Email Marketing

Year End Giving for Event Fundraisers

Part 2 of 2: Year End Campaign Planning for Event Fundraisers

Yesterday, I reviewed some of the reasons why engaging your event’s participants and donors in year end giving is a smart idea. Today, I’m going to give you some practical tips and tricks to help you get started on planning your event’s end-of-year campaign.

What’s typically included in a basic end of year campaign?

A basic end of year campaign includes a series of fundraising solicitations starting on the day after Thanksgiving and run through New Year’s Eve. For events, I’d recommend you use your event branding to guide the look and feel of your year end communications and that you focus on your online communication channels - Email, Website and Social Media. 

Steps to Kick Start your event’s Year End Campaign:

1. Ensure event fundraising is open Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day.  For fall events, this may require you to keep fundraising open through the end of the year. For spring events, this may mean that you should open your event registration prior to the Thanksgiving holidays.  If this is not an option, then direct people to your organizations general donation form or to the form that is being used for your general year end giving form.
2. Coordinate with your traditional giving peers. If your office is already running an end of year campaign, be sure to coordinate with your development peers to ensure that you are coordinating your messages. The goal of your work is to compliment, not compete with the efforts of the other fundraising groups within your organization.
3. Develop a documented communication plan. Assuming that you are already documenting a communication plans for your event, this EOY communication planning should be an addition to your overall event communications. Focus on email as the driving force behind of your year end strategy, which are reinforced through social media updates.
   
   Communication Timing: Your first email and all your website & donation form content updates should be completed on Black Friday.  Additional email updates can be scheduled sproatically through out the 6 week window.  The week between Christmas & New Year's is also critical.  Be sure to schedule an email for the last business day before New Years Eve and also for New Year's Eve. 
   
   Primary Audiences:  current participants, past participants who haven't registered, current donors and past donors who have not contributed.  It's really important that you tailor your messages based on the relationship that the prospective donor has to your event and your organization. Depending on your level of comfort with your email tools, this may require that you conditionalize content within a single email or that you send multiple emails.   
4. Socialize the your communication plan internally. This ensures that others within your organization are knowledgable of your activities and also help eliminate the chance that you might be overlapping year end communications with your other development peers. 
   
   Tip from the Pros:  Be sure to include donors to both the event's end of year campaign or your traditional giving group's campaign in your email exclusion groups.  The quickest way to annoy your donors is to send requests once they have already contributed to your organization.
5. Create your Year End campaign content. By the nature of their relationship to your event’s participants & donors have a unique reference point to your organization, you should be focusing on the unique aspects of that relationship. I'd recommend centering in on 2 for 1 nature of year end gift to peer-to-peer fundraising program. Their tax-deductible gift can supporting a loved one, while at the same time supporting your mission.  My colleague Ken Cantu posted this clever mad libs year end template to help you nail down the content basics.
   
   Unique Year End Campaign Ideas for Events:
• Email your current participants reminding them to contribute to their own fundraising
• Email last year’s donors who have not given this year encouraging them to donate this year
• Include an request to register in your email to past participants who haven't registered
• Email last year’s participants who haven’t registered this year – You can’t attend this year? Donate instead!
• Place a self donation link in the participant center  
• In emails to donors, provide a link to the participant search screen in addition to the event donation form
• Create a sense of urgency in social media posts by focusing on the # of days until New Year's


6. Build out your content. Build out emails, develop website updates and document your social media posts in advance. Many email and website content tools like Luminate Online and Sphere allow you to actually build out and schedule emails or website updates. Taking care of this during the Fall will take pressure off of creating assets in the middle of the campaign or, even better, allow you to enjoy your vacation while your Year End Campaign is on auto-pilot.
7. Embrace your inner nerd and run some reports. I’m a HUGE advocate for using data to determine campaign successful and opportunities for improvement. For Year End Campaigning, focus on comparing stats year over year stats from the specific time period that you were running the year end campaign, in theory this would be from the day after Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. Some of my favorite metrics for measuring Year end campaigns are total event fundraising, donation counts and average gift amount. Think about tracking these data points day by day basis, then overlaying your communication schedule. This will help you determine which specific messages, posts or tweets generated the most traffic for your campaign.

