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Monday, February 22, 2010
Are you struggling for ways to increase online donations? Do you think your online donation process is clear and simple?
If it isn't, you are almost certainly losing potential gifts and the truth is -- you're probably too close to the process to judge for yourself.
So why would I suggest asking your parents to test your online donation process? Well, hopefully they're willing to do you a favor, but they're also less likely to be computer-savvy and won't mind having you observe them while they make the donation. Okay, it doesn't really have to be your parents -- anyone in your family or circle of friends who you think is a little "technically-challenged."
So here is how I suggest you perform the test:
The next time you're at their house, ask them to sit down at their computer and go to your organization's website to make a $50 donation (more if you think you can get away with it ;-). Tell them you just want to watch them go through the process. Encourage them to verbalize any thoughts or questions while they're doing it, but make it clear that you won't be able to answer their questions until after they are done.
Now the hard part -- stop talking and watch. Take notes about your observations and their questions and comments, but avoid the temptation to guide them or answer their questions. You can't be there to help other donors so you won't get a realistic view of the donor experience if you interfere.
Here are a few things you should try to notice:
Do they have trouble finding your website?
Do they have trouble getting to the correct page to make a donation?
What steps seem to take them a long time?
Do they seem to be confused by the donation options they are offered?
How long does it take them to complete the process?
After they are done, you can ask for additional feedback and ask questions that occurred to you while you were observing them. Obviously repeating this exercise with other family members and friends will give you the broadest insights, but even one or two experiences will probably uncover things that you didn't realize were problems.
Most importantly, improve your website and donation form based on these insights. Change your call to action link if they didn't immediately find the donation page because the link said, "Give your support" and they were looking for the words "Donate Here." Reduce the options and text if they felt there was too much to read. Increase the font if they had to put their reading glasses on. Small changes can make a big difference -- not just for your parents, but for all your potential donors.Labels: fundraising basics, online donations
Monday, November 23, 2009
A few nights ago the phone rang at about 8pm. When I answered, a woman introduced herself and said she was calling in regard to my support of a non-profit called The Steppingstone Foundation that helps inner-city children attend private schools. "Oh great," a late-night solicitation call I thought -- but I was wrong.
She explained that her children were beneficiaries of my donation and were now attending a private school in my area. She told me what a difference my gift was making to her family and that she just wanted to thank me for my kindness. It felt really good, and it truly personalized the impact of this organization's mission. The whole call took perhaps 2 minutes, but virtually guarantees that I will continue to support this organization for years to come.
So the next time your considering a phone campaign, consider making it a thank-a-thon.Labels: donor attrition, fundraising basics, thank-you
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Competition is a powerful motivator and the Jewish Community Heroes campaign is a great example of how to harness people's competitive instincts to achieve multiple benefits. I learned about the campaign when I recently received an email encouraging me to vote for noted holocaust survivor and author Gerda Weissmann Klein to be recognized as a Jewish Hero. She is a very worthy hero in my mind, so I happily clicked the link and voted for her. After voting, I was given an opportunity to get updates on the voting and FIND OUT WHO WINS! by just providing my email address and zip code. When I did, I was invited to Spread The Word by emailing friends. Brilliant, think about how this seemingly simple website is able to achieve so many desirable goals including:
- providing recognition for many worthy individuals - not just the winner, but everyone who is nominated.
- engaging constituents in the process of nomination, voting and campaigning.
- dramatically expanding website visitors and collecting lots of email addresses using viral and social networking techniques that require very little effort (or really commitment) from participants.
Although creating a sophisticated campaign like this may be beyond your non-profit's current capacity, there are still some great lessons about using friendly competition (a common option in team-raising and sponsored event tools) and about using non-fundraising engagement tools (e.g. petitions and surveys) to build email lists that can be cultivated into active supporters. Labels: donor email addresses, fundraising basics, social networking
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
We recently conducted a client focus group to get insights from customers who are using a new product of ours called DonorPages. It helps nonprofits use social networking to assist supporters soliciting donations or sponsors for events (or virtual events). Anyway, the feedback was really interesting and incredibly useful -- and not entirely what we expected.
I suspect that most nonprofits have never thought about organizing a donor or constituent focus group, but I think it is a great idea and not hard at all. Here are a few tips based on our experience:
Virtual focus groups - A simple conference call is easy to setup and not at all costly (even free). Since you don't have visual queues like raising one's hand in a virtual meeting, it usually best to keep them to about 6 participants.
Have a clear theme - What are you trying to learn? For example it could be what aspects of your mission are most important to donors or how to improve your communication with supporters. Focusing on one main topic helps keep the sessions from getting out of control.
