How to Raise Money Online Effectively for Your Non-Profit
By Laura Packard
Digital Consultantvia HuffPost Impact
How can your non-profit use online fundraising to raise more money to support your operations and programs? Here's some of our thoughts and lessons learned, to help you make the most of what you're doing.
The first and most important principle for online fundraising: You must ask! Most people are not going to wake up this morning and think to themselves, today they should give to your organization. You need to go out and ask them to give. But this doesn't mean you should overdo it -- it's better to send a strong fundraiser once in awhile rather than bug your most dedicated supporters every day until they tune out. But don't go years without asking, either.
Test test test. It's important to incorporate testing into your online fundraising campaigns to learn what works best for your organization, and get smarter over time. You can try everything from different $ asks, to different subject lines, different senders, different creative, to different content altogether! Try simple (graphicless) versus your normal styled emails, try different times of day, lengthy versus short, tweaks to your landing pages, anything is fair game to test. These days it's also worth trying a all-graphics email, because that's been shown to do really well. Also make sure your emails work well on mobile devices, or you are leaving money on the table. A corollary to testing - learn how to do tracking with your online fundraising tool of choice. You can use refcodes in ActBlue, tracking codes in Salsa or NGP or BSD or NationBuilder, or even create different donate pages if you can't use URL modifications for tracking in your system. But you need to know where the money is coming in from to be able to tell what works and what doesn't.
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