You’ve worked hard to build up relationships with corporate sponsors, a major donor, or compiled a matching grant application, and now you have successfully secured a matching grant for your campaign.
Hooray! Now you can sit back and watch the funds pour in. But wait! There’s a few more things you can do to ensure your matching grant gets the attention of your donors.
With a match in place, 84% of donors say they’re more likely to give, and a staggering 1 in 3 say they would give a larger gift if matching is applied to their donation.
With this potential to raise more money from donors and from the match, how you communicate the match to your donors on your campaign site can really make an impact on your campaign.
Here are 4 ways you can effectively communicate your matching grant to your audience and encourage the most donations from your supporters.
1. Use An Automated Matching Feature
The best way to get your donors up to speed on your match is to feature it front and center on your campaign.
Too many times, I’ll be reviewing campaigns and I’ll see one line about a matching grant buried in their appeal text — text that could easily be skimmed over and organizations miss out on the great opportunity that a match provides them.
That is why using an automated matching feature is the most clear and effective way to promote your gift matching campaign. CauseVox’s automated matching feature works by showcasing the match directly on the donation form, and displaying the match gift on the donor listing and progress bars. This helps donors see in real time the impact of their donation.
Donors can see that their gift was matched 1:1 as soon as they donate.
What is also really beneficial about CauseVox’s automated matching feature is that it is just that: automated. No more manually adjusting your progress, donors can see instantly how close you are to your goal, which encourages greater generosity.
Donors are able to see the amount their gift is matched up to, and knowing their donation can have double the impact encourages more generous giving.
2. Communicate Impact To Promote Matching Grants
Your matching grant’s end goal isn’t just to double the funds raised, it’s to make twice the impact — and your donors should know what twice the impact adds up to.
Using your donation tiers, impact metric, and any other messaging you want to place on the page, try to communicate the impact that each dollar raised helps to accomplish.
This will help keep your donors focused less on the money they give and more on the great impact that they’ll create with their donation.
For The Impact Metric: The impact metric allows you to tie dollars to impact, and this is particularly helpful if you’re raising funds for one item or program.
For example, on the campaign Together For Gambia, anytime someone donates $8, another care package is added to their impact metric counter.
When a match is in place, half the dollar amount needed to make one unit of impact, and the impact metric will automatically show double the impact for each donation. So instead of $8, together for Gambia would write $4 in the amount box so it counts double the care packages.
For Your Donation Tiers: Similarly, for your Donation Tiers, reflect the impact created with different levels of giving, with the match included so that donors know what impact they’re creating with each donation. It’s always beneficial to include “With your donation matched, you’ll provide X”
Summit Dog’s Donation Tiers
For Anywhere Else: Try creating infographics or inputting any other text on the page that helps break down the impact associated with each donation.
3. Send Out An Email Pushing The Matching Gift
It’s all well and good to communicate your match on your site, but what drives your donors to the site in the first place is equally, if not more important.
Whether your campaign has a match for the entirety of its duration or has a smaller match for a few days, whenever the match goes live it’s important to do an email blast to let your audience know the match is in place and to drive up the urgency to contribute.
During the campaign, consider sharing specific milestones reached and personal stories that highlight the difference their gifts are making. Each email should build excitement and urgency, but also express gratitude for the ongoing support. By keeping your audience informed and engaged, you can maintain momentum and inspire continued generosity until the match goal is achieved.
You can also highlight your match in your subject line and in the header of your email, like Schoolyard Farms did when they introduced a $500 matching gift for donations within a short timeframe:
By emphasizing to their donors that if they donate today, they’ll receive twice the funds, they’re really engaging their audience to join in and make double the impact, before the match ends. Schoolyard Farms saw a huge spike in donations that day, and it was no doubt due to their messaging around their match and their efforts to drive urgency around it.
If you have a match on your campaign and want to drive donations, here’s a few email heading ideas you can consider:
- You Can Make Double The Impact For [Insert Cause]
- Only X Days Left To Double Your Impact
- Today, Every Dollar Will Be Doubled
- Donate Once, Make Twice The Impact
4) Promote The Matching Gift On Social Media
Throughout your campaign, don’t forget to highlight the match when you promote your campaign on social media so you can keep your audience informed that your match is in place, and give them updates on your progress towards receiving that match.
Here’s an example of how International Justice Mission (IJM) promoted their match during their GivingTuesday campaign.
There’s three ways this IJM post worked to inform and engage their audience in their matching campaign:
- They referenced their match in their title
- They included an image with a clear indication of how much will be matched, and who will be impacted.
- They added text to the image that emphasized the donor’s need to give today (on GivingTuesday).
In your posts on social media, do your best to include images that help communicate impact, as they get more reach, engagement, and shares, and couple it with text emphasizing the match.
Continue to update your donors by posting regularly during the matching time. You can also use other forms of posts to drive engagement like videos and reels. Graphics and Instagram/Facebook stories also are a good way to continue to remind your audience of our goal, and how close you are to achieving it.
Get Started With Automated Matching
Matching opportunities motivate individual donors to contribute and amplify their impact. When donors know that their gift is going to go twice–or three times as far–they are more likely to give, and give more.
Just 1’s 20 for 40 campaign raised $20,000, which was doubled to $40,000!
Automated matching takes all of the admin and grunt work out of the matching campaign. It helps you and your team optimize fundraising efforts, as well as enhance donor engagement. Bottom line: it helps you raise more money for the causes you care deeply about.
Ready to optimize your fundraising efforts and enhance donor engagement? Interested in using an automated matching feature on your next fundraising campaign? Sign up for a CauseVox demo today and get started for free.
And to get more tips and tricks on all things related to nonprofit fundraising, join the 65,000 nonprofit professionals who have signed up to get our Weekly Educational Newsletter in their inbox every week.
