My nonprofit is trying to improve the engagement and retention of its online donors. While we’ve had some success using digital marketing to draw in new donors, we’ve found that it’s still difficult to maintain their interest over the long run.
Our fundraising efforts are now managed by Funraise, therefore I was wondering if anyone could offer advice or best practices regarding how to optimise digital campaigns with a focus on improving donor engagement and retention.
I would appreciate some guidance on the following queries:
Techniques for Personalisation: How can you make sure your communications with donors feel genuine and not overly robotic? What are some successful ways you’ve personalised correspondence with them?
Timing of the Campaign: Could you provide advice on how frequently we should email or message donors on social media so as not to overload them?
Content That Works: Based on your experience, what types of digital contents—such as testimonials, videos, and updates—keep donors interested and involved?
Automated processes: What particular automated processes or email sequences in Funraise have been effective in re-engaging supporters who have fallen out of the picture or in increasing recurring donations?
Event Integration: How have your virtual or hybrid events, if you’ve held any, been incorporated into your Funraise donor engagement strategies?
Any advice, techniques, or examples from people who have dealt with such difficulties would be greatly appreciated.
You have identified one of the most critical challenges for nonprofit fundraisers: retention. Most organizations lose about 50% of their donors YoY, so you’re not alone—but there are definitely some strategies that can help. I’ll provide some quick thoughts below and if anyone else from the community has thoughts they can chime in too!
Techniques for Personalisation:
Send a text message to your donors. This is an excellent and personal way to reach them. Text messages have a much higher open rate than emails and can lead to a more personal connection with your organization.
Don’t ask for a donation every time you connect with donors. Most of your communication should be about the impact that your organization is having (because of the donor’s previous donation).
Consider key touch points in the donor journey: Reach out to the donor on their birthday or the anniversary of their first donation date. And be sure to invite donors to big giving days like Giving Tuesday or End of Year campaigns.
Timing of the Campaign:
Be consistent. Find a schedule that works and stick to it. There is a lot of power in consistency.
More is generally better. Your donors will follow/get updates from you in their own preferred network (email, socials, text) so it’s important to consistently share updates on all of these channels. At minimum, I’d recommend a monthly update to your donors. This monthly update doesn’t need to be a hard donation ask each time — most of the time it should have updates about your work and impact.
Outside of large campaigns that engage all your donors, consider that each donor is on their own journey with your organization and the communication to each donors should take that into account. For example: a donor that first donated last month is different than a donor who has been donating monthly for several years.
Content That Works
In my past experience we found that videos of our impact were the most compelling content. Donors really want to hear from and see direct impact. Even videos that are not professionally edited or polished are still very impactful and feel very “real” for donors — almost like an inside look at your work.
Automated processes:
Today, Funraise does not have bulk email to outreach to specific donor lists (although this is coming soon and it’s going to be really powerful for this exact strategy). One strategy that I would recommend though is to use Funraise’s Automated Tasks that can be created based on donation parameters. So for example, you might create a task for a team member to follow up on failed recurring payments or a task for a team member to personally thank donors that give over $500.
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