Life makes sense when you look back.
Everything was already decided and I had to act with honesty.
That’s why I guess it is said - in the end it all made sense.
In 2019 when I was looking for Digital Strategy jobs a Nonprofit approached me with a consulting project. The 4-month-long project required creating a digital strategy and fundraising roadmap for the organisation.
By the end of the project, I decided to keep working in the Nonprofit field. By early 2020 I got an offer from DTV for a Digital Fundraising role. All thanks to my blog 🙂
After 2 years and 3 months, Friday was my last day at DTV India. The agency is shutting down in India for reasons that are not in their control.
The last 2 years have been an amazing time at the agency working and learning with supremely talented fundraising colleagues and bosses. Thankfully I can confidently call myself a “Digital Fundraising Consultant” who has raised money and acquired donors for NGOs in India and Asia.
In 2020 I wrote about how NGOs can create their digital journey. Looking back the post only talked about awareness and retention.
Now it’s time to share my learnings on acquiring donors digitally.
No shame in acquiring new donors
An NGO shared that they are not interested in advertising and acquiring new donors digitally since it was a cheap way of getting attention and dilutes the cause.
A nonprofit is a business even though it is for a cause. Besides digital organic reach is dead so advertise and communicate about your cause.
According to the M+R Benchmarks study 2023 - “The largest portion of ad budgets was devoted to direct fundraising. Overall, 56% of ad spending went to direct fundraising, and the range by nonprofit size was relatively small.”
Creatives
It is the soul of your campaign. Before jumping into creating more videos please ask yourself - “Why would people give to your organisation.”
Further, when you are working on a campaign idea decide the creative routes, and look for creatives from the ground that can appeal to people to take action.
Communicate about the cause rather than your organistation. “People give to the cause and the impact rather than to the organisation.”
Clear images or videos stand out but make sure you test different versions such as with captions and without captions with the appeal.
Most NGO’s communication/brand teams only want happy faces on digital but if everything is happy and good then why would people donate to the cause? Have your brand guidelines but understand how fundraising works.
Finally, A/B testing can only tell you what works for your campaign.
Fundraising routes
Generally, there are two common routes - Lead Generation and Click to Donate.
A Lead Generation campaign is a good idea to create awareness for a new campaign and collect leads or personal details.
Generally, people don’t want to exchange personal details for free. This is why a “Value Exchange” is one of the most effective lead-generation campaign ideas. In this scenario the NGO shares some valuable guide or info or gift for exchange of personal details.
Running a lead generation campaign on Meta has improved in the last year. Now you can have questions so that you are collecting qualified leads rather than spam. Also, you can run survey-based campaigns on Meta without even leaving the platform.
Click to Donate campaign is raising funds for a cause. The user clicks on the ad after getting motivated by the creative and is taken to the donation page. The rest of the donation process happens on the donation page.
If you are launching a new campaign it is good to start with building awareness and capturing leads with Lead Generation campaigns and then slowly after two months you can start the click-to-donate campaign.
Fundraising platform and Targeting
Meta is still a clear leader when it comes to raising money from digital be it India or Asia. Followed by YouTube which is still an untapped platform.
The M+R Benchmarks study shares a similar thought with Meta, Search, and Display ruling the list: “Beyond search, we see a greater divergence by group size. Large nonprofits invested more in Meta, while Small nonprofits prioritized display. As privacy changes by Apple and the deprecation of cookies continue to affect the digital ads landscape, Meta has been challenging for everyone. It may be that Small nonprofits felt these challenges more strongly than Large nonprofits, and scaled back accordingly.”
When it comes to targeting I follow a simple rule of starting with 4 ad sets:
Lookalike Audience - Creating similar audiences to the existing donor database of the NGO.
Custom Audience - Creating similar audiences to the audiences that have visited your website, social media pages, etc for a certain duration such as 3 or 6 months.
Core Audience - And two core audiences depending on the campaign and the target audience. One is broad and the other is niche.
Don’t be in a hurry to start a campaign because the moment you do the campaign goes into a “Learning Phase.”
The learning phase on Meta can take 4-5 days to a week. In the learning phase, Meta is learning about your campaign and audiences. Avoid making too many changes since every time you do the campaign goes into the learning phase and it hits your conversion.
Have patience and don’t start optimising the campaign from day one even if your client is going bonkers about ROI. Here is a useful resource on how to avoid the learning phase.
As a thumb rule, I start a click to donate campaign with 5 creatives and 4 ad sets. This way the learning phase is quick and the budgets are distributed well. And I give it a minimum of 2-3 weeks before I start optimising the campaign.
Donation page and pixel
Avoid starting a campaign without the pixel being installed on the donation page. More than reporting pixel is very important for optimising.
The donation page is the backbone of click to donate campaign so make sure it is optimised and functioning. Do some end-to-end testing before starting the campaign, so that you know the page is capturing landing views, the payment process is working and donation values are being captured.
The donation value on the donation page is important. Digital in India is a volumes game unlike TV so make sure your donation pages have donation values ranging between ₹1000-₹5000
Ideally, people in India tend to give between ₹1000-₹2000. Don’t forget to keep a minimum limit on the donation and ₹1000 is good.
Call Center
Don’t be surprised call centers play an important role in fundraising - TV and digital.
Ideally in a click to donate campaign 25-30% will be unsuccessful transactions. These drops can happen due to a slow donation page, payment gateway problems, or bank server failures. You can reach out to these potential donors via email but the results will be bleak. In a call center, the conversion chances are more if the NGO reaches out to the donor in the next 48 hours.
Similarly in a lead generation campaign having a call center integrated is a must because you need to reach out to the leads in the next 2-3 days. Otherwise, the leads are of no use.
Training the call center agents and managing them on a campaign basis is also essential for a campaign's success.
Retention is important too
One of the challenges with the acquisition campaign is that once the donor is acquired the NGO goes silent. If you have a call center then start building the conversion.
Additionally have email journeys in place so that the donors are nurtured and leads are converted to donors. So acquisition and retention go hand in hand.
I am thinking if I have missed something :) I am still learning.
Fancy hiring a Digital Fundraising Consultant for your NGO then you can reach me at prasantnaidu@gmail.com
Have a good weekend!