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Create Your Own Nonprofit Channel On YouTube
Deliver Your Message To The World's Largest Viewing Community!
Does your organization have a compelling story to tell? Do you want to connect with your supporters, volunteers and donors, but don't have the budget for expensive outreach campaigns? YouTube can help! Video is a powerful way to share your organization's message, and with a dedicated "Nonprofit" channel on YouTube, you will be able to get the word out to the world's largest online video community.
Your Nonprofit Channel Includes http://www.fundraisers.com/picsindex/pixelclear.gif
- Premium Branding Capabilities
- Increased Uploading Capacities
- Rotating Videos In The "Promoted Videos" Area
- Google Checkout Donate Button
If you are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in the United States, apply today for the
YouTube Nonprofit Program!
How Online and Offline Fundraising Work Together
Back when we first started seeing the potential of the Net as a fundraising medium, I doubt anyone would have guessed that the biggest impact of online fundraising would be the way it interacts with offline fundraising.
Turns out the media are increasingly intertwined by donors who use them in tandem. We're all scrambling to figure out how to measure this odd behavior and market appropriately, given the way donors behave.
Here's lots of useful information for tackling that challenge: 2011 donorCentrics Internet and Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report (download, PDF), part of the Target Analytics Internet Giving Benchmarking study.
Here are some of the many useful findings:
- The majority of multichannel donors are those who are acquired online and then subsequently start giving direct mail gifts.
- Every year, large proportions of online-acquired donors switch from online giving to offline sources -- primarily to direct mail.
- When online-acquired donors move offline, they tend to do so soon, in their first renewal year.
- Robust direct mail programs drive up the retention and long-term value of new donors acquired online.
One thing this tells us is that we can't see online fundraising as a different thing from offline media, especially direct mail. They are different parts of the same tool. That's the way donors are using them.
I see two major warnings here:
- If you are not taking online fundraising seriously because it seems insignificant compared to your large and well-oiled direct mail program, you are losing donations. And it's going to keep getting worse. You are failing to respond to the ways donors interact with their causes.
- If you are one of those hip online-only fundraisers and you never use direct mail, you are missing out on huge opportunities to deepen your relationships with donors. It's probably costing you deeply.
This is research we all should pay attention to. Unlike over-hyped surveys that gather the stated opinions of self-selected respondents, this is the observed behavior of huge numbers of donors. It's real.
Some Email Best Practices Need Rethinking
Beware of best practices. Sometimes they aren't all that great. There's a good post at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing blog: Email marketing -- debunking the "best practices."
There's a lot of stuff in the post, but three not-so-great practices stand out:
- Long subject lines are bad. (shorter subject lines are better at driving opens; longer subject lines are better at driving clicks because they deliver a more qualified audience)
- There is a best time of day or day of week to send your email.
- You should remove inactive subscribers from your list. (Inactives may not be dead or annoyed; don't remove them for inactivity alone)
Don't believe everything you hear. Sometimes a "best practice" is more like an unsubstantiated rumor.
Make Your Fundraising Local for Better Results
Charitable gifts aren't isolated transactions. Every gift comes out of a social context. Donors think a lot about what others know and believe and say when they decide to give.
The Return Customer recently took a look at this in a commercial context at The Power of Localized Social Proof:
When you use localized social proof, customers start to trust you because someone they trust (at your company, in your industry, from your hometown) already trusts you. This borrowed trust is a great foundation upon which to build a relationship with a potential customer. It opens the doors for opportunities you didn't previously have.
Even implied localized social proof can improve fundraising results. Just mentioning the donor's city name, as in Join the Seattle campaign against hunger, where the city name is pulled from the donor's record, can improve fundraising results. I've seen that happen many times.
If your cause is local, don't get tired of keeping that fact in front of donors. If you aren't local, look for ways to localize it.
Stories Make Fundraising Work -- When Used Correctly
If you're paying any attention at all, you've heard that telling stories is a good way to engage donors and raise funds.
But there's more to it than that. Saying "You must use stories" is kind of like saying "You must use colors."
A white paper from M+R Research Labs, Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing (PDF) takes a close look at the use of storytelling, especially in online fundraising.
The key point is this:
Embracing storytelling means more than simply dropping a personal story into a fundraising appeal. Too many organizations have a limited understanding of what "storytelling" means -- and it leads to what we call "the personal story trap."
The stories that don't do you any good have one or more of these characteristics:
- They are not relevant to the subject at hand.
- They are over-written. They read like the work of a professional writer, not like what a friend would tell you over dinner.
- They are not interesting enough to pull readers in. This can be a problem with the quality of the writing or with the story itself.
- They're about the wrong thing. Most commonly, an appeal for funds has a success story in it, which basically communicates that the problem is already solved.
I've found that picking a good story is a lot like picking a good photo. The right one is:
- Technically good (well written), but not so much that it calls attention to itself.
- It's about the right subject.
- It's about people, not things.
- It communicates exactly the same thing that the rest of the messaging communicates.