February 2024: Top 5 tips from nonprofit digital assessments

My maternity leave kicks off in March, so this is likely the last edition of The Good Stuff you’ll receive until the fall. 

If you’re seeking support with any aspect of your marketing, communications, or fundraising while I’m on leave, check out this trusted partner list. Feel free to email me before the end of this month with some context if you would like a recommendation or introduction.  

I’ve been busy conducting four nonprofit digital assessments over the last six weeks to help wonderful organizations improve their online donor acquisition, engagement, and retention. These four organizations do very different work—two international aid nonprofits, one national medical association, and one California regional center—but their assessments unearthed quite a few common themes.

These recommendations showed up in all 4 assessments and they’d probably show up in yours, too. 

1. More videos, please! 

Very few nonprofits are sharing enough video content—especially to drive online fundraising. I’m desperate to see nonprofits create more informal, straight-to-camera videos of team members sharing important updates, asking for donations in specific times of need, and thanking donors. 

To practice what I preach, here’s a video recapping this newsletter:

2. Ramp up your SMS/MMS program using that video content! 

We wonder why donor retention rates are so dismal at 40% on average. Well, the average nonprofit email open rate is 40% (and this may be inflated), and as few as 1-2% of your social media followers might see one of your organic posts. 

So if you’re not running ads and an SMS/MMS program, it’s likely that 40% of your donors or fewer are seeing any of your online content. 

I’ve been encouraging all of my clients to build their SMS/MMS programs, starting small and primarily using this channel to thank and engage with existing donors every month. 

3. Monthly donors aren’t getting enough TLC. 
Here’s a prime example of where more video and SMS/MMS messaging come in handy: loving on your monthly donors and keeping them informed. 

Everyone wants to know how to bring in more monthly donors but so few are providing a fabulous experience to those donors with exclusive content, events, and other opportunities to get closer to the cause.

I’ve had a blast suggesting ways each of my clients can better connect with and celebrate their monthly givers. 

4. Your homepage should be a love letter to a future donor. 
This scenario is all too common: your homepage gets the vast majority of your overall web traffic and it's a strange hodgepodge of content mostly geared toward people who are already familiar with your work.

Most nonprofit homepages remind me of that frozen mixed vegetable medley with green beans, carrots, and corn. Something for everyone? Exciting for no one. 

And most nonprofit homepages are all about the organization. “Join us," "our model," "what we do," “support our work." 

Your homepage should be written and designed with love for a prospective donor. What do they want? A fuzzy feeling. A way to make their life more meaningful. An opportunity to help fix a problem they care deeply about. A group of similar people they can connect with.

Social proof is an untapped resource here (e.g. videos and testimonials featuring existing donors). 

5. Digital ads are being used too much for fundraising and not enough for cultivation (which is why they’re not working). 
I see this in the M+R Benchmarks every year and it always makes me cringe. Here’s the 2023 version:

The smaller the nonprofit, the less they’re investing in ads for brand awareness. The smaller fish are spending the same % of their ad budgets on direct fundraising and expecting the same results as the big, well-known fish. 

There's an easy fix here because brand awareness and engagement ads are the cheapest ads to run. It’s common to pay just one cent for a 15-second video view with Meta Ads! (Again with the videos.) 

So if you’re running a lot of ads asking people to donate and these ads aren’t profitable or even close, you might need to move more of your ad dollars toward the earlier stages of the donor journey: awareness, engagement, and lead generation.

Focus less on asking and more on welcoming and informing people. Even your fundraising ads should focus on making people feel welcomed and informed. 

On the topic of digital ads...

Here’s a LinkedIn post I shared earlier this month with a full year of fundraising results from one of my Meta Ad clients, the Antarctic & Southern Ocean Coalition. By investing more of their ad dollars into lead generation instead of direct fundraising, they’ve seen a better financial return and welcomed thousands of new contacts to their email list. 

Thank you for sharing these numbers so others can learn, ASOC team! 

I hope you can use these takeaways to make some tweaks to your own 2024 digital strategy. If you need expert help tackling any of the recommendations in this newsletter, let me know. I’m happy to refer you to great consultants and tech solutions. 

And if we don’t connect before Baby Griffin arrives, I hope life and work treat you well while I’m offline!