How to Promote Matching Gifts to Your Audience: 5 Best Practices

You’ve worked hard to build up relationships with corporate sponsors, a major donor, or compiled a matching grant application, and now you have successfully secured a matching grant for your campaign.

Hooray! Now you can sit back and watch the funds pour in. But wait! There’s a few more things you can do to ensure your matching grant gets the attention of your donors.

With a match in place, donors tend to donate 50% more, because it feels like they’ve gotten a deal and they can make twice the impact.

With this potential to raise more money from donors and from the match, how you communicate the match to your donors on your campaign site can really make an impact on your campaign.

Here’s 5 ways you can effectively communicate your matching grant to your audience and encourage the most donations from your supporters.

1. Feature Your Match

The best way to get your donors up to speed on your match is to feature it front and center on your campaign.

Too many times, I’ll be reviewing campaigns and I’ll see one line about a matching grant buried in their appeal text — text that could easily be skimmed over and organizations miss out on the great opportunity that a match provides them.

Instead, place information about your match in prominent places on your page, such as in the first sentence of your appeal (in a header size) or dedicate your site’s Sidebar to informing people about the match and all its details with a thank you to the sponsor, if applicable.

Just1, an organization that works to end human trafficking, ran a campaign called the 20 For 40 campaign which has a matching grant of $20,000, and therefore Just1 featured their match in the very title of their campaign.

This helped get their community on board for their campaign, and even helped communicate their fundraising goal, making it clear to their donors why they’ve set their goal and raising the stakes for reaching their goal.

Want to make a graphic for your page to highlight your match? Canva is a really easy tool you can use to create some colorful text that will make information about your match stand out.

2. Communicate Impact

Your matching grant’s end goal isn’t just to double the funds raised, it’s to make twice the impact — and your donors should know what twice the impact adds up to.

Using your donation tiers, impact metric, and any other messaging you want to place on the page, try to communicate the impact that each dollar raised helps to accomplish.

This will help keep your donors focused less on the money they give and more on the great impact that they’ll create with their donation.

For The Impact Metric: The impact metric allows you to tie dollars to impact, and this is particularly helpful if you’re raising funds for one item or program.

For example, on the campaign Together For Gambia, anytime someone donates $8, another care package is added to their impact metric counter.

When a match is in place, half the dollar amount needed to make one unit of impact, and the impact metric will automatically show double the impact for each donation. So instead of $8, together for Gambia would write $4 in the amount box so it counts double the care packages.

Here’s how to set up the impact metric for your campaign.

For Your Donation Tiers: Similarly, for your Donation Tiers, reflect the impact created with different levels of giving, with the match included so that donors know what impact they’re creating with each donation. It’s always beneficial to include “With your donation matched, you’ll provide X”

Here’s how you can setup your donation tiers.

For Anywhere Else: Try creating infographics or inputting any other text on the page that helps break down the impact associated with each donation.

3. Send Out An Email Pushing The Match

It’s all well and good to communicate your match on your site, but what drives them to the site in the first place is equally, if not more important.

Whether your campaign has a match for the entirety of its duration or has a smaller match for a few days, whenever the match goes live it’s important to do an email blast to let your audience know the match is in place and to drive up the urgency to contribute.

Try highlighting your match in your subject line and in the header of your email, like Schoolyard Farms did when they introduced a $500 matching gift for donations within that short timeframe:

By emphasizing to their donors that if they donate today, they’ll receive twice the funds, they’re really engaging their audience to join in and make double the impact, before the match ends. Schoolyard Farms saw a huge spike in donations that day, and it was no doubt due to their messaging around their match and their efforts to drive urgency around it.

If you have a match on your campaign and want to drive donations, here’s a few email heading ideas you can consider:

• You Can Make Double The Impact For [Insert Cause]
• Only X Days Left To Double Your Impact
• Today, Every Dollar Will Be Doubled
• Donate Once, Make Twice The Impact

4) Promote The Match On Social Media

Throughout your campaign, don’t forget to highlight the match when you promote your campaign on social media so you can keep your audience informed that your match is in place, and even give them updates on your progress towards receiving that match.

Here’s an example of how Grey2k USA promoted their match during their #GivingTuesday campaign.

There’s three ways this Grey2k post worked to inform and engage their audience in their matching campaign:

• They referenced their match in their title
• They included an image with two greyhounds, which tugs at the hearts of their audience and communicates impact.
• They added text to the image that emphasized the donor’s need to give today (on #GivingTuesday).

In your posts on social media, do your best to include images that help communicate impact, as they get more reach, engagement, and shares, and couple it with text emphasizing the match.

5) Add The Matching Donations To Your Site

Reflecting your match in your fundraising total shows just how much each donation went to create double the impact.

Your donors want to see their donations matched in your progress bar, so be sure to accurately reflect how much has been given with your match towards your fundraising total.

Depending on your match requirements, whether it’s rolling (any donations are matched), or contingent on raising a specific amount, you can still add the matching donations to your site.

For Rolling Matches (Usually From A Board Member or Major Donor): Set your goal for the full amount you want to raise with the match included. Then,using the donation total in your daily summary email notification you receive from CauseVox, add that amount as an offline donation to the campaign. The daily update will keep your progress bar reflective of the amount donated in total.

For Capital Matching Grants: Set your goal at the amount you need to raise to receive the grant, so your donors know exactly what you need from them, and it will put pressure on them to give that amount. Then, once you’ve raised the total needed, change the your goal to the total amount and add the grant as an offline donation.

Once your fundraising total reflects the full amount of the funds raised on your site, it’ll be really satisfying to your donors to see their donations actually be doubled!

By taking these 5 steps to communicate your matching grant, you can ensure you’re effectively reaching your audience to build excitement around your campaign and encourage more donations!