5 Tips for Creating Nonprofit Chapters and Affiliates

Nonprofit Management

Article | July 11, 2022

When creating your nonprofit fundraising and donations strategy, email marketing should be on the top of the list of channels to use to support your efforts. However, 70% of nonprofits do not have an email marketing strategy, despite 26% of online donors saying email marketing is what inspires them to give. Email marketing can help nonprofits reach their fundraising goals by helping expand reach, develop a loyal donor base and drive more donations. Build an Email Marketing Strategy Implementing email marketing may seem intimidating to some, but once you have an effective strategy in place, it will act as a blueprint and support all your goals moving forward. When you start building your strategy, it’s important to spend time developing a unique strategy that aligns with your mission and goals. Consider these questions: Who is your target audience? How are you collecting email addresses? What types of emails will you send? What types of content do you want to share in those emails? What will your emails look like? What is the layout? What is the design based on? How often do you plan to send emails? What platform will you use? Does it integrate with your donor database and have all the features you need to implement your strategy? Email marketing is the most effective and successful when there's a strategic plan in place. Creating a detailed strategy that answers the questions above will provide your nonprofit with the stepping stones needed to set your email marketing efforts up for success and help meet your overall fundraising goals. Send Emails Once you have a strategy and execution plan in place, you’re ready to start sending your messages to your audience. Email subscribers want to hear from you, but you need to be sure you are sending engaging messages to the right audiences. When you start sending your emails, plan to send a mix of different messages to your audience. Email marketing is an effective channel to not only fundraise but to help subscribers stay engaged and keep donor retention high. A great example would be to include advocacy emails in your plans. Advocacy emails include newsletters and impact stories. These types of emails help your subscriber feel valued as a donor as they’re seeing the direct impact of their support. As you start and continue to send emails, always track each email's performance. This helps you determine what is working and what is not working. By tracking key metrics, like click-through rates, conversation rates and donations per email, you will be able to continuously improve your strategy and the emails you are sending. Follow Best Practices As you begin to execute your email strategy, there are a few key best practices I recommend following to help increase engagement, donations, and overall performance of your emails. Personalize the email for your subscribers. Personalized emails can generate donations up to six times more compared to a generalized email. Make sure your emails are well-designed with compelling imagery that helps the donor visualize your mission and the impact of their donations. Provide clear calls to action in each email you send and always include a “Donate” button in all your communications. Include social sharing buttons and links to your social channels in all your email communications. Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by as much as 158% and help expand your reach by allowing donors to recommend and share your nonprofit with their network. Create an email cadence so you are regularly communicating with your audience throughout the year. For every 1,000 fundraising emails delivered, nonprofits raised $78, so it is in your best interest to continuously send messages to your subscribers. Start by sending emails monthly and then experiment with increasing the frequency of emails per month and see what works best for your nonprofit. Utilizing email marketing is key to having a successful fundraising strategy for your nonprofit. By building a well-thought-out strategy and implementing it, you will be able to engage, retain and convert subscribers into a loyal donor base.

