1. Community
Before you start fundraising, you have to be able to build a community of supporters. It’s just like making friends, you have to cultivate a relationship with people before you make any type of ask. One of the ways to understand them better is to use Supporter Personas and Empathy Maps, which are a profiling tools that helps you get into the mind of your community.
So why is this important?
It’s important because you need to figure out how to best talk to your community — not only with the content that you create, but the channels that you use to communicate them. If your community isn’t online, then why would you want to spend so much time cultivating that channel?
2. Internal Capacity
Internal capacity is your staff and board’s ability to manage online fundraising. This involves having clear goals, roles, and responsibilities — some of the fundamentals of management. Typically with online fundraising, you have to think about a couple of different roles — communications, tech, and accounting. If any of these roles are not filled, then you won’t be successful.
I like to look at non-profits that don’t succeed in using our platform to see what went wrong. The internal capacity issue was involved in two of them. During a non-profit’s big campaign, critical staff went on vacation and handed their online fundraising off to a volunteer. They didn’t succeed. In another instance, the non-profit didn’t succeed because their staff and support base was fatigued. You have to keep a pulse on your organization to see if there is capacity to do online fundraising.
3. Narrative/Stories
Stories are what draws people into your non-profit. They elicit emotion so other people will share your message and support you. I recently interviewed Cara Jones, an Emmy-award winning writer, reporter, and producer about this topic.
She says to tell the most effective stories, you have to do three things:
1) Aim for the heart.
2) Find a compelling character to wrap the story around.
3) Remember structure and length.
4. Organization Culture
In order to do online fundraising successfully, you have to break down some traditional roles. By definition, you’re combining components of IT with components of the development team. The cross-functional group can blend effortlessly sometimes, but other times it causes a lot of grief.
Sometimes I even see organizations not even get off the ground with online fundraising because the staff can’t agree who’s in charge of what. There are territory battles. This can be common in larger organizations, so you’ll have to be mindful.
When you add in social media, then you’re blurring things even more with the combination of IT, communications, and development.
You have to set a vision of where you want to take your organization, how online fundraising supporters it, and get everyone on staff on board.
5. Process
In order to do online fundraising effectively, you’ll also have to develop processes that support it. Specifically, you should focus on the process that happens after a donation comes in to recognition. If you don’t have any thing written down, I recommend doing two things — writing a narrative and drawing out a flow chart.
6. Tech Infrastructure
There was a recent study that says that donors tend to give more directly on a non-profit’s website — sometimes up to 40% more compared to other channels. This means that you must have a well designed website with updated and relevant content. If you can’t keep your website up-to-date, then you can’t do online fundraising at all.
You’ll have to get a donate button too. PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout are all good solutions to start with. Eventually, you’ll want to get your own merchant account.
Email is the best channel to drive online donations. The reason is that everyone, young or old, has an email account that they access at least once a day. I recommend using a email newsletter provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact to manage your email lists. You should also use their visual email tools as studies have shown that they lead to greater click through and donations.
You also have to make sure you have a donor database, whether it’s something like Salesforce or GiftWorks, to capture donor information. You won’t be able to manage and thank donors unless you use a database to keep track.
7. Social Media Profiles
Lastly, before you start online fundraising, make sure you cover some of the basic channels. You should create a Facebook Page for your non-profit. Having a Twitter account is good, but optional.