What are your event's plans for the end of year soliciations? We'd love to hear what has worked for you or see some of your appeals, tell me about them in the comment area below or shoot me an email at robyn.mendez@blackbaud.com.

Year End Giving for Event Fundraisers

Part 1 of 2:  Why Year End Giving is a Smart Strategy for P2P Fundraisers

Last weekend Houston experienced our first “cold front” of the fall.  I use parathesis here because “cold” for SE Texas in early September means the high temperatures were only in the lower 90’s, which I'll admit is not really cold.  While it’s still hot here, the cooling weather is a nice reminder that fall is hear and the holidays are quickly approaching.  For nonprofit orgs and higher ed institutions, cooling temps of early fall are also a reminder that year end giving is about to kick into high gear.

As an event fundraiser, I mistakenly viewed year end giving as an isolated campaign ran by our traditional giving development staff that didn’t really have anything to do with my events.  Since I was leading fall event campaigns, the holidays in November & December were a nice down time immediately following the busy event season devoted to planning and a couple weeks of well-deserved vacation time.  This was a huge missed opportunity for my events, like rejecting a stack of cash that was handed to me with pretty red bow.  My siloed thinking blinded me to the fundraising opportunity that could have bolstered my event fundraising during the last 6 weeks of the calendar year.

End-of-year giving is critical for fundraising events for two primary reasons:

1. There is a significant number of donors who are motivated by the tax-deductible nature of gift to a nonprofit organization and want to contribute before the close of the calendar year. 
2. Peer-to-peer or event fundraising provides a unique way for donors to give tax-deductible gift to a charity while also supporting a friend or family member.  It’s twice the bang for same dollar!

To further drive home the point that there is a tremendous amount of charitable giving that is taking place during this small window of time from Thanksgiving to New Years Day, I've pulled together a couple stats: 

• On average nonprofit organization received 41% of their annual contribution in the last few weeks of the year according to Charity Navigator’s Holiday Giving Guide.
• The average person makes 24% of their annual donations between Thanksgiving and New Year's, according to research from the Center on Philanthropy.

Bottom line… lots of people are donating lots of money during the last six weeks of the year. As an event fundraiser, you want that money to be supporting your event and your organization's mission. You are providing a unique and interesting opportunity for your donors through the P2P giving model that is different than your traditional giving peers.  Additionally, by taking a proactive approach to managing year end giving communications, you can help avoid situations where your event participants and event donors feel thier contributions to your event are underappreciated. 

Now that you are sold on why incorporating year end giving into your event's fundraising strategy is a smart idea, it's time to come up with a game plan to make your event the attractive option for this pool of donors. Tomorrow, I’ll be highlighting some tips & strategies to take the standard end of year giving model and flip it around to support P2P Fundraising Campaigns in a way that doesn’t compete with your participant’s fundraising efforts and also compliments the efforts of your traditional giving peers.

You Kids Stay Outta The Spam Folder

Spam. Nobody likes receiving it, nobody likes being considered a spammer. But as users of any email marketing tool can tell, sometimes constituents will mark your messages as spam anyway.

Why? Well, it goes to constituent perception. You may have heard the expression "Spam is in the eye of the beholder." If someone doesn't believe that they signed up for your list - even if they did - and it's too hard to find the unsubscribe link, then they're just as likely to hit the "REPORT SPAM" button.

As numerous procedural crime dramas have noted, the human memory can be notoriously faulty. Someone who signed themselves up for an email list can forget they did it - especially in the year 2012 when electronic and web signup forms are pervasive.

