E-Philanthropy

At last year's Fund Raising Day in New York hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Ann Crowley, membership and online strategy director for the Human Rights Campaign, joined three other fundraising professionals to present 28 ideas for digital fundraising success. Here are the first 10 ideas.

For many nonprofits, e-mail is the bridge that Facebook fans frequently walk across on their way to becoming a donor, simply because it’s more private and less distracting than Facebook. This is why it’s critical to have a smart e-mail marketing strategy, in addition to a smart Facebook strategy. No one ever joined an e-mail list just to join an e-mail list. It would be great if this were so, but it’s not.

Fundraising e-mail clickthrough rates dropped 27 percent and response rates were down 21 percent from 2011, according to the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmark study. What’s to blame? For certain nonprofit sectors, the eNonprofit study cites real-world activities as a possible cause. I’ll speculate a poor mobile experience might also be partially to blame. With that in mind, here are eight popular npENGAGE posts to help improve e-mail engagement and fundraising e-mail results.

Study after study shows a direct correlation between frequency and donations. A whopping 72 percent of the respondents in Penelope Burk’s Cygnus Donor Survey said they could be inspired to give more generously this year. But by not having an e-mail schedule you lose out on some import relationship building, response conditioning (yes, you can train your people to be more responsive and you’re missing out if you’re e not consciously conditioning them), community building and money.

It's always interesting to see how far technology has come and how rapidly things change. Online fundraising has continued to rapidly and drastically grow and evolve, just as it has since the advent of the Internet. In our July 2005 issue, FS took a look at how online fundraising had grown since the turn of the millennium, hitting a number of different organizations. In the story, Pamela Barden, then with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, discussed how IFCJ engaged younger donors online.

After Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012, individuals created campaigns and inspired people to donate money using online fundraising tools (including the ones mentioned in this article). These people raised millions of dollars and made many people’s lives a little bit easier.

This type of crowdfunding may not be new, but in increasing numbers, people around the world are creating all kinds of campaigns — for creative projects, technology, nonprofits and much more.

Who doesn’t love a good Internet meme? Those clever little images and captions that have become a phenomena on the interwebs. But what would happen if we combined some commonly “overheard” phrases from the nonprofit sector with the most popular Internet memes? I took a break from nonprofit data spelunking to create a few. Don’t recognize one of them?

After a frustrating experience trying to make donations in friends' names for the holidays, I asked readers of my April 2009 Editor's Note to examine the ways that seemingly minor glitches and missteps can affect their all-important donor relationships.

How do you become your donors' favorite cause — you, the one that they want? Here are five things you can do to increase engagement

Collecting e-mail addresses and using them to mobilize your supporters is one of the simplest but most important tactics for online organizing. As Ricken Patel, founder of Avaaz, told us, “Someone operating out of their bedroom can do this better than a multimillion-dollar organization with a huge staff.” Before you get started, though, look over these tips for how best to turn a list of e-mails into a powerful tool for activism.