Solidifying Your Digital Donation Campaign This Year

1. Start by Researching Your Ideal Donor

Donation campaigns are all about connections - connecting your cause to the right donor audience so that they feel empowered to take action and ultimately make a donation. The first step, like all campaigns, is to identify your ideal donor; finding their interests, their demographic, and their location and using that as the foundation for where to go with your campaign. Knowing some baseline numbers and expected outcomes is important for tempering expectations, so that you know exactly what is a realistic goal for your campaign, and how to reach it.

2. Generate a Captivating Story to Keep Your Donors Engaged

This is the fun part for you, and probably the most fulfilling for your organization; telling YOUR story. With all stories, make sure your donation campaign is concise, and focused. And add the human element to it as well, because at the end of the day you are using a digital medium to connect to people, not clicks or views. We'd recommend starting with your central theme, and working the layers of the campaign to loop back to that theme. We've seen action statements from various campaigns that become the hashtag and the branding piece, and all of the attributes to the campaign tie back to that main idea. This is how you'll always distinguish your campaign and continue to stay on task.

3. Build a Quality Landing Page to Bring Donors to All the Relevant Information

So you've gotten your audience and strategy solidified. The next step would be to build an optimized landing page to fit your goals. A landing page really serves to be the "home base" for your campaign and the place where you can drive all of your donors to learn more about your cause. In essence, it's a one page website, your online billboard, so it's important to make the most out of that opportunity. This means making sure that your donation objectives are clear, concise, and visible, your message is focused throughout, and it looks GREAT. People need to be captivated, and driven to take action! This is your chance to funnel in donors to make meaningful contributions.

4. Recruit Email Marketing to Stay Top of Mind

The most direct way to get in front of a donor is to contact them directly with an email campaign. Although experts are divided on the effectiveness of email (because we're all guilty of leaving brand emails unread), we still see that it's a great medium to use to spread your message. Having regular, scheduled email reminders throughout the life of a campaign can help remind people who want to donate but forget about your campaign in their day to day. There's a great opportunity to nurture your donors via email, building up their loyalty to your campaign in gradual content bursts with email.

5. Use Social Media to Engage in Meaningful Conversations

The art of storytelling is a huge tool to utilize when connecting to donors on social networks. Using captivating imagery, strategic hashtags, quality content, video, and starting a conversation will raise awareness for your cause without the need for a large scale budget. For example, a live video Facebook is a quick and easy way to share information in real-time instead of trying to get people to read information that they might otherwise skip over. If you are looking to acquire donations at or for an event, tag the location and start building check-ins or content around the venue to relate back to or share with prospective attendees or donors. Create content and visuals that aid in your campaign, and unify the theme and branding. This is another channel for you to drive home the passion in your story, and a real chance to resonate with your donors. Social media is the best opportunity for bringing personality and fun to a donation or fundraising cause.

6. Use Social Media Advertising to Solidify Your Story

If your campaign includes a marketing budget, big or small, social media advertising can be used to build a buzz around your cause or drive visitors straight to your donation page. There are various social media campaign options to boost your fundraising efforts. With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube Advertising, you have an abundance of platforms to spread your message with a little bit of extra firepower. Whether you need to build a list of contacts, drive traffic to your campaign's website or increase the audience for an event - social media advertisements are a cost-effective, creative methods of boosting a campaign cause.

7. Think of a Social Media Contest To Continue Drumming Up Interest

A contest is a surefire way to produce heavy engagement and attention to a cause or campaign. Using social media as a platform, conducting a contest to garner social activity around your goal is an extremely helpful way to get people talking and interested. Choose a photo to post on your organization's timeline and ask people to comment a caption, or ask people to post a story to your timeline that relates to the cause of your campaign. Inviting others to share and participate in your contest will promote a sense of community that will inspire others to become involved and contribute to your campaign.

As with all digital campaigns, just remain the most authentic version of yourself when trying to promote any cause, and you're more likely to captivate the audience you're looking for. Digital media has given rise to robust campaigns at a click of a mouse, so use it to your advantage!