E-Philanthropy

Time spent chasing promises to give online is better spent thanking actual donors.

Engagement has been at the forefront of the fundraising sector since its inception and is such an integral part of the job that Tom Gaffny, principal at Tom Gaffny Consulting, named his 2008 DMA Nonprofit Federation Washington Nonprofit Conference session, "'E' Is for Engagement: 65 Organizations, A Case Study."

Getting your nonprofit email marketing up and running can be both tricky and time-consuming. In addition to a series of posts on email marketing for nonprofits, we’ve highlighted these five nonprofit email marketing mistakes we see many nonprofits making. Read on to prevent your emails from ending up in the junk folder: not having permission, buying or renting an email list, not using an email service provider, sending from DoNotReply@yourdomain.org, and not taking mobile email rendering into consideration.

If you’re a fundraiser who is struggling to get your executive director or board to understand why you should launch an online fundraising program or invest more in online giving tools, try these talking points to help plead your case: Online giving boosts individual giving. Online giving allows you to interact with your donors where they are — online. You don't have to set up a merchant account. It's not just a fad.

We can live or die by email these days. With all the din and clutter in everybody’s inbox, how can yours get opened? Try these 10 ruthlessly practical tips for smart emailing: 1. Show some personality. 2. Wear your heart on your sleeve if you can. 3. Your subject line is all-important. 4. Don't reuse the same (boring) subject line. Ever. 5. "From" is as important as the subject line. 6. Only one topic per email. 7. Only short emails. 8. Try a one-sentence email. 9. Use plenty of white space. 10. Be realistic.

At the 2014 Washington Nonprofit Conference, three fundraising professionals tackled "Digital Fundraising 101," specifically covering best practices for email, websites, online acquisition, social media, testing, integration, retargeting, responsive design and mobile optimization.

More and more of the people coming to me for coaching seem to think that fundraising can be done 100 percent online. It's a digital version of the Field of Dreams Fundraising Myth. No one tool can do all the heavy lifting for your fundraising program. Here are some of the email fundraising myths that I'm seeing: Email is free, everyone has email and email has replaced print.

Would you like to drive more Facebook traffic to your website? Is quality Facebook traffic important to your business? Use these five steps to help you get more Facebook traffic to your website: 1. Have a steady stream of shareable content on your website. 2. Make it easy to share your content to Facebook on your website. 3. Optimize your Facebook posts. 4. Optimize other places on Facebook to add links to your website. 5. Advertise.

If I told you that you could double your digital fundraising quite easily, wouldn’t it be stupid of you not to? I think everyone would agree. Yet the sorry state of affairs is this — donation forms stink, and people are not fixing them. When you move someone with a clever piece of fundraising communications, your donation pages are a deciding factor in whether you get that gift.

Donor retention is often overlooked, and because of this, nonprofits aren’t using email as a key retention tool. That likely means more email “asks” this year (donations, event registrants, advocacy actions) and fewer retention emails, like reporting back to donors and building relationships.

The risk this poses is if most emails ask for something, people may start tuning out everything. To make “ask” emails more effective, constituents need to also see results consistently from your organization. They need know that progress is being made and feel the momentum.