In the interests of staying out of the spam folder, here are some tips:

Problem 1 - long lag time between paper signature collection and welcome email. If you're collecting signatures on a paper petition, make sure you data-enter those names right away. If you send them to a data entry firm, they key them in upload them to the donor database and sync to your email system, 4-8 weeks can pass between the time of signature and the first welcome email. That's way too long - who will remember signing the petition at the street festival two months ago?

Solution - do data entry the next day directly into the email system. Even though it's harder to do diligent data entry every night, it will go a long way to reducing your spam rates. And you might even see an uptick in engagement and donations by the prompt followup if you strike while the iron is hot!

Problem 2 - generic welcome message that doesn't trigger the memory of having signed up. Many organizations put a lot of time into designing their welcome series, and want to get the most mileage they can out of it. When faced with a large number of new names from a specific event or online channel, it's tempting to just dump the names into the generic welcome message stream. But if the person is already having memory problems, a generic message won't help.

Solution - state the event or channel in the welcome message. Luckily, if you have a solid welcome message, you can alter it slightly. Just add an introductory paragraph - sometimes called a "love note," if it's located above the email stationery - that states "Thank you for signing up for our email list at the Earth Day 2012 Celebration in Sioux City" or "Thanks for joining our email list through the signup box on our coalition's website."

Problem 3 - can't find the unsubscribe link. Most organizations make their unsubscribe link a sutble design in the footer of the email stationery, and that's okay. But it can be hard to find, and if someone's in a hurry, they might not bother looking.

Solution - add an unsubscribe link in the body of the first paragraph. Add a sentence to your love note: "If you changed your mind and don't want to be on the list, just click here to unsubscribe." Yes, you don't WANT them to unsubscribe - but do you want an unhappy person on your list, or for them to hit the "Report Spam" button?

Put these methods into practice and monitor the results for 3-6 months. I'll bet that you'll see improvement!

What are some other ideas you've tried for reducing spam complaints?

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house that really prioritized thank you notes.  There were other things that were stressed, but I think writing thank you notes was one of the most important lessons that my mom instilled in us.  She made writing thank you notes enjoyable—good note cards, fun pens, festive stamps.  And she also saved the particularly nice or well written or beautiful thank you notes she received.
I think there is a great lesson that non-profits can learn from my mom (well, there are many lessons you can learn from her, but this one is particularly fitting).  If someone makes a donation of time or money to your organization, you should send a thank you note. 

• Consider asking board members to write thank you notes (yes, this is the online marketing and fundraiser in me suggesting handwritten notes sent offline) to major donors, sustaining donors, or first time donors. 
• Set aside 20 minutes during your next board meeting and supply the names and mailing addresses of folks who would be a good fit for a handwritten note.  I received one from another organization last month and was so pleased that there was no ask in the note, just a plain and simple thank you. This really stuck with me.
• Make sure your donation auto-responder is alive and well.  Double check that it is visually pleasing, and provides an overview of what will be done with a donation.  Make your overview tangible and very specific (“We’ll serve 71 guests dinner with your gift.”) 
• Consider the timeline of your note.  Use the one year anniversary of someone becoming a sustaining donor to thank them, or perhaps sending them an e-card thank you note on their birthday.
• Thank people over social media! If an organization gives an in kind gift, tag the group in a photo or tweet. If someone becomes a sustaining donor or a first time donor, ask to tag them and put a real face on the people who are helping to support your organization.

Why don’t my friends like me on Facebook?

...Well actually they do. But lately, I've noticed an interesting trend: I post something on Facebook that I think is fascinating, hilarious, or some deep revelation into the mysterious world of Miriam Kagan, and my social sphere reacts in...dead silence.  Failed in my effort to get instantaneous gratification at my own personal awesomeness through likes and comments, I am subsequently delighted and confused by friends who say things like "your Facebook status the other day made me laugh out loud" or "you know, it seems from your Facebook posts like your coworkers are really funny" a few days later, when we are say having coffee.

