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.
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Nonprofit Management
Article | July 29, 2022
For small nonprofits struggling to keep pace with day-to-day work, planning ahead can seem like a luxury. Especially when it comes to IT asset maintenance: If everything is functioning well right now, why mess with it? But a little work now can save a lot of work in the future. It can also prevent downtime, security incidents, and other issues that can hurt your organization.
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Nonprofit Management
Article | July 28, 2022
Volunteers are the lifeblood of any nonprofit. Your services, fundraising campaigns, and even day-to-day operations of your nonprofit can depend on volunteers.
An estimated 30 percent of Americans or 77.9 million people reported they volunteered for an organization or association.”
AmeriCorps published survey
So, if people want to volunteer, the key to garner willing volunteers is to:
Communicate your needs
Share your “why”
Make it easy
While all nonprofits know they need volunteers, investing time and energy into building a program can naturally fall by the wayside. As you look to recruit and retain volunteers, a best practice is to put a strategic volunteer program in place.
You may be asking, “What’s the benefit to me, the nonprofit?” Let’s dive into it!
First, let’s start with the basics — what are the top reasons to invest in a volunteer program? We’ve got you covered. A dynamic volunteer program:
Creates ambassadors for your mission. Volunteers spread the word in your community and increase your community engagement. They can advocate for you with their friends, family, and local and state legislatures. Provide your volunteers with messaging so they can share their “why” on social media and by word of mouth. One pro tip shared by Points of Light is to provide a digital badge to add to your volunteer leaders’ email signatures.
Develops new funding sources. The line between a volunteer and donor should be fluid, not separate. A 2014 study by Fidelity Charitable found that 83% of volunteers report supporting the same nonprofits with their donations. Don’t silo your volunteers and your donors!
Reduces your operating costs. According to the Independent Sector, the value of a volunteer hour was estimated at $28.54 in 2020. Since payroll is often the largest expense for a nonprofit, volunteers provide essential support to your cause with minimal costs to you.
Increases the quantity and quality of your programs and services. It’s a win-win situation for professional development and your lengthy project list! That list will be met by an eager, talented volunteer, and your volunteer will improve their professional skills at the same time.
Maximizes your limited staff resources. We’re sure there’s been a few items on your wish list that you’d love to check off if you had more resources, like being open on holidays or offering more services to your community. Volunteers can fill in those gaps! Maybe they are looking for ways to give back over a holiday, or they may have the connections to develop a new service opportunity for you.
Increases your diversity and brings in new ideas. Although your nonprofit may always strive to diversify or get out of the “we’ve always done it this way” rut, you may not meet the potential of those goals with your staff. Volunteers can provide unique perspectives, different experiences, and even that spark of excitement that comes with a new idea.
Minimizes volunteer turnover.Just like staff onboarding, volunteer onboarding takes time and money. If you recruit and onboard well with easy-to-access opportunity matching, training, and tracking mechanisms in place, your volunteers will be well on their way to a successful experience. Build on that by learning more about your volunteers’ interests and skills, and they will feel seen and appreciated. An upfront investment will pay off in years of dedicated service.
Are you convinced? If so, it’s time to take the next step of how to start putting a volunteer program into place. Then you can scale your volunteering as your nonprofit grows!
Here are our 5 fundraiser-approved steps to developing a bullet-proof volunteer program.
Step 1: Quantify your current volunteer impact.
Gather data on number of volunteers, hours and skills contributed.
Measure the return on investment (ROI) including your program cost and total estimated volunteer value (# of volunteer hours x est. volunteer wage per hour). You can even take it a step further and consider the monetary savings to the community when volunteers provide the service or in-kind donation versus a private provider (e.g. number of children tutored or trees planted).
Step 2: Educate your staff and board on the benefits of volunteering.
Share your ROI and other data with your executive team and board and garner to get them on board. Recruiting, onboarding, engaging, and retaining your volunteer base will be much smoother when you have their support.
Step 3: Purchase or build a volunteer management software system.
Track volunteer hours, record your volunteers’ information, and create reports. Your software/tracking system should include a personalized volunteer dashboard where they can track their hours and volunteer services provided, demonstrating to them their impact in real-time.
Step 4: Develop a plan for recruitment, training, and growth opportunities for your volunteers.
Share the plan with your current volunteer leaders and solicit their feedback before rolling out to the community.
Step 5: Make the case for even more investment in your program next year.
Give insight into how your efforts to recruit, engage, and retain volunteers positively impact your mission and your bottom line.
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Article | April 26, 2020
When those in the nonprofit sector consider “compliance” the first thing that often comes to mind, and rightly so, is maintaining nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service. That makes sense, because failure to properly maintain nonprofit status has significant implications on taxes and can negatively impact fundraising. But compliance for nonprofits shouldn’t stop there. A comprehensive, documented compliance program, that includes privacy, security, marketing, donor and grantee diligence, and vendor management, for example, can go a long way to protecting the organization, its donors, and its constituents.
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