Winter Wonderland Clairity Click-it: Nonprofit Links, Free Resources
This week’s Click-it is dedicated to your year-end success!
December is the biggest fundraising opportunity of the year. What you do between now and December 31st will impact what you’re able to accomplish through the rest of the year.
- Close to a full third of giving happens in just this one month.
- 12% of all giving happens on December 31st (don’t go on vacation that day)!
- 30% of all online donations are made in December.
- 10% of all online giving happens in the last three days of the year
- Average gift size is larger in December than any other month.
It’s now or never.
Please. Seize your opportunity!
But do it right.
It’s no longer just about direct mail or an email or two.
You’ve got to think about your website, thank you pages, social media and peer-to-peer fundraising – just to name a few. Old school is good, and there are some tips in the articles that follow to help you. But they’re no longer enough.
You must use online techniques to leverage offline techniques.
Think of social media and your website home page as advertising for your appeal. So that when folks finally receive your request for a gift, they do so with eyes and ears wide-open. Because they’ve been primed.
Ready? Let’s get started!
Year-End Giving
Click-It: How to Write a Lapsed Donor Letter. Clearly a key year-end strategy is to assure you don’t allow your current donors to lapse. This is timely advice from Alan Sharpe on the Fundraiser Help site to help you win back your valuable (and soon-to-be) lapsed donors. Don’t let these folks slip away.
Click-it: 7 Steps to Get Ready for Year-End Online Giving by Michael Stein of Tech Soup offers some great strategies you still have time to put in place before December 31st. One is to think multi-channel. Another is to go mobile.
Click-It: 7 More Weeks – Are You Ready for Year-End Fundraising? Just in case you missed it, here is my own post this week on how to make sure all your little duckies are in a row before the hoards descend upon you (fingers crossed!) at the end of the year. You still have time. One piece of advice: Drop the little stuff; Go for the game-changers!
Fundraising Copy
Click-it: Nonprofits: Why You Should Stop Trying and Start Doing. This is a great post from Mary Cahalane on the Hands-On Fundraising blog. She suggests nonprofits too often take a passive approach, saying things like “We’re trying to cure…” or “striving to heal…” or “helping to end….” Take a look at your copy, and see if you can strengthen it by saying what you’re actual doing.
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
Click-It: 6 Steps to Starting A Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaign. This guest post from Candace Cody of Cause Vox on Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog takes you step by step through creating a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign using a real life example. In a nutshell: Start with the goal; craft your story; create a campaign; publicize; thank participants, and follow-up/stay in contact.
Diversify
Click-it: Diversify Your Fundraising . This is a great infographic to remind you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Especially not the baskets with the least eggs in them! Thanks to the folks at Classy Blog for this one.
Website Home Page
Click-it: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Nonprofit Website for Year-End Fundraising. This includes four solid tips. My favorite is to have your year-end social media campaign visible on your home page. Choose an original and intuitive hashtag, and publish content consistently. Thanks to Hillary Skeffington on the Elevation blog.
Click-it: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Nonprofit Website for Year-End Giving. This comes from Rebecca Gregory Segovia on the Pursuant Intelligent Fundraiser blog. You make a first impression here, so your home page can have a huge influence on whether folks will go on to give to you. There’s also a free, downloadable resource here: “10 Things You Should Know for a Strong Year-End Campaign.”
Donation Landing Forms
Click-it: 7 Most Costly Sins of Donation Forms. This infographic from npENGAGE nicely lays out some of the reasons folks don’t complete their donations to you. They mean to, but you make it too hard for them. This is really a shame. Fix it now!
Click-It: 15 Lessons Learned from Donating Online to 32 Nonprofits. The folks at np Tech for Good gave to 32 nonprofits. For some, it was a great experience; others, not so much. Take a look at the things you may be doing that you should fix before the end of the year. Plus get tips from the folks who are rocking it out of the park!
Planning to Say Thanks
Click-It: Top Tips for Successful Supporter Care Events. It’s not too soon to begin planning your gratitude strategy if you want to get a second gift. Here the JustGiving blog offers up some suggestions for thank you events to engage and begin to build relationships with your supporters.
FREE RESOURCES
Marketing
- Click-it: Pro Tips on How to Raise More Money with “Win-Win” Sponsorships. Download this free webinar by cause marketing pro Joe Waters on the Wild Apricot site.
Fundraising
- Click-It: Top 10 Tips for Giving Tuesday Campaigns is a free webinar by Rob Vu from Cause Vox.
- Click-It: Giving Tuesday Weekly is a curated newsletter with tips to help you plan. You can subscribe for free using this link.
- Click-It: Guide to Donor Retention. The good folks at Bloomerang offer this excellent guide, complete with a video with donor retention guru Dr. Adrian Sargeant and a dandy infographic. I encourage you to study this. Because if you’re focusing on acquisition at the expense of retention, you’re in a losing battle. (BTW: If you’re in the market, Bloomerang has a great donor database that’s driven by retention. You can get a video demo here.)
Saying Thank You to Inspire Future Gifts
- How to keep and upgrade more donors through the active practice of gratitude + tons of creative ways to say thank you.
Will you be ready when your year-end gifts start flooding in?
- Ready to turn your thank you around in 48 hours?
- Ready to pick up the phone and call folks who’ll give much more if you give them special attention?
- Ready to surprise your donors with something special they didn’t expect?
- Ready to engage your supporters and get to know them better?
- Ready to set things in motion so your next gift is a slam dunk?
My Donor Retention and Gratitude Playbook covers all this and more!. It’s a 6-Volume set of Companion Guides to help you put in place a full-blown acknowledgement program and transition your culture to an organization-wide “Attitude of Gratitude.” Get ’em all at a nice discount – almost a third less than buying them separately — or just get the ones you need. You’ll find them all well worth your while. If not, I’ll make a donation to your nonprofit – with deep gratitude for all you do to make our world a better place.
Photo: Flickr, Isaac Torronterra
