Amplify your Year-End Fundraising Success with Mightycause
December is the busiest time of the year when it comes to giving! It’s also one of the busiest times for your donors as well, so your campaign needs to stand out to rise above the noise and get noticed. Mightycause recently hosted a webinar focusing on 5 keys strategies to boosting your Year-End fundraising success. Check out the recording, and the read on for the quick tips below!
1. Incorporate the Holiday Season into your messaging
The Holiday season is a time when individuals are thinking about giving gifts to friends and family. Tap into that by packaging donations to your organization as “holiday gifts”. With the right messaging, and customized donation levels that denote a tangible impact (ie $25 buys one week of food for shelter animals) you can help donors see their giving as gifts! Consider offering e-cards or holiday cards this season to encourage donors to give donations as gifts to friends and family.
Even though the tax code has changed and there may be less donors looking to itemize deductions, you can still use that year-end messaging (coupled with other strategies, see #2!) to encourage donors to take action today!
2. Add a Matching Grant to Multiply your Impact
One of the best ways to add urgency to your campaign and encourage donors to give now (rather than waiting until next year) is to add a time-sensitive matching grant. Help donors of all levels see the chance for a greater impact by doubling or tripling their gift with a match! Focus on prospecting your existing supporter relationships since we’ve only got a few weeks left, but there is still time to turn a major gift donor or a board member’s gift into a matching grant to leverage more donations this season.
3.Optimize your Email Strategy
The most important message here is that with everyone’s inboxes flooded with sales and deals from all kinds of retailers, your organization shouldn’t worry about sending too many emails. The only concern should be sending the right emails to the right people! With proper segmentation of your contact lists, and a customized message for different donor groups, you can ensure that your emails have the most impact. You can segment in many ways:
-By date of last donation
-By donation amount
-Recurring donors & volunteers
-Board members & major donors
-By lapsed or almost lapsed donors
Beyond segmentation, take the time to draft creative subject lines, and A/B test to make sure you are fine tuning your strategy. You can A/B test your subject line to see what drives a higher open rate, or the image within the email to see what catches donor’s attention enough to encourage them to click on your “Donate Button”.
4. Focus on retaining your previous donors
Donor retention is a MUST this year-end season. Save time and money by re-engaging past donors who are easier to convert. Focus on building long term donor relationships which will pay off in many ways: volunteering, major gifts, event attendance and more! We have calculated your donor retention rate for you right in your Analytics tool, so the first step is done! Just download your list of 2017 donors that haven’t made a 2018 gift (or those that have given less in 2018) and make your plans! This group deserves special attention, targeted emails are a great start, but this group deserves some personalized outreach via individual email, phone call, etc.
Access the Mightycause Guide to Donor Engagement & Retention for more tips!
5. Let Mightycause Advanced tools increase your year-end fundraising success
All organizations using Mightycause for their year-end fundraising have access to a no-strings attached free trial of Advanced features. Advanced software subscription plans usually start from $99 a month, but during the most important fundraising month of the year, you can have it free! This includes a CRM system to segment and message your donors, advanced analytics, a branded donation page for your website and data integration with Salesforce, MailChimp, Constant Contact and more!
For more tips on how to make Mightycause Advanced tools work for your year-end campaign, check out our blog post!
With a few weeks left in 2018, there is still time to make some changes to increase your year-end fundraising success. Don’t delay, incorporate these action items now!