Do You Know Where Your Online Fundraising Plan Is?

It’s December – do you know where your online fundraising plan is?

If not, here are the three words you need to know to maximize online fundraising success between now and the end of the year:

Volume = Send a lot of email
Every other non-profit is going to be in your donors’ faces with nonstop online giving opportunities. To get a piece of that pie, you need to be there as well. Sending five email messages in December is not too many – especially if one of them is cultivation and doesn’t ask for money. And remember, you want two or three email asks the last week of the year.

Urgency = Goals and deadlines
Of course the end of the tax year is a natural deadline. But you can take this even further by creating one-day campaigns with goals for number of gifts, number of donors or the ever-popular matching gift campaign. You can also set a goal of raising enough money in one day to feed one person for a year.

Optimization = Make it easy to donate
Eliminate all barriers to making a gift. Reduce the number of clicks needed to get to the donate page. Better yet, do a homepage takeover the last week of the year and make that your donate page. Reduce the number of fields donors have to complete to make their gift. Double-check all "donate now" links on your website to ensure that they go right to the donate page. Make an online donation from outside your organization to test processing time. Do everything you can to reduce your abandonment rate!

Good luck on your year-end fundraising!