Prepare just 3 or 4 questions - Keep them open-ended to encourage more in-depth responses. Listen and ask probing follow-up questions when appropriate. To "break the ice" ask participants to introduce themselves and answer a short question like how long they've been a supporter.
The moderator - Speak as little as possible. Your job is just to ask the questions, facilitate discussion by keeping it on topic and encourage participation by all. Let participants know that you may need to limit their comments so everyone gets to speak.
Record the call - You probably want someone else listening and taking notes but recording the call makes it easy to ensure all the insights get summarized. It is also a great way to share information with others who don't participate.
In this challenging economy, it is that much more important to stay in touch with your constituents. What better way than to ask them what they think? So try a focus group -- and let me know how it goes.Labels: fundraising basics
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Everyone's mother did, and thanking donors is a basic rule of successful fundraising. That's why I'm amazed at how often I don't receive a gift acknowledgement or when I receive a thank-you letter weeks or months after my donation. I'm pretty certain the charity's Executive Director or Director of Development isn't aware that this is happening, so here are a few potential causes (and suggested solutions).
1) DELAYS IN ENTERING GIFTS - Typically, sending a donation acknowledgement letter is the last step in entering the gift into fundraising software and many nonprofits can't keep up with the volume during peak periods like the end of the year. Two ways to address this are:
Encourage online donations - If your website has been setup to accept online donations and automatically provide donors a gift receipt and thank-you email, encouraging year-end giving this way ensures a fully automated and timely acknowledgement. Assuming your online donations automatically download into your fundraising system, it even cuts down data entry so that a more formal thank-you letter can be generated quickly and easily.
Use temps or volunteers - They're the most cost-effective way to handle seasonal peaks in work. This can be particularly easy to implement if your organization is using a web-hosted fundraising system since temporary workers or volunteers can be setup to work from their homes.
2) COMPLEX PROCESSES TO GENERATE THANK-YOU LETTERS - If generating a thank-you letter requires lots of steps or manually editing letters each time, consider ways to simplify and improve the process such as:
Have pre-written thank-you letter templates for your most common types of gifts (new donor, donor who gave more, donor with company matching option, etc.). Each letter should be setup to automatically merge name, address, gift details, etc. directly from your fundraising database (why would you ever want to have to type the same information twice?). The best fundraising systems allow you to just pick which acknowledgement letter you want to send as you enter each gift, and then generate all of them as one print-batch.
Personalization - Including a personalized P.S. or note is a great idea and it's possible to setup your thank-you letter so you can enter your custom message as each letter is produced. Often handwritten messages are even more effective and can be added once the letters have been printed.
3) NON-STANDARD TYPES OF DONATIONS - I frequently make donations of appreciated stock, though I now do this through a donor advised fund I established with the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program (see my earlier post for why I love giving this way). Anyway, I'm sure most nonprofits get a relatively small number of donations this way and they haven't established a good procedure for acknowledging the gifts.
Create the necessary acknowledgements and processes - Although less frequent, gifts of appreciated assets, grants from donor advised funds, matching gifts and other types of gifts involving "soft credits" are typically larger and will continue to become even more popular, so invest a little time in ensuring you can record and recognize them efficiently and accurately. Look for another post with some tips on this soon.
I'm sure these aren't the only challenges that cause delayed acknowledgements, so please feel free to email me a dschoenberg@softerware.com with other problem areas you've identified. I promise to promptly send you a thank you acknowledgement if you do.Labels: fundraising basics, gifts of appreciated assets
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Last week, I listened to Gerda Weissmann Klein speak at the school my kids attend. She was simply amazing. She spoke about her experience as a survivor of the Holocaust, but her real message was that we still live in a world where millions of people suffer from intolerance; but it is also a world of great compassion where everyone of us can -- and should -- do something to make things better.
I was truly inspired and motivated. So I asked myself what I ask my employees when they get excited about something: "So what are you going to do about it?"
1) I'm going to try to share her message -- starting with this post.
2) I just made a grant recommendation via my donor-advised fund to her foundation http://www.kleinfoundation.org/
3) I also thought there were two important lessons I took from this experience that I think are pretty relevant and useful to virtually any non-profit.
The power of speaking - Would I have been as motivated to make a donation or act if I had received a letter from Gerda? I doubt it. Sure most people aren't blessed with Gerda Klein's ability to tell a story, but all you really need is a passion for your cause. Seek out face-to-face opportunities with groups large and small to share your vision and why your mission is important to you. If you provide a clear and specific call to action, I believe many in your audience will be motivated to get involved.
