Many organizations, particularly non-profit ones, heavily depend on gifts and donations from their donors. There are many philanthropists who donate out of the goodness of their hearts to causes they can relate to. These organizations utilize those gifts by helping people in need and bearing their operational costs. Hence, a big portion of these organizations are dedicated to ensuring that donors are informed about their work, causes, and fundraising activities.
Why? Because this engagement plays a pivotal role in pursuing donors and boosting the fundraising process. There are 45 percent of donors worldwide who are enrolled in a monthly giving program. Also, the online donation rate grew by 12.1 percent from 2020 to 2021. This is why engaging donors online is quite important.
However, it is not an easy task to engage donors online. First, organizations must send personalized content to donors. Sending generic messages to donors can do more bad than good. Second, content should be relevant to donors so they are moved. Sending the same content to three different groups of donors may not work as intended. Finally, when engagement messages are sent manually to donors, there is no way to track how donors are interacting with those messages.
Also, many organizations are so busy that they might not have enough resources to carry out the whole online engagement process manually. Imagine, you have a list of 3,000 donors and you have to send a super personalized email message to each of them every week! Nightmare, isn’t it?
Therefore, it is ideal to adopt a digital, automated donor engagement process to boost your donor engagement process. Then again, setting up an automated donor engagement process is a lengthy process. It requires a strategy, digital tools, and a way to streamline these digital tools.
That’s our topic of discussion for today. In this blog, we are going to demonstrate our five-step process for building a digital donor engagement solution.
Step #1 Build a Donor Database
The whole process starts with building an accurate, complete donor registry/database. This step is important because later, when you are going to send personalized content to them, the solution will pull data from the registry. The registry can be built from scratch or you can import existing donor data.
Step #2 Create a Series of Messages
Say, you want to send an email newsletter to your donors once a week. You want to set up a series of message templates so you don’t have to send the newsletter manually every week. You have the option to select areas that you want to personalize for each donor. For instance, you want to put your donors’ names in the newsletter while addressing them, instead of writing a generic “Hi” or “Hello.” So, you will mark that area for personalization.
Step #3 Send Automated Messages
Now, once the series of message templates is built, you can also set up the trigger time for each of the messages. As said above, you can schedule each of the messages to be sent once a week. You can also include an option for donors to opt out of your newsletter.
Step #4 Receive Donor Responses
The goal of the engagement message campaign is to pursue donors who may be willing to donate. So, in each of the email newsletters, you will have a call-to-action button named “Donate Now” or anything similar. If the donors are moved enough by the content, they can simply click on the button and go the online donation page. This way, they do not have to take the additional steps they would have to in a manual process (like sending an e-Transfer, cheque, etc.). Super convenient for them, highly beneficial for you.
Step #5 Reports
Finally, it is important to determine how the overall donor engagement campaign is working. If the campaign is not working properly, you should know that because it will impact your overall fundraising goals. You can learn about the campaign performance by analyzing key indicators like the email open and response rates. For instance, by analyzing the newsletter response rate (e.g., button clicks), you can understand how donors are responding to the content of newsletters. If the response rate is low, then you will know you need to change the content accordingly.
So, there it is. You have a solid strategy to build a high-performing, online donor engagement campaign that can drive your overall fundraising process.
However, you will definitely need some help here, despite the process sounding so intriguing. First, finding digital tools to execute this process is a difficult job. You will need a variety of digital tools such as a CRM for managing donor database, email marketing tools to send weekly newsletters, a landing page design tool to build a payment page, and last but not least, a tracking tool to find out how users are responding to your newsletters. You will also need a platform to bring all of these tools together and streamline them.
Demotivated yet? Don’t be! Because SimplyCast has a solution for all your digital engagement needs!
We have built a complete digital, automated donor engagement solution for organizations to drive engagements. The solution is powered by our all-in-one digital engagement platform, and it deploys our own email marketing, CRM, digital form, landing pages, and web tracker software. The solution is also fully customizable so we can tweak it to meet your policies.
Sound like a good idea? Don’t wait! We are here to explain the whole thing to you.
Request your one-on-one demo with our experts today by clicking the button below!
