As the Customer Success Lead at CauseVox, every day I talk to nonprofits that are actively fundraising, and many of those same nonprofits come back to run the same campaign the following year.
It’s a wonderful thing to see how one campaign that’s run annually naturally reflects the growth of the nonprofit, and it’s always exciting to help them raise more year after year.
But after seeing this happen time and time again, we also see that there’s more potential that our users can tap into.
With CauseVox there’s a lot of opportunities to grow your online fundraising presence by using our flexible template to power your fundraising year-round and build an active online community.
Our easy-to-create and easy-to-use fundraising sites can be used throughout the year to help you raise more and engage your community at any time, even in between your big campaigns.
After having conversations with nonprofits all over the country and sharing how they can use CauseVox to help them meet their fundraising needs year-round, I started seeing some similarities in the types of fundraising sites I suggested they create with CauseVox.
Then I got to thinking, every nonprofit could make use of some proven fundraising strategies that help them fundraise year-round.
Here’s my top recommended fundraising initiatives I recommend putting in place to help you fundraise year-round.
1) DIY Fundraising
Do-it-yourself (DIY) fundraising campaigns give all the power to your community by allowing individuals to set up their own page and do anything they’d like to fundraise for your organization.
Does someone want to run a marathon and donate the proceeds to you? DIY fundraising works for that.
Does someone want their birthday to be donated to your organization? DIY fundraising works for that too.
Does someone want to knit for a good cause and have the proceeds be donated? DIY fundraising even works for this.
The flexibility of DIY fundraising allows you to easily point anyone interested in supporting you to fundraise on your behalf in a way that matches their interests specifically, which fuels their commitment and excitement to fundraise all the more.
This kind of fundraising campaign is perfect for building a passionate following and an online community primed for fundraising, drawing from a wealth of your communities’ talents and interests and diversifying your audience.
No high-level promotion or heavy lifting on your end makes it really simple and easy to implement.
Since a DIY fundraising campaign is really lead by your fundraisers and their timeline, this is the kind of campaign that can be left open online for a long period of time, garnering more attention and even attracting new fundraisers along the way.
2) Recurring Donor Campaign
One of the best ways to create long term donors and a steady stream of income is running a recurring donation campaign.
Recurring donations are the gift that literally keeps on giving, as it helps your nonprofit to be able to expect a certain amount of income every month, which can offset operational costs or cover the cost of running a particular program.
The best thing about recurring donations is that even donors that contribute a small amount each month have a huge impact when totaled up at the end of the year.
Even more, recurring donation campaigns make it easy for donors- since it’s automated they’re able to contribute regularly without any effort and often small monthly donations work better with their budget than a larger one-time donation.
What’s interesting about recurring donors is that they are more likely to be retained, as 63% of repeat donors are retained as opposed to 19% of first time donors. So, as donors continue to give, they also become more committed and invested in your organization.
Running a recurring donation campaign is really easy with CauseVox.
You can accept recurring donations through your campaign sites on CauseVox using Stripe as your donation processor. And, while recurring donations can be added to any campaign, to further drive recurring donations you’ll want to create a site that contains language specifically urging your audience to become a recurring donor.
The best part about it is, once your campaign’s up and you’ve done the initial promotion to your audience (we recommend targeting current donors to become recurring donors), you can let the campaign run nearly on autopilot all year and watch the donation total rise from month-to-month.
As a best practice, we recommend connecting with your recurring donors at least once a month to report back and show the impact their donations have made, which in turn encourages them and inspires further engagement with your organization.
3) Board Member Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Site
Your board members are the backbone of your organization, helping guide your every turn and helping you move your vision forward.
However, with the busyness of their schedules, it can, unfortunately, be a little difficult to engage them in the fundraising side of your organization.
Sometimes board members aren’t always ready to make calls to friends to write a check to your organization, but by setting up a board member specific campaign site on CauseVox, they’re able to easily create their own personal fundraising page for your organization.
By using the peer-to-peer fundraising feature for a campaign that’s board-specific, the board is able to raise funds as a community, driving them closer together to feel like a team. Additionally, seeing how much other board members are raising can also inspire them to raise more.
Since personal fundraising pages are customizable, they’re the perfect fit for board members so they can share their own story about why they’re passionate about your organization, and really make the fundraising page their own instead of driving friends and family to a generic page to make a donation.