While my inner social addict silently pouts—"if you liked my status so much, why didn't you actually 'like' it and show the rest of my social universe how awesome you think I am?”— the fundraiser and strategist in me can't help but think how this kind of behavior and interaction applies to ways nonprofits are trying to engage with their constituents.

Advice abounds about tricks and tips for engaging the social sphere.  You should use certain key words. Post your comments in the form of a question.  Post photos—people like pretty things.  Ask for photos – people think they are good at taking them. Respond to comments. Retweet. Pin things.  Pin things in a very specific way. Make videos. Annotate them. Animate them.  And all of these are certainly appropriate tactics to be found in the social marketing toolkit for constituent engagement. 

The part that's still very tricky for most is measuring the impact of these activities.  So we start with the industry-wide best practices: How many people like you on Facebook? How many should? Is 10K enough, too little, too many?  Not sure?

Try calculating a ratio of how many people comment and/or like and/or share your posts divided by how many like your page.  So maybe that gets you an “engagement” ratio.  Similarly, how many retweets? Hashtag mentions? Video views? Clicks on embedded links? Conversions? If your embedded donation form isn't getting traffic, does that mean your FB page has no ROI?

A little trickier, but doable, is calculating your most engaged supporters' social media reach: if they repost your post, how big is their network? If they share your video? Retweet you?  What is your followers' average Klout score?  Metrics, metrics, metrics.

But there is a different kind of reach that is much harder to calculate:  the word of mouth/human network reach.  How do you measure the impact of motivating and activating your network offline or via word of mouth and the direct or indirect influence social media efforts are having?  How do you value the actual impact of your “inactive” social media connections? 

Marketers are certainly working hard to figure this out.  Media mix attribution models attempt to measure the relative influence of “supporting” channels to ones where an action or purchase is actually made (maybe I saw the promotion on FB but didn't click on anything, then bought an item from the catalog).  Social CRM and social media appends attempt to connect social media with constituent and consumer profiles to track integrated interactions (note: this is mostly only possible for consumers with relatively lax profile settings. As in, if you can't find me on Facebook, you can't connect me to the Miriam you have in your CRM). 

While measuring the ways humans chose to spread information and WHY on any given day they chose a specific method to do so may never be a 100% data driven, there are some additional approaches to consider in trying evaluating the indirect influence of your social media efforts:

• Qualitative research/focus groups. Basically:  if you want to know, ask people.  Put together a focus group or two.  Get a good cross section of your constituents—not just those who are most engaged, and ask them.  Does social media influence their “offline” behavior/engagement toward your organization? How? How often do they actually pay attention to your various posts/tweets/pins even if they don't do anything to let you know they are reading them?
• Qualitative research part II.  Surveys: Basically, ask people again. Online.  Use Facebook surveys. Use actual surveys. Listen to people's feedback.  “They all say they like our Twitter account, but none of them retweet any of our posts!”   Perhaps that's ok. The easiest way to fight those kinds of arguments inside your organization is to remind folks that it's important to listen to what constituents are telling you they like/need to build stickiness.  Wave those survey results around.  
• Think creatively and take advantage of indirect attribution opportunities even if you don't have a fancy attribution model (and yes, those are things are both awesome and fancy), and can't match 70% of your constituents to a social media profile. For example: think about your online donation thank you page and autoresponder.  We like to put all sorts of stuff in those: matching gift info, connecting to social media, other ways to get involved, etc. How about adding a link to a quick post-donation survey (you know, like the commercial folks do), to ask a few questions about the transaction experience...and sneak one in about anything that influenced your donation decision? If someone chooses say "Facebook", ta-da, you are able to attribute their decision-making.

And PS:  not that you asked, but my most popular Facebook post ever  (generating over 30 comments and a subsequent 5 hour debate over dinner with some friends), was from a question I remembered a professor asked us during an ethics and values class in college: “If someone handed you an envelope that had your entire future written down in it, would you open it and read it?” Would you?