Using Multichannel Digital Fundraising 'Shoestring' Strategies for Acquisition

In this day and age as development professionals, we need to keep our eye both on donor retention and acquisition. It is one thing to retain your current donors, but if you are not constantly acquiring new ones, your donor file will naturally attrition through donors changing addresses, passing on or just choosing not to give.

Below are some steps that I recommend to use cost-efficient, multichannel digital strategies to boost your acquisition in your next fundraising campaign. Follow these suggestions, and watch your donor acquisition rates increase at a price more inexpensively than traditional methods such as list rentals, and other means.

1. Be sure that you have a strong "Case for Support" for your fundraising campaign. It all starts here and then develops into what will be a strong donation call to action that has some time-based urgency.

2. Develop a website pop-up to capture those who are visiting your website during your next fundraising campaign with a strong “Donate” call-to-action. Be sure that this pop-up and your website is mobile-friendly, as we know that many websites are visited and donations are now being made via mobile devices. The pop-up does not need to be elaborate. In fact, a simple text-based version has been shown to be more efficient than a graphically laden one.

3. Add a one-time and a monthly giving call-to-action on the pop-up. Also, see step No. 5 below, where a “Donate Later” option is highly suggested to capture all those who are not ready to give.

4. Consider obtaining a matching gift for this campaign from either an individual donor or a corporate sponsor.

5. A “Donate Later” button has been successful. Be sure that these subscribers receive an email later on in the campaign.

6. Conduct a social media ad campaign in tandem with the fundraising campaign to promote this matching-gift possibility.

7. Ads can be specifically targeted to key donor personas. If possible, identify possible donor identities and create specifically targeted ads appealing to each identify (i.e. ads specifically for cat or dog lovers respectively).

8. Use your donor management software to create highly-segmented and personalized emails for asks.

Acquisition strategies using digital approaches do not have to be as costly as traditional methods. With today’s increasingly simple technologies, these approaches are easier than in years past to implement. Be sure that you begin to take efforts to test and try multichannel digital efforts to begin to stem the tide of donor attrition and increase the health and effectiveness of your development program.