Three Types of Effective Campaign Communication

How do successful fundraising campaigns communicate? What makes them effective and fundraising or not effective? After examining fundraising campaigns that have been successful, we’ve developed three categories of communication that they use:

1. Updates – This is commonly in the form of mass communication to your support base — usually email newsletters and blog posts. It includes announcing the campaign and giving updates on progress. Most successfully non-profits give updates weekly via email, and daily via social media.

Ex. Campaign launch announcement and weekly emails.

2. Appreciation – This can be mass or individualized. Mass communication usually is used at the end of the campaign to show appreciation to both advocates (your fundraisers) and donors. We’ve seen the best campaigns give individualized appreciation to high-performing advocates as well as large donors within a week of identification. Appreciation communication usually happens via email, social media, and in some cases, phone or face to face.

Ex. “Thank you John Smith for helping our campaign raise $2000!”

3. Encouragement – This type of communication is usually individualized. It is focused on rallying advocates to continue fundraising for the campaign as well as to rally donors to give their donation.

Ex. “Sara, this is the last week of the campaign…help us with one last push to your friends and family?”

In peer-to-peer fundraising, running a successful campaign is all about coaching your advocates to become fundraisers. Use these three types of communication to really spur them to action.