Marketing
Using Digital Marketing to Boost your Fundraising Efforts
5 min read
Marketing
Digital marketing is used for all sorts. It’s used to help sell lots of products that, let’s face it – the world really doesn’t need.
So, let’s look at a way that digital marketing can most definitely be used as a force for good.
One of the biggest benefits of digital is the awareness-enhancing platform it gives to charities and causes. A recent report commissioned by the House of Lords Select Committee on Charities spoke about how important digital technology is for fundraising, especially mobile tech.
So, let’s have a look at how you can use digital marketing for your own fundraising efforts:
When you have a cause close to your heart, there are lots of different sites you can use to set up your fundraising project for online donations. This can be the hub that you send people towards from other platforms. Your social media ads and videos should all point towards a central hub where donations can be made. Usually, you’ll be able to embed donation buttons.
You’ve probably donated on some of these sites before:
You can also register your charity on a site like EveryClick which allows backers and supporters to link up with your charity and donate as they make purchases online through other retailers.
Crowdfunding is really popular too and lets you rely on lots of small donations instead of larger donations – lots of people can make a big impact basically. This should be used in conjunction with a marketing plan to make sure your cause is noticed online.
Try Amazon Smile – Amazon donates 0.5% of the product purchases to your charity
Build a detailed communications plan before you launch your campaign, with key milestones and opportunities to consistently promote your campaign. This means looking at the channels you’re going to use to promote your cause, your social advertising budget, the type of content you want to create and promote and your SEO strategy too.
Like with any digital or mobile campaign, you have to deliver your marketing strategy with your target audiences in mind. Try and capture some data and do some research on the typical donor or the types of audiences that usually engage with fundraising in your area.
Of course, if it’s an emotive subject, this can potentially be anyone, so delivering persuasive, poignant marketing is key. And deciding where to focus your attention is important too – using Facebook and Twitter advertising to provide links and more detail can give people a further insight into an issue. Instagram can be great for visually-driven marketing where you can grab attention with a poignant photo and tell people’s stories and show the people behind your cause.
Telling people what their donation will buy is a really effective way to encourage donations. When people know exactly how they will make an impact, it makes it a more tangible concept.
It’s crucial that you use an appropriate tone for your fundraising campaign. It goes without saying that being sensitive to the issue at hand is important and steering clear of campaigns that have the potential to cause offence or be patronising is recommended.
Using humour, emotion and a tone that’s thought-provoking are all good ways for your campaign to stick in people’s minds.
As long as your marketing campaign is authentic and honest, you’ll find that audiences will be able to relate to your cause or find it easy to empathise with it.
You can experiment with tones of voice in your content marketing, so have a look at which types of videos and blog posts do particularly well and resonate with people.
The Dress: are social memes and shock tactics the future of charity marketing? Read this Guardian Article
Fundraising requires much more emphasis on narrative than marketing for other products and services. Building a community around an issue means that you need to deliver updates for audiences and allow them to closely follow a cause’s journey.
Facebook is great for creating the potential for a fledgeling community and you can start a group page that allows you to post updates and encourage your audience to share it with their followers too. SEO optimised video and blog content can be posted here and give you an opportunity to show where funds are being used and how fundraising is influencing people’s lives.
It’s really important that your digital fundraising campaign is mobile responsive and optimised for mobile usage. So many people will see your campaign on their smartphone or tablet, so ensuring that your website and fundraising pages are fit for purpose is essential.
This means that you need to work on your page’s user design for mobile and make it mobile-friendly. You can make your pages more visually-driven with concise copy.
Make sure that the ‘donor journey’ is easy to navigate and simple to use – if audiences are faced with several long-form pages for them to fill out when they want to make a donation then they might leave a page and increase your exit rates.
Make sure that your donation pages are linked to PayPal and make it as easy as possible for people to donate.
When charities can access bigger audiences through digital, it immediately helps them to engage with potential donors for relatively low cost and divert more funds towards tangible change.
More awareness + more funds for charities = a better society!
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