If you’re looking to maximize the biggest season for nonprofit fundraising, now is the time to ensure your data, systems, and marketing campaigns are set up correctly, giving yourself plenty of time to test and iterate for success.
If we’ve learned anything from this past year, it’s that agility is the key to driving impact. Forced to adapt, many made a shift to digital strategy for the first time, continuing their mission-critical work while making impressive pivots to achieve new and better results for their communities.
In this post, we highlight five digital strategies that can be applied to your end-of-year fundraising campaigns with Nonprofit Cloud for Fundraising. So here we go, let’s dig into five ways you can weave digital into your end-of-year fundraising campaign.
1. Convert Direct Mail to Digital
Direct Mail is a staple of most nonprofit marketing and end-of-year fundraising programs. And for good reason; it works! This year, consider combining direct mail tactics with the power of digital to convert donors to a lower-cost channel, especially as many people are becoming increasingly digital savvy.
By adding a QR code to your direct mail, your constituents are able to scan the code with their phone and are instantly brought to your Elevate giving page to make donations online and become sustaining donors. They will also get a thank you note immediately following their donation, and their donation is instantly tracked in the Marketing Cloud or Pardot with a sustaining giving journey. This will allow your organization to further engage with donors based on their previous giving history, and meet them where they are.
Want to learn more about converting direct mail to digital? Watch Brandon, senior solution engineer and former campaign architect at St. Jude’s hospital, in the demo below.
Products used:
- NPSP to give you a single view to help segment
- Insights for clean supporter data
- Elevate to collect payment
- Pardot to increase engagement.
2. Create Hybrid Event Experiences
If your organization relies on revenue and constituent engagement that comes from live events, 2020 was quite a year. If you were like some of our customers, you were working overtime to figure out how to pivot away from in–person gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organizations were able to move quickly to transform their in-person events into virtual fundraising experiences.
While this past year has forced so many of us to rethink our event strategy, this has actually created more opportunities to engage with donors and constituents, regardless of zip code. It’s also opened up opportunities for nonprofit organizations to increase their event fundraising impact, while decreasing costs.
Listen to Heeyon Park, lead solution engineer at Salesforce.org, as she shows you how to create online events in the demo below.
Products used:
- NPSP for campaign management
- Traction Gather to run your virtual event
- Elevate for payment capture
- Pardot to segment donors
3. Smarter Major Donor Cultivation
Digital strategies have made it much easier for fundraising teams to segment their donors and constituents. This is especially critical for major gift teams. While smaller giving amounts require communications through marketing systems, major donors need additional tools to better build relationships and hand-hold more closely. Major gift teams are rethinking how they build and track relationships with their major donors in a digital environment.
Using NPSP, you can manage your donors and collaborate with team members using Nonprofit Cloud. Teams have access to a major giving dashboard, allowing them to see their pipeline of major gifts and track notes from meetings for each donor. Digital also gives the opportunity to connect to wealth screening apps that look at publicly available information to determine likelihood of giving and at what amount.
Want to know more about how to cultivate major donors using digital strategy? Watch the demo video below where Nicole Adair, lead solution engineer at Salesforce.org.
Products used:
- NPSP for pipeline tracking, campaign management and team collaboration
- Salesforce Inbox for Gmail or Outlook integration
- iWave for wealth screening, helping you make an ask at the right amount
4. Scale with Self-Service
Increasing your digital capability also means empowering your donors and constituents in a way that wasn’t possible before. Many nonprofits have dedicated staff focused on responding to donor requests, receipts, or changing contact information. Using Experience Cloud with NPSP, organizations can streamline back office operations and also give constituents a better way to access their very own information update on their own, ensuring your nonprofit has clean and accurate data.
Watch the demo below from Jessica Romig, senior solution engineer at Salesforce.org.
Products used:
- NPSP as a single source of truth
- Experience Cloud for digital self service
- Einstein Bots for donor self service
5. Glean Insights with Reports & Analytics
Do you have access to real-time fundraising data that you can share across your organization? Building reports and dashboards is easier than you think. With NPSP, you have access to pre-built nonprofit fundraising dashboards, so you can easily get a high-level view of the health of your fundraising organization, and have the ability to drill down into the underlying details. With Tableau, you can gain deeper insights with funnel charts, pie charts, time graphs, and more.
Real-time transparency across your organization is critical to well-run operations, revenue prediction, and more — especially as dispersed and remote teams become more common. Actionable data also indicates things like which campaigns drive the most revenue and trends over time, which allows you to align your team and execute.
Want to learn more about how to create a data visualization? Dan Tajbl, lead solution engineer at Salesforce.org, will show you.
Products used:
It’s never too early to plan for, strategize about, and refine your end-of-year giving campaigns. The five steps above should get you started, and stay tuned for the rest of our series over the next few months that will help you plan your end-of-year fundraising strategies.
About the Author
Jarrett O’Brien
Nonprofit Product Marketing Director at Salesforce.org
Jarrett is passionate about helping nonprofits build capacity and further their mission with technology. As Product Marketing Director, he focuses on the Fundraising solutions at Salesforce.org. Jarrett’s background has been in marketing, consulting, and business development with software companies and nonprofits over the last 15+ years. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
The post 5 Ways to Weave Digital Into End-of-Year Giving appeared first on Salesforce.org.
