2012 Year End Giving Begins Now!
That’s the headline that attracted me to blogger Mark Marshall’s latest post.
I expected Mark to be making a point about building relationships. Your year-end giving isn’t simply a response to some clever tactics dreamed up in October and executed from mid-November on. Those tactics are simply tapping into a (hopefully deep) reservoir of donor interest and commitment that your organization should have been nurturing for months.
However, Mark focused on something more narrow … sharpening your online giving strategy.
To be sure, heaps of donations have passed digitally into nonprofit coffers over the past 3-4 weeks.
By now, you’ve probably counted it … compared it to your projections (resulting in high-fives or gulps) … and even compared it to last year’s results (which, as Mark points out — citing Blackbaud — were up 34.5% in 2010 over 2009 for the sector … a high benchmark to beat).
I hope your next step will be to identify exactly what worked and what didn’t with your year-end online campaign. What is there to learn … and fix? Especially with regard to your conversion effectiveness at every step along the online giving process — from initial response (e.g., email subject lines and use of URLs in mail packages) to close (e.g. capture rate of your landing pages).
While the largest chunk of online giving still occurs at year-end, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table during the year, starting with your first online appeal of 2012, if you don’t attend to these learnings right now.
Mark is right about that.
But all the ‘fixes’ are just that … tightening the nuts and bolts. Don’t forget that the fixes still ultimately rest on the bedrock of donor commitment, which some nonprofits enjoy far more than others (as we’ve reported here).
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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