It’s shown that personal fundraising pages can help individuals feel a sense of ownership over their fundraising page and that by setting their own goal they’re more likely to try to attain it- and this tends to show even more so when your board of directors (who are already committed to your organization) create their own personal fundraising page.
With the page’s easy sharing capabilities, board members can promote their page on social media and through email, and donors contribute right through their page. No phone calls or checks required.
What’s great about having a board of director’s campaign is that once their pages are set up and you provide some basic promotional content, they can take their page and run with it.
4) Event Integrated Fundraising Site
Do you do fundraising events with your community? Fundraising events have been a big part of nonprofit’s fundraising strategies, and they’re not going anywhere.
But, one thing that happens with fundraising events is that you raise a lot of funds in one evening, and then it’s over.
However, just because you have an in-person event doesn’t mean online fundraising can’t be part of helping make it a success. By creating a campaign that’s integrated with your fundraising event, you’re able to open up donations before, during, and after your campaign.
This helps to build excitement about the event, gauge your community’s interest, get them invested in the particular focus of the event, and even get them tracking your progress. All this helps you to fundraise more before the date of the event, and can keep your fundraising event lingering in minds afterward.
Of course, there will still be a huge surge of donations the day of the event, but the benefit of leaving your fundraising site online after the event also helps bring in donations of people that weren’t able to attend or those that were inspired by the experience after the fact.
Here’s an example of how the Or Gallery not only raising funds through their online fundraising site, but they’re also promoting their event to gain more attendees:
Your next fundraising event can be brought to the next level by creating a fundraising site that works to engage your community in fundraising on your behalf before your event.
5) Partner/Chapter Based Campaigns
If you have corporate partners, or other partners, one of the best ways to leverage this partnership is to ask them if they’d like to run a fundraising campaign.
For corporations, a little competition around the office is always fun, and making the competition for a good cause only motivates them even more.
If your partners are interested in participating in a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, creating their own co-branded campaign site can really help the corporation take ownership over the campaign and promote it throughout their office.
By creating a site with your partner’s branding, it shows that you too care about your partner and their brand appearance, which encourages and equips them to raise more for your organization.
For organizations on the Standard Plan, you’re even able to invite your contact to become an administrator for that particular campaign site, so they can take the lead and manage it as well.
With the same concept in mind, if you’re an organization that has many chapters based on location, you can even create campaigns for each of your chapters, branded specifically for them, which gives them the tools they need to take ownership over it and fundraise within their community.
This relatively low effort way of using CauseVox for your partner fundraising campaigns can offer high impact for your organization, and even work to strengthen your chapters and partnerships.
6) Program Specific Campaigns
If you’ve been focused on running a campaign that just serves the overall fund for your organization, one of the best ways to get more value out of CauseVox is to run multiple campaigns that raise funds for specific programs that work toward the various goals of your organization.
For example, Beyond Borders serves Haiti, working to end child slavery, provide education, prevent violence against women and girls, and support sustainable livelihoods.
While they could have just launched a main campaign that works towards all these things, over the past few years they’ve differentiated each of these things into their own campaigns.
By manifesting different programs into different campaigns, you’re able to make your goals and impact clearer to your audience, all the while widening your potential audience because certain parts of your organization may appeal to different people.
This essentially allows your donors and fundraisers to become part of the impact they want to make, engaging them to get involved on a whole new level.
Additionally, this allows you to run campaigns either throughout the year depending on awareness days (or whenever you’d like to rally your audience around that particular program), or even run campaigns simultaneously.
Differentiating your campaigns to fund specific programs is done easily with CauseVox, because you can use our cloning feature to carry over your branding from one campaign to the next and edit your content accordingly.
Overall, diversifying the campaigns you run with CauseVox can work to really engage and widen your audience, and help you bring in sustainable funds for each of your programs throughout the year.
While CauseVox can help power your fundraising campaigns that run annually, you’re able to get more value out of CauseVox by launching various types of campaigns to help you continue to bring in a steady stream of funds throughout the year.
With customization and a little creativity, you’re able to quickly adapt the template to fit your nonprofit’s needs and help you raise more funds in different contexts.
This adaptability of the platform allows you to easily put more emphasis on the likes, needs, and wants of your community, and further cultivate a community of fundraisers online–all the while letting you still focus on planning your next big campaign.