Nonprofit Management

Article | July 29, 2022

Are you expecting all donors to be the same? If you answered “no…well actually… kinda,” then you are not alone. It’s simple to send out the same fundraising message to everyone. However, you can transform your fundraising when you understand that there are many reasons why a person chooses to donate to a nonprofit. Once you understand the psychology of donating to charity, you can then best appeal to current and potential donors. Why do Donors Give? Along a spectrum, there are two extremes that prevent nonprofits from using donation psychology in their fundraising messages. On one end, the person making the ask – the Executive Director, Development person or Board member – assumes all donors have the same motivations for giving that they do. This translates into single-focused messaging that appeals to the person making the ask and to some donors, but not to others. On the other end of the spectrum when a nonprofit neglects philanthropy psychology, the person making the ask becomes paralyzed. They fear offending donors by asking at the “wrong” time. They focus on external, societal crises, such as the pandemic, wars, tragedies, and make a decision for the donor that this is the wrong time to be asked for a gift. They assume that the donor would be offended if asked. The Millennial Impact Project studied why donors across generations start giving. Unexpectedly, according to the researcher, Derrick Feldmann, donors first give because they want to belong. They desire to join their friends or be a part of a cause doing the good they wish to see in the world – this is before they understand what the cause or nonprofit is seeking to accomplish. As they gain that sense of belonging and begin believing in the cause, they can be motivated to continue to give when the nonprofit taps into their giving style. The Seven Faces of Philanthropy was groundbreaking research published in 1994 that has been updated and is still relevant today. In summary, the researchers found that donors give for different reasons. Some donors give because they enjoy the act of giving, especially through events. More donors prefer to donate to local charities or make a long-lasting impact through their investments. Other donors desire to repay or pay forward in gratitude through their giving. Others give because of religious or altruistic reasons. Then, there are donors who see giving as a family tradition and, if applicable, to teach their children generosity. Understanding the donor’s motivations for giving guides a nonprofit in developing the right message, using the right fundraising methods and segmenting to the right group of donors. How Can you Encourage Your Donors to Give? Now that you understand the psychology behind making a philanthropic gift, you can implement this knowledge to customize your fundraising appeals. First, you will need to determine why your donors give. This is done through discussions with Board members, personal conversations with donors, and through donor surveys. It begins with a simple question, “Why do you give to…?” The answers will assist you in creating donor identities; that is, the types of identities or groups where donors wish to belong. Sample identities could be “community leader” or “survivor” or “change maker.” Next, based on what you learned from your current donors, pick the top two or three donor motivations and associated identities. Alter your current messaging and fundraising methods to these giving reasons. The messaging and methods that inspire your current donors will likely attract more donors. Begin testing your messaging for these two to three reasons: Which message has the highest engagement in response and donation? This will be your primary message that you will rotate with the secondary messages. As you further explore your donor’s psychology for giving, you can advance to segmenting your communications based on what will motivate groups of donors to give. Once you understand donor psychology, you will wonder how you missed the clues to why your donors give – and be ready to catch future donors by staying one step ahead of their giving habits.

Fundraising

Article | July 15, 2022

Poor website health may be impacting your non-profit organization's business. Without a question, the basis of your digital presence is a high-performing website. However, it is easy to let other concerns take precedence over website health, especially if it is not your area of expertise. Healthy websites guarantee long-term success, increased reach, and more engagement. This is critical for organizations in terms of community involvement and giving. Healthy sites are also optimized for all users and free of flaws that might degrade the user experience. Poor website health, on the other hand, might result in a loss of visitors and search engine ranks. When it comes to search engine optimization, website health is equally vital (SEO). Sites that load quicker and have fewer difficulties will rank higher in search. How to Improve Website Health? Speed up your site pages: Visitors will not wait for a sluggish site to load in this day of immediate gratification. If your pages do not load immediately, you will make a poor first impression. Fix 404 errors and reduce redirects: Broken links are ones that produce the error message "404 Page Not Found." Error pages might disrupt the crawling of your website, lowering your search ranks. This informs search engines that you are not giving a decent user experience, which will lower your search rankings. Decrease image file sizes: Image files are huge and consume a lot of storage space. Large files might cause your site to slow down and take a long time to load. Reduce file sizes and compress all photos to enhance website health. Optimize for mobile: Google has stated that mobile speed is taken into account by the ranking algorithm. Your website should ideally operate on all devices. Create grammar-free, relevant content: Content is important in all marketing activities, so it's no surprise that it affects website health. Great content is the key to success since search rankings, engagement, and conversions are all dependent on it. Optimize for search: SEO is the process of improving your website's ranking on search engines. This is one of the most crucial aspects of maintaining a good website. A good SEO strategy brings traffic to your website without costing any money.

Article | June 14, 2020

Most nonprofits know about corporate sponsorship, but have you tried matching gifts and volunteer grants? Has a business ever donated goods or services to your nonprofit? What about a business donating to a cause or capital campaign? If you haven’t explored corporate philanthropy options, chances are you’re leaving money on the table. Corporate philanthropy programs are a great way for nonprofits to raise crucial funds. Plus, there are often non-monetary benefits that add additional incentive to embrace a business’s social responsibility program.