Digital fundraisers have gained a lot of popularity in recent years and not without due reason either. They allow nonprofits to raise funds faster and reach a wider audience beyond the limitations of a physical event. It’s still a relatively new concept for a lot of people of course, albeit with near limitless potential. Perhaps the best part about digital fundraisers is the fact that almost anyone can get started, even if they don’t have prior experience with conducting fundraiser events online. This post will highlight a few major points and tips to help that process of initiation along.
Choosing the Right Online Donation Platform
The choice was quite limited even five years back, but there are quite a few good online donation platforms available to nonprofits in the States. To make the right choice, shortlist your options to include only the legitimate, verified, and best reviewed online donation platforms available. Now, compare the plans, features, pricing, fees, marketing tools, reliability, etc. to further narrow down your options.
You should only be left with a handful of online donation platforms now, but there’s still a final choice to be made. Fundraising Brick points out that PayPal for non profit fundraising is an excellent option because PayPal Giving Fund is legitimate, verified, and has an international presence. The linked post is a complete guide on the very best online donation platforms, so you will find the pros and cons of other popular digital donation platforms listed there as well.
Creating an Online Presence for the Brand/Campaign
To create an online presence for any organization these days, social media marketing strategies hold crucial importance. The planning and execution of branding/marketing campaigns for each individual fundraiser must be boosted by content (backed by stats) from the NPO’s previous successful fundraiser events.
For established NPOs with a big fundraiser event in the making, it is common practice to create a small new site that’s entirely dedicated towards promoting and hosting the upcoming digital event.
In case the NPO is a new one, more effort will be required to first establish their name, goals, origins etc., in a positive light. There is no shortage of fake and fraudulent nonprofits on the internet, so people must be able to verify the NPO’s legitimacy. The main site should encourage the same by making it easier for them to do so with clickable links to the authorization websites.
Promoting the Fundraiser
Promoting a fundraiser and marketing a product essentially follow the same avenues and core rules, but the execution will be different. Include as many of the following avenues of promoting your event online as the budget allows:
- Google Ad Grants: Google Ad’s specialized wing for promoting nonprofits, their causes, and their fundraiser events on the search engine.
- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and even TikTok has specialized tools for promoting digital/traditional fundraisers on their respective social media platforms.
- Go beyond just Google and try to optimize other search engines (SEO) such as DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Ask.
It is not uncommon for a situation to arise where the NPO is at significant risk of putting too much money into promoting their event and overspending. In such instance, it is better to keep the avenues of promotion limited with better concentration of funds and effort.