Two Tips for Driving Donations in 2016 using Interactive Marketing
Your marketing is critical to your reach and to driving donations and in 2016, if you’re not measuring engagement, you’re not trying to improve your reach. You won’t improve your numbers either.
Donors are increasingly more interested in well, what they are most interested in, and using the channels that are most accessible for them, you’re going to want to adapt not only your message but your vehicle/channel for delivering that message to them.
This means you have to go interactive marketing. Donors are already people ready to take action, so give them a call to action that resonates with them. And here is what is working according to a graphic Forbes shares in its CMO Network section in marketing tips for nonprofits to reach donors.
However, a recent survey by Abila has found that nonprofit organizations don’t understand their donors very well at all. The survey specifically finds:
- Nonprofits are not measuring donor activity. Almost four-in-ten do not measure donor processing costs and therefore do not know if they are operating effectively.
- Less than one-third (31 percent) measure administrative costs
- Only 23 percent measure related marketing costs.
- Nonprofits are not keeping pace with technology.
- Just under half currently receive online donations.
- Only 6 percent receive donations via mobile devices.
- Paper checks are still the most commonly used form of receiving donations.
- Nonprofits’ donor communications often lack structure and organization.
- 27 percent of nonprofits have no structured email schedule
- 54 percent lack a timetable for phone calls
- 89 percent have no organized text messaging communication program
Here are two great tips you can start to use right away and begin interacting with your target audience in a way that really shows up in those donation numbers.
- Define your own “lead.” Formstack acknowledges that getting that edge in reach and those donor numbers up, starts with figuring out the best way to reach, nurture, and call your target to action.
A lot of the marketers in our survey work in industries with very defined marketing prospects, such as someone who fills out a demo request form and is contacted by a salesperson. However, as a nonprofit, your marketing prospects are a bit different. Do you have a page where volunteers can sign up for service opportunities? Those are people who can be nurtured toward giving campaigns or encouraged to bring their friends to future events. Do you have a web form for people to request more info about child sponsorship? Contact forms are a common method of lead capture in most industries. Once you define what a “lead” might be for your organization, you can create goals around getting more people like that on your site. Formstack
- Use Social Media– Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are up there with email marking and your website as the most popular mediums for getting donors to your site and getting involved with your cause. Are you utilizing them? With many social media tools providing analytical measures as well, you can easily measure which messaging is converting into strong leads, dollars, and involvement.
In order to reach customers, your campaigns should utilize these sources as a channel. Creating Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and LinkedIn ads are powerful ways for reaching a targeted audience. Social media enables you not only to select a target audience (and a “lookalike” audience based on target audience criteria,) but it also enables you to optimize your marketing outreach campaigns by using analytics. The days of using guess work on marketing campaigns are over. Analytical data is the best way to gauge your true ROI and understand which marketing techniques you should invest in. Forbes
Nonprofit Orgs Photostream via Flickr
Is your organization looking for help when it comes to reaching 2016 donor goals? How is your donor reach? Are you among the many nonprofits not measuring engagement? We’d love to help you! Contact us to learn just how easy it is to expand your reach and grow your donor numbers through interactive marketing.
