Tips To Boost Your Online Fundraising

Over the last few weeks, we’ve shared some resources to help you get started on specific aspects of your year-end online fundraising. But really, there’s a lot you can be doing all year to increase your base of supporters, engage them in your mission, and convert them to active donors. Using the Internet to Raise Funds and Build Donor Relationships: Tools, Tips and Techniques for Boosting Donations, a new handbook from Convio, will help your organization see the big picture and create effective strategies for long-term success.

This guide integrates many of the tips and best practices you’ve read about here, into a detailed overview, with frequent reminders of the benefits of online vs. traditional donor relationships, suggestions for the types of tools you’ll need, some metrics that will help you to set goals for your program, and real-world examples.

To make the most of the advantages of online fundraising over offline methods – cost-effectiveness, timeliness, and the ability to find out more about your supporters over time and more easily communicate with them based on what they respond to – you’ll need to take an approach that includes:

• Build and manage your email list: drive traffic to your site, and make sure it’s optimized to convert visitors to subscribers. Make your join button easy to find across the site, keep “required” information limited, and have incentives (such as an insightful newsletter or invites to special events) for joining your organization or signing up to your email list. Send messages to your existing supporters, asking them to “tell a friend” about you and follow you on social network like Facebook and Twitter. Consider engaging a reputable “list append” service that finds email addresses to match postal addresses in your existing database.

• Develop relationships with your supporters: over time, you can survey or poll your members to find out more about themselves and their interests (helpful for list segmentation), and create special messages and landing pages based on what they tell you.

Tips to Boost Your Online Fundraising

Backlink: http://www.frogloop.com/care2blog/2011/8/26/tips-to-boost-your-online-fundraising.html

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