Multiplying your impact - One of the Klein Foundations projects provides teachers with an education kit of materials to assist them in teaching tolerance. It's been distributed to over 122,000 teachers, and as a result it has been used to teach over 12,000,000 students around the world! Non-profits can use this same concept of "Multiplicative Effect" by harnessing the power of your constituents' social networks. Simple viral email campaigns can be used to generate awareness of your mission, advocate social action and of course for fundraising. Today's headlines may be disheartening with tales of greed and economic woe, but I for one agree with Gerda Weissman Klein. The world is filled with way too many energetic and caring people to not be optimistic about our ability to solve problems and give our children a better world to grow up in. You don't have to be rich, you don't have to be famous, you just have to care. And share your story. Labels: fundraising basics, social networking
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Over $600 million dollars, with a record breaking $150 Million raised in September -- in the midst of a steeply declining stock market and widespread economic worries. What is the Obama campaign doing right and what can your non-profit learn from this success?
Small donations can really add-up - Consider this quote from a recent LA Times Blog post:
"The Wall Street crisis appears to have had little effect on Obama's small-time donors. He expanded his fundraising base by 632,000 individuals in September to a record total of 3.1 million -- most of whom gave in small amounts. Roughly half of the $605 million Obama has raised has come from small donors, and nearly all of them give over the Internet."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/barack-obama-to.html
Reduced response levels from direct mail and the allure of major gifts can cause nonprofits to focus less effort on small donors, but ignoring smaller donations is a mistake. The Internet can provide a remarkably efficient and effective tool for collecting large sums in small amounts.
But what is bringing all these donors to the Obama website to give?
Great content - Check out Obama's website. There is lots of real information for visitors to learn about the candidate's positions on important issues, but even more importantly many calls to action to get involved, not just by making a donation, but volunteering, sign-up for email, etc. Giving people a reason to visit your website and multiple options for becoming involved is certainly lesson #1.
Effective email list building - Its pretty hard to go anywhere on the Obama website without providing your email address and the campaign has collected millions of them and used them very effectively to solicit financial and organizational support.
Leveraging supporters for personalized donation requests - The Obama campaign has not only mastered the use of social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, etc., but they've provided supporters with simple tools to solicit friends and family to get involved and make an online donation or sign up for a mailing list. These personalized donation requests have been another critical piece to the growth of Obama's email list and online fundraising success.
Creative use of technology - If you think personalization only applies to soliciting donations, read this wonderful post about someones experience after making an online donation to Obama.
http://authenticorganizations.com/harquail/2008/09/23/obamas-website-made-me-cry/
Compelling message - Certainly a critical aspect of the Obama campaigns successful use of technology wouldn't be possible without his strong and motivational message. Fundraising success always requires communication that inspires people to action and Barak Obama has proven himself a true master of this. Although you and I may not have Obama's gift for communication, we can still apply this lesson (Inspiration = Motivation) when crafting email donor solicitations and website messaging.
Doing it well takes time and energy - The Obama campaigns online fundraising success didn't just happen, they have clearly spent lots of time and money developing and refining their website, emails, and messaging. Undoubtedly each of their successful efforts was proceeded by numerous less successful ones with their ultimate success the result of continuous testing and refinement.Labels: donor email addresses, fundraising basics, online donations
Monday, June 16, 2008
Calculating the life time value (LTV) of a typical donor is relatively simple and very useful. You just need to know your average annual donation amount per donor and your donor attrition rate (the percentage of donors that stop giving each year). To compute LTV just plug those numbers into the following formula:
Avg Annual donation / (attrition rate) = Life time expected donations
($100/yr)/(.10) = $1000
Although it might be more accurate to discount the value of future contributions to present value, it requires a slightly more complex computation and the effect is mostly offset by the likely increase in average donation amounts over time.
Knowing the LTV not only allows you to make better decisions about how much is reasonable to spend on acquiring new donors, but also gives you an important metric to track and improve on. Although it is certainly great to improve the average annual donation figure, your most dramatic results can come from improving (reducing) your donor attrition rate. For instance in the example above, reducing your attrition rate to 5% from 10% increases the LTV to $2000.
Of course improving your attrition rate by that much isn't easy, but it can be done. I believe the easiest way to achieve a dramatic reduction in donor attrition is by eliminating the inevitable donor loss that comes from the normal cycle of annual appeals and gifts and instead stressing sustaining support through a monthly giving program. I'll discuss that more in my next post.Labels: donor retention, fundraising basics, Fundraising Efficiency Measures, LTV
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