Featured Services: Audience Research // Digital Fundraising // Campaign Planning // Copywriting // Email Marketing
ISW: Building a Research-Informed Donor Journey
Imagine: 15 years after founding your war research nonprofit, Putin invades Ukraine. Your Twitter account gains 250,000 new followers in a matter of weeks.
For Kim Kagan, President of The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the winter of 2022 was surreal. She knew this war was a possibility before it was a reality, but never could have predicted her organization’s role in it.
When Kim reached out to me that fall, her team had been operating in hyperdrive for eight months straight. They were—and still are—the Western media’s go-to resource for daily updates and maps tracking the war on Ukraine.
Kim is savvy. She knew ISW needed to map out a donor journey for all of their new social media followers. We agreed, there was audience research to conduct and a larger strategy to develop, but first, we needed to seize the moment and run the organization’s first-ever digital Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising campaigns.
We moved quickly to install Fundraise Up, a free donation platform with a variety of “sticky” elements and a fully optimized donor experience. Fundraise Up allowed us to create distinct fundraising campaigns for Giving Tuesday and year-end and accept a variety of payment methods without any coding or website updates.
Next, we pulled in my favorite social media partner, Brynne Krispin of Cause Fokus, to develop Giving Tuesday and year-end social campaigns that humanized the ISW team. Our public goal was to raise $80,000 so ISW could hire a new analyst.
Thanks to great teamwork and the power of Fundraise Up, ISW raised $31,000 for Giving Tuesday and $85,000 in December. They welcomed 150 new monthly donors in these two months alone.
Year-end campaign results
$116,000
Dollars raised in November and December with Fundraise Up, organic social media, and light email marketing.
150
New monthly donors acquired without any explicit push for monthly giving, thanks to Fundraise Up.
$91
Average one-time gift amount, with most donors being first-time givers to ISW.
In the new year, it was time for research.
Equipped with six-figure proof that ISW’s readers and followers want to provide financial support, it was time to get to know these people better. I designed two surveys: one to better understand ISW’s hundreds of new online donors, and another to better understand the people on ISW’s email list who hadn’t yet made a donation. Here’s why I survey donors and non-donors and ask them some of the same questions.
By sending these surveys directly after year-end fundraising, the donor survey received 318 responses—an incredible 24% response rate!
Key findings from our survey research:
ISW’s email audience skews heavily male (more than the ISW team knew) despite the organization’s female leadership and wonderfully diverse team.
Though ISW is focused on U.S. national security, the organization’s email audience and new donor base live all over the world.
While the war in Ukraine is currently everyone’s primary interest area, donors and nondonors have a strong interest in China and the Middle East as well.
Both groups want to see more interactive war maps. This reinforced one of the organization’s existing priorities.
In the nondonor group, 23% of respondents said they would donate to a Ukraine-specific campaign and 29% would donate for exclusive content. AKA, more than 50% of nondonor respondents want to donate!
Open-ended survey responses informed key messaging adjustments that will resonate with both groups.
77 donors and 17 nondonors asked to be contacted by ISW to learn how they can get more involved.
Next up: campaign planning
Informed by survey insights, I developed a quarterly campaign plan and an email welcome series for ISW’s new contacts, two critical rungs in the supporter ladder we’re building together. ISW’s campaign plan has a different focus each quarter to provide variety and support a healthy mix of email lead generation, virtual event engagement, and online fundraising.
This campaign plan is now being implemented one quarter at a time with my support on retainer. We’re experimenting and learning as we go, as is the case with all great digital marketing and fundraising programs. The virtual Ukraine Briefing we planned together in Q2 sold out to 500 registrants in a single day and brought more than 200 new contacts over to ISW’s email list.
ISW’s monthly giving program has surpassed 240 members only seven months after installing Fundraise Up. Later this year, we’ll be crafting a membership model to provide ongoing value and exclusivity for these monthly givers.
ISW’s growing digital marketing and fundraising program is a great success story in the making. It’s a prime example of an organization that has worked incredibly hard under the radar for years, rose to meet a major moment, and now it’s paying off—financially and through increased social impact.