2020 State of Nonprofit Digital Giving
Insights on SEO, donation process, email cultivation and why LinkedIn is more relevant than Facebook from Bigwidesky’s Nonprofit State of Digital Giving Study
Shall we start our conversation or rather a one-way conversation by analysing two interesting data sets:
Only 19% of nonprofits use lightboxes (email signup, event promotion, donation asks, and other popups), and only 24% of nonprofits ask for a donation in their homepage hero.
Really 57% of nonprofits are not asking about donation at a place where it should be and then we keep cribbing digital is not giving returns.
96% of nonprofits sent their first email the same day as the first donation was made, albeit a bland templated receipt in nearly all cases. 62% of nonprofits sent no email after that first one and 59% did not use direct mail as a communication channel.
62% of nonprofits are only interested in money and these are the same people who will go mad with donor retention.
I started 2021 by sharing three key areas nonprofits should invest in 2021. Two of them are effective communications and building online donation infrastructure. The above two data sets strengthen my belief more.
By the way above data set is part of the extensive study Bigwidesky initiated in the spring of 2020 - The Nonprofit State of Digital Giving Study.
This year the organization selected 100 random U.S.- based nonprofits. Donated to these nonprofits, signed up for emails, followed them on social media, and opted for their calls and text messages when offered. Additionally, this year the study also collected myriad information about all of these nonprofit websites and who linked to them.
Organic search algorithms have a bias toward showing searchers brands they recognize, and social media news feed algorithms (Facebook specifically) are biased toward showing posts from individuals rather than pages. This means small- and medium-sized nonprofits have a hard time getting seen online.
And here are my learnings from the report.
SEO and backlinks - the state and role it plays
The study mentions that one of the key pieces to increasing visibility (and therefore be found in online search) is getting other high-quality and topically relevant websites to link to yours. “Unfortunately, in our study, we found that the median number of websites linking to the typical nonprofit is 658. For comparison, the largest nonprofits have 25,000 different websites linking to them.”
When we talk about backlinks it is important to talk about Domain Authority or Rating. This is a number on a 0-100 scale with the lowest quality websites having scores closer to 0 and higher quality websites having scores closer to 100. Ideally, a small or a medium nonprofit would love to get referred by a publication or a larger nonprofit with a better domain rating.
The study finds out nearly 50% of websites linking to nonprofits have Domain Ratings of 10 or less.
In fact, 78% of all websites linking to nonprofits have Domain Ratings of 50 or less, and only 5% have Domain Ratings of 81 or greater. This means that no effective value is generated by these links, so these links contribute little or nothing to help a nonprofit show up in search results.
Over the years Google has evolved in how it treats backlinks and ranking of content and overall website. Early last year Backlinko studied 912 million blog posts to better understand the world of content marketing.
The report highlighted that when it comes to acquiring backlinks, long-form content significantly outperforms short blog posts and articles. Content longer than 3000 words gets an average of 77.2% more referring domain links than content shorter than 1000 words.
E-A-T or Expertise Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are the three pillars that Google wants its search to be based upon. The 175-page guide talks about E-A-T on page 20.
“Think about the topic of the page. What kind of expertise is required for the page to achieve its purpose well? The standard for expertise depends on the topic of the page.”
So how do you acquire backlinks from a trusted website or with a higher domain ranking site?
Create and curate reliable content consistently. Getting backlinks isn’t an easy task and get ready to run a marathon. Do occasional guest posts on trusted websites related to your domain. There is no short cut. But always remember to create value for readers because Google wants a better internet.
And when you have nothing to say just be quiet, don’t act smart.
Read how to keep Google Search happy in 2021 and follow the expert Backlinko.
Don’t screw your donation process
Fundraising is the number one objective for nonprofits. But I fail to understand how nonprofits keep ignoring this basic step.
This year the study finds that only 19% of nonprofits use a lightbox (aka a popup or modal) that asks for funds, and only 24% ask for donations in the hero area of their homepage.
You have to ask for the donation to get the donation, and research indicates that less than 50% of nonprofits are asking in a clear and obvious way. “Our years of testing website CTAs have consistently shown that using a lightbox and asking for donations in the homepage hero both have statistically valid positive impacts on conversion rates, total donations, and revenue.”
While asking for a donation in a clear and simple format is the rational thing but most nonprofits go behind the glamour and create unnecessary anxiety for the donor.
“We found that 10% of nonprofits use auto-playing videos in the homepage hero and another 37% use auto-rotating homepage heroes.”
When you auto-play a video on a webpage, you make the CTA “watch this video.” When you auto-rotate your homepage hero, you draw the viewer’s attention to the auto-rotation. What if the visitor wanted to make a donation to the donation CTA that showed first, but then it rotated and now they’re looking at information about your upcoming banquet? The donor is now distracted. The autorotation has diverted their attention away from what was there first or what they might have otherwise wanted to look at.
