Everyone knows that effective communication with donors is essential to successful online fundraising. But you may be left wondering what effective communication on the internet looks like. Between website copy, social media, emails, and more, there are so many avenues for reaching out to donors. How can you make sure that your communication with donors is helping you bring in gifts?
Nathan Hill is the VP of Marketing at NextAfter, fundraising consulting research lab and institute on a mission to unleash generosity. Nathan has trained hundreds of nonprofit professionals in communication, fundraising, websites, and emails for organizations both big and small. In a recent webinar, Nathan gave us some tips for effective communication with donors.
Through their experiments, Nathan and NextAfter have found that the single most important piece of communication determining a donor’s likelihood to give is the value proposition. But before we jump into how to write an effective value proposition, let’s take a look at how we think about our donors.
Nonprofits and businesses have a tendency to think in terms of donor or customer funnels. The pattern will probably sound familiar: a large group of email recipients results in a smaller group of website visitors, resulting in an even smaller number of donations.
The trouble with this line of thinking is that it does not account for the conversions and donations that you are failing to get. It also assumes that some natural force will pull donors through the process of giving, much like gravity pulls water through a funnel. In reality, giving is a journey that involves a lot of work and many distractions along the way.
Nathan at NextAfter recommends thinking of donor experience as a mountain. Your job as a nonprofit is to get the donor to say yes to a series of decisions until they ultimately make the decision to give.
With your donors, you should be playing the role of the sherpa as you guide them along the path of fundraising online. At each step, from clicking on your email, to visiting your site, to making a donation, your goal is to get them to say “yes.”
Attracting and retaining major donors is a top priority for all nonprofit organizations. We’ve put together a free workshop to help you with this process. But communication is key and there’s no better way to communicate donor impact than with a value proposition.
Now that we know the most effective way to think about our donors, let’s talk about the best way to communicate with them. Nathan and NextAfter have helped nonprofits find greater success fundraising online with powerful value propositions. This pivotal idea deserves a clear definition. But before we talk about what a value proposition is, let’s be clear about what it’s not.
A value proposition is not your organization’s mission statement, which tends to be internally focused, rather than donor-focused. Your value proposition is also not an incentive. Incentives make donors think about themselves rather than what they can give to the organization.
The ideal value proposition answers one crucial question. If I am your ideal donor, why should I give to you rather than some other organization (or at all)?
Maximizing your online fundraising means answering this question as often as possible in donor-facing communications like websites, social media, and emails.
Here’s that crucial question once again: If I am your ideal donor, why should I give to you rather than some other organization (or at all)? By breaking the question into parts, we can unpack what makes value propositions such an effective tool for fundraising online.
Now that we know the purpose of the value proposition for fundraising online, let’s review the four essential elements for a value proposition.
There are four elements that you should include when writing your value proposition. Making sure all four elements are in place will ensure that you are effectively communicating donor impact to encourage donations.
Keeping these four essential elements in mind as you are drafting and reviewing your value proposition will make it easier for you to ensure that you are effectively communicating with your audience. If you already have a value proposition written, you can use these elements to evaluate its relative strengths and weaknesses.
The simplest way to evaluate your own value proposition and how well it serves you as a tool for fundraising online is to turn to those four essential elements above. For each one, ask yourself how successful your value proposition would be for a potential donor.
You may find that you have a clear and exclusive appeal that does not meet the credibility criteria. That realization should guide your revisions so that you can target those specific components of your value proposition that are failing to perform.
You can also take a look at other organizations to evaluate their approach to value propositions and how you can use theirs as inspiration (or not). Here are two examples that Nathan at NextAfter showed during our recent webinar.
Knowing what we now know about value propositions, we can see that Save the Children could improve theirs by making it more specific to improve the appeal and credibility. However, their copy included with their gift tiers does clearly convey the exclusivity of their mission.
Buckner could improve their value proposition for their newsletter by strengthening the appeal, the exclusivity of their offer, the clarity of their copy, and their credibility.
Donors want to know how their gift will further the mission of your organization. The most effective way to communicate this information is through a value proposition. Use the strategies above to write a winning value proposition and maximize your online fundraising.
CauseVox offers customizable donation pages that let you add your value proposition directly onto your site. Your donation page not only allows you to convey your value proposition to donors, but it is also central to your whole online fundraising effort. Here are a few suggestions for building a winning donation page.
Get started now for free on building a donation page that converts with CauseVox!
Ever wished your donations could go even further? Enter automated matching—an indispensable tool that transforms…
Chances are, you know what Giving Tuesday is by now. However, it's important to recognize…
Here at CauseVox, we love a good success story. And we couldn’t think of a…
Do you ever go grocery shopping and see a product that feels like it was…
Hosting your own giving day is a powerful way to amplify your mission. At CauseVox,…
From Giving Tuesday to World Diabetes Day, giving days stand out as events that bring…