For successful short term fundraising campaigns, the typical rate of donations chart looks like this.

There is a higher rate in the beginning and end, with a slight leveling out in the middle. In other words, most short-term campaigns slow down in the middle of the campaign.

This is typical across many of nonprofits. We call the plateau the mid-campaign lull. It is scary because your rate of donations is decreasing. For the first-timers, you might think your campaign is failing.

Many times, the lull is caused by fundraisers and donors saving their efforts for the end of the camapign. …

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Understanding your support base is one of the three foundations of a successful campaign. We talk about this strategy framework in a previous post.

The most effective fundraising is based on relationships. Understanding supporters is building relationships. It gives you insight into why they love your non-profit, what draws them in, and how to best rally and communicate with them.

So what tools are out there to help you understand your support base and capture that information? Here’s a run down of a few that we love:

Wufoo – Wufoo is the easiest to use survey tool out there. It …

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In a previous post we talked about how supporter personas can help you communicate better your non-profit’s supporters. Another tool, an Empathy Map, helps you get into the minds of supporters. The Empathy Map helps you develop a better understanding of the environment, behavior, concerns, and aspirations that affect your supporters; this understanding helps shape communications so that supporters can better connect with your non-profit.

The Empathy Map was developed by XPLANE, an information design consultancy. The authors of Business Model Generation do a great job of illustrating how an Empathy Map works, and we’ve summarized it for your …

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In non-profit online fundraising, better engagement with your supporters starts first by developing a deep understanding them. One tool that helps make this happen is a supporter persona.

Supporter personas are a small set of fictitious profiles of supporters that represent your support base. These personas contain information about a supporter’s behavior. This may include their expectations, attitudes, environment, and goals. Often time, these personas also include a fictitious name and photo as well as a few personal details to bring the persona to life.

Personas should be based on research and represent similar types of real supporters. As a …

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Engaging your supporters starts by understanding them. This understanding helps you craft better messages to help them take action. In this two part series, we discuss two tools that will help make your message more relevant to supporters.

1. Supporter Personas – a small set of fictitious profiles of supporters that represent your support base. Personas are used to tailor communications and messaging.

2. Empathy Maps – a simple profiler that helps you develop an understanding of a supporter’s environment, behavior, concerns, and aspirations.

Tune in to our next blog post about personas, the first method in making your message …

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Campaign strategy is the intersection of objectives, supporters, and internal capacity. In the previous post, we presented an overview of this strategy framework for online campaigns. In the next few posts, we’ll be diving into each of the components.

Objectives is the first component of campaign strategy; they describe the intended result or outcome of an effort. Objectives are the target and the foundation for keeping track of campaign progress. When planning your campaign, first define your objectives; they’re what keep the campaign grounded.

Your objectives should be “SMART“:

1. Specific
Objectives should be focused, clear, and unambiguous. …

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“Who do we target?”
“What is our message?”
“How do we set our goals? What are our goals?”

These are just a few of the strategy questions that go into the planning of an online fundraising campaign. Strategy guides the campaign, presents a holistic view of issues, and cultivates a specific direction for the campaign. A framework is simply a way to think.

Our goal is for each of you to have the best fundraising campaign possible, so we developed a Strategy Framework to help you make this happen. Here’s a way to visualize this line of thought:

The intersection …

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Supporter-driven fundraising is a method of fundraising that enables a non-profit’s supporter to champion and raise funds on the non-profit’s behalf within each supporter’s personal networks.

Synonyms include: peer-to-peer, distributed, and networked fundraising

With supporter-driven fundraising. a non-profit’s support base is expanded past what is managed by the non-profit and into the new personal networks of existing supporters.…

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