Digital fundraising is constantly evolving and it is important to stay on top of emerging trends and take advantage of new tools. As technology has made it easier for even the smallest organizations to communicate with potential donors, voluntary organizations are finding various inventive ways to fundraise. Digital fundraising campaigns have become an innovative model for organizations to create attractive events as a strategy to engage with donors in the 21st century. Digital fundraising mediums like direct mail, phone solicitation, events, email appeals, online donation forms, social media ads, search ads, and peer-to-peer fundraising are modifying themselves with new digital advancements.
Following interesting trends in digital fundraising are greatly helping fundraisers to attract more donators, making them donate a good amount of money.
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Virtual Reality
In a disaster prone area, if a non-profit organization want to raise funds for assisting affected people then Virtual Reality can be used to bring a deep sense of empathy and realism to non-profit fundraising programs. Looking around a village wasted by a natural disaster, donors can see the actual need. Fundraisers can broadcast the field conditions live to attract more donors. Early reports show that the virtual reality experience will increase brand recognition, which means that the fundraising organization will remain reserved in the donor’s mind for future donations. The experience of being at the field site and seeing things up close can help to build donors trust as well.
Coming to companies of products, solutions, and services, they can post a guided tour VR video of their offerings and company’s growth so that the investors or donors can understand about the current situation of the company.
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Mobile-Optimized Marketing Campaign
According to a report, 24 percent of all online donations were made on a mobile device in 2017. As this number increases, it is important for fundraisers to have a mobile responsive website and emails. If the fundraiser’s website is not accessible to users from their smartphones, they will not likely to come to their website again when they sit on a PC. Making donation forms, donation buttons, and fundraising toolkits mobile friendly is a real benefit for fundraisers. Likewise, this makes it easy for participants to access information about the fundraiser. One way to track how much traffic the website is getting from mobile devices is to look at the Google Analytics metrics. If more than 20 percent of online donations are mobile, it’s important to ensure that all of the company’s marketing efforts are mobile-friendly.
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Marketing Automation
Campaign management is a repetitive task where fundraisers need to perform activities including e-mails, website analysis, and marketing. Most of the times these tasks are performed manually, but due to Marketing Automation this work has become much easier and in turn helps to grow the business. Marketing automation is a component of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). There are numerous marketing automation tools and platforms that are available in the market to automate these tasks. The software creates personalized appeals and puts potential givers on customized pathways into the organization.
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Multi-Step Donation Forms
Multi-step donation forms break up the tiresome donation process into simple chunks, resulting in a superior user experience. These forms also have the benefit of being far more mobile-friendly and visually attractive than regular, single-step forms. One can strip away all the unnecessary navigation elements and put a slick, attractive step-by-step form with no distraction and complex graphics. Adding unnecessary fields in a donation form simply makes it more complex and frustrating. A shorter form is easier to fill out and less intimidating.
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Contextual Communications For Every Donor
Making personalized quotes according to donors’ capabilities will help to incline their will of donation because showing a gift array of $25 to the person who can donate millions is the act of ignorance. For instance, tech giants like Netflix, Amazon etc. show the contents as per the users’ interests. If someone watches action movies, Netflix does not show the contents of the drama genre. In the same way, Amazon uses such technology to customize the shopping experience for the user. By collecting the data and utilizing the right technologies, one can make recommendations especially personalized for the donors at the individual level. The technology is called as cookies. Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that website use to transfer to user’s computer hard drive through the web browser. It enables website system to recognize user’s browser and provide features such as Recommended for you, personalized advertisement on other websites, etc.
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Social Media As a Fundraising Platform
According to reports on social media fundraising, 92% of NGOs use Facebook and 34% actually pay for social advertisements. Social media is a digital pathway to find new donors and a place to stay engaged with existing ones. It plays a big brother role in fundraising and can lead to enormous possibilities when it comes to starting a new campaign for fundraising. Running a campaign or event needs it to be shared on popular social media like Facebook and/or Twitter. Posting at least once a week before the campaign or event goes live can help to gain more audience on the campaign page. Moreover, after starting the fundraising campaign, one should plan to share it at least once a day to create a sense of urgency. Posting updates can be a great way to entice potential donors to get in on the action. This can really help to achieve the desired target.
If one looks at the digital fundraising landscape, many fundraisers still use traditional methods like direct mail, but such methods were popular five years ago. Prioritizing the fundraising channels is important, as there are maximum opportunities to obtain more donations online. The opportunities that digital platform possess are colossal, which are more efficient and personalized for fundraisers. Fundraisers can utilize big tech trends like digital wallets, biometrics and digital assistants for better security and assurance. Digital platforms are growing and adding more potential in digital fundraising. With the right strategy and direction, digital fundraisers can make the process easier and beneficial to achieve most of their targets.
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