In doing such jazzy things you are unnecessarily increasing the website load time and Google will be really pissed. Imagine doing this on mobile and you have pissed a prospective donor with your jazzy and unnecessary popups.
And say NO to plugins as much as possible, they might be easy to plug and play but they screw the website load time. Hire a developer and get it coded rather than going for free options. FREE will always create nightmares.
Finally don’t be dumb and ask a donor to connect to a dead or inactive donation page. Last year Bigwidesky attempted to make 100 online first-time donations and here are the results: “92 donations were a success, 5 linked to donation pages that did not exist and 3 organizations said the gift went through, but no charge appeared on the card.”
“This year 8% of nonprofits linked to donation forms that either did not exist or did not function. When we clicked on the upper right donate button, we were redirected to a 404 page. Or worse yet, we found that the donation page existed, but when we entered our information and hit submit our credit card was never charged. This year, 7% of nonprofits had this problem,” informed the study.
Think of it how many potential donors a nonprofit is missing out on its own mistakes.
Email - the medium for trust and conversations
Last year when Bigwidesky did their first study they found out that off 92 successful donations, 91 organizations emailed a receipt. “Every organization that emailed a receipt sent it on the same day the gift was made. 65 nonprofits sent a receipt email with no significant thank you messaging or any other information other than transaction details.”
This year according to the study: “96% of nonprofits sent an email the same day the donation was made. 66% of nonprofits sent just this one email. A further 22% sent 2 emails. In most cases weirdly enough, this was a basic, templated receipt and then another more letter-like receipt, but again with no substantial thank you or welcome information… just another receipt really.”
Additionally, after that one email of thank you, 62% of nonprofits didn’t bother to have any communication with the donors. Only 3% averaged more than 5 emails per month.
“You’ve worked really hard to get a prospect to not only come onto your email file but also give. Congrats! So now what? This is where the real opportunity begins: getting them to stay engaged and potentially make a second gift. But how do you do this?
Through a new donor welcome series,” said Courtney Gaines from NextAfter while stressing the importance of “New Donor Welcome Series”
Don’t treat email as a tool for blasting your message or asking for money. Treat it as a tool for cultivating a one to one relationship. I am not saying that write individual emails to your entire email list. This is where Email Segmentation comes into play. You decide who needs to get a more personalised email.
But whatever it be, make sure you are active in communicating with your donors. Otherwise, they will remain your one-time donor.
LinkedIn is the network for small and medium nonprofits, not Facebook
This year’s study makes it clear that Facebook’s News Feed algorithm makes it nearly impossible for your nonprofit to be seen unless you’re advertising. Even then, it’s difficult to be seen.
“Fortunately, we did find, however, that it’s much easier to be seen organically on LinkedIn. The same was true of Twitter in certain cases.”
27% of nonprofits advertise on Facebook, and despite this, there is only a 0.18 correlation between an organization’s revenue and whether or not they advertise there. Because on Facebook you’re competing against the likes of McDonald’s and REI and political campaigns and who knows what else.
“While Facebook is huge and our experience has been that advertising there generally has positive returns, the numbers consistently cause us to question if you are really best served to invest your time on Facebook— especially if you are investing in organic tactics that are getting you a 0.2% engagement,” says the study.
This year the platform that has worked so far has been LinkedIn for smaller and medium nonprofits. Only 23% of nonprofits link from their websites to a LinkedIn page. The median number of followers nonprofits have is 568, and there is a 0.69 correlation between an organization’s revenue and whether or not they run LinkedIn ads.
Despite the fact that LinkedIn is 1/10th the size of Facebook, one can imagine a large nonprofit that spends perhaps $100,000 per year in Facebook ads only spend 10-20% of that on LinkedIn.
The study finds that “A small- or medium-sized nonprofit might very well be able to compete effectively against much larger organizations both organically and with ads on LinkedIn as compared to a place like Facebook or Instagram.”
Last year I had an opportunity to listen to the thoughts of Eric Pratum - Head of Digital Strategy at Bigwidesky and the brain behind this study.
One thing that stayed with me was his simple insight - “Deliver what you can.”
“If you create an email program, you better be good at delivering an email experience. If you create social media accounts, you better be active in those places.”
This year in the author’s note he writes:
“Please don’t go crazy with new or less common marketing and communications tactics. At the same time, evaluate what you’re doing now and determine if you’re really getting an appreciable benefit from your activities.”
Additionally: “ If you don’t understand SEO or CRO, start googling. You really can have a legitimate positive impact on your organization without requiring that you master a specialized field of marketing.”