reporting capabilities may want to consider a business intelligence solution for their nonprofit to combine multiple data sources together.

Social media

To succeed at digital communication, your nonprofit will need to go beyond email and dive into the realm of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Snapchat are all useful tools to get your message across and bring new donors or volunteers into the fold.

Social media lets you share info more frequently than email, so you can provide daily updates on certain projects. It also has a wider reach, since you can use hashtags or post in specific groups to reach new audiences who may not follow your organization directly.

Social media posts can be slightly less formal than email or official correspondence, so have fun! Encourage employees to share your nonprofit’s posts on their own social media feeds – word of mouth is still a great way to spread your ideas, and social media makes the process easier.

Website and donation pages

Crafting a compelling website with powerful donation pages can bring in even more donors than other digital communication strategies.

Your priority should always be clarity of information. Label the sections of your website and pages clearly and double-check that your contact info and other essentials are easy to find without digging through multiple web pages.

Highlight important links and create a section for recurring donations to encourage people to donate more often. The easier it is for people to donate, the better your fundraising will be.

Don’t forget to use all the online tools at your disposal. Share your website and donation pages with friends and followers on social media and put a link to the website in every email so people can access it effortlessly.

The takeaway

It doesn’t take an IT pro to improve your digital communication and get the word out about your nonprofit. You can get started today, with these three steps.

No matter the goal, whether it’s increasing your donors or finding volunteers for your next event, better online communication can get you there with minimal cost or time, which is particularly helpful for smaller organizations with fewer resources.

 

About the Author: Kelsy Ketchum is an editor for Better Buys, helping organizations to find and select the right software solutions.

 

 

Nonprofits, Are You Telling Your Donors “I Don’t Know You”?

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Do you know me?You probably donate to some nonprofit organizations. You may even attend their events.

What if after you attended an event, the nonprofit called you and showed they had no idea who you were?

This Really Happened to Me

I attended a thought-provoking webinar about creating a monthly giving program at your nonprofit. The Nonprofit Know It All, Danielle Johnson-Vermenton, gave the webinar, and you can find her follow-up talk on video. I recommend it!

The company that sponsored Danielle’s webinar shall remain nameless. Here’s what they did: they sent me an email afterwards that assumed I was a nonprofit organization.

Now, you know me, right? I’ve worked for nonprofit organizations. I consult to nonprofit organizations. My mission is to help nonprofit organizations win loyal donors.

But Communicate! Consulting is a business. You know that. You read this blog, and perhaps you follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

This company didn’t do its research. And it showed.

Lesson #1 for nonprofits:

Before you send email to a prospect, know as much about them as you can. Otherwise, you may be offending the people you're trying to attract. Share on X

What Happened Next (it gets worse!)

I politely wrote the company back and thanked them for providing the valuable webinar. Even though I’m not a nonprofit, I explained, I work with multiple clients who might be interested in your product. Let me take a look at it on my own and compare it with some others in the field. Please touch base with me in a couple of weeks.

Fine.

Two weeks later, the company rep reaches out to me by forwarding the original message.

I was miffed. Had she forgotten we had ever been in touch before? Or did she think that somehow, I was the one who owed her a follow-up message? Either way, I did not feel like a valued customer.

Lesson #2 for nonprofits:

Know the history of your relationship with the people on your email list. Refresh your memory before you write. (A good database or CRM helps!) Share on X

How Nonprofits Should–and Should Not–Automate Their Messages

When a potential supporter shows they’re interested in your nonprofit, you want to respond right away. But because you work at a nonprofit, you have many other things to do. It’s hard to find the time to respond before the interest fades.

Automation could be the answer–if you use it wisely.

Most email platforms, like MailChimp or Constant Contact, will let you set up auto-responders. When a person out there signs up for your email list, they get an immediate reply. When they sign up for an event, they get information about the event, and so on.

It saves you time, and it gives the potential supporter what they’re looking for.

What could go wrong? Well, exactly what happened to me!

The first message I received was a canned message. The automation filled in my name and email address and sent out the same content it would send to a nonprofit.

The second message could also have been automated, if the company’s system was set up to repeat the same email to anyone who didn’t respond to the first.

And in either case, what saved the company time might have just lost them a customer–or several customers, if I had decided to recommend them to all my clients!

Lesson #3 for nonprofits:

Use automation to make your messages more personal, not less. Set up your system for the different audiences you hope to reach. Share on X

 

 

 

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