Ep 275 | Engaging Others To Help You Raise More Money

Fundraising is more fun with friends. Bring along your volunteers, team, board, and more to help carry the load and make the most of your year end giving.

What you'll learn:

→ How to engage your board, volunteers, and donors to support your year-end campaign
→ Specific ways to get your board members involved (beyond just setting a fundraising goal)
→ The power of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns
→ Ideas for partnering with corporate sponsors and utilizing volunteers

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[03:37] Get specific with your board. We don't just want to say, hey, here's our year end fundraising goal. Who can you reach out to? It's Hey, we have a goal of every board member introducing us to five new people for year end so that we can send them this particular mailer.
[04:56] Create a promo kit. This promo kit includes sample email language, sample social media, copy, imagery, all of the things that are going to make it easy for your board members to click, copy, share.
[06:15] Who can you reach out to that you know is just obsessed with your organization and may or may not be giving this year? They likely want to help make a bigger impact but haven't been asked in a way that makes sense. All it takes is an ask.
[08:15] Create fun and unique ways to encourage people to give How can you maybe get fun with it? Gamefication works well here!
[09:42] Dedicated volunteers can make phone calls to existing donors, providing a personal touch and sharing information about the organization. Starting phone call campaigns now can help build relationships and secure donations before the end of the year.

Resources

EP 68 | Using Your Existing Audience to Promote For You

Full Transcript

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Let's face it, fundraising is more fun when we do it with a group of people, right? We don't want to do it by ourselves. And so as we gear up for year end fundraising, I've got some ideas for you so that you can involve more people in your fundraising campaign help lift the load and keep things moving forward, so you can have your best year end fundraising yet. So that is what we are going to talk about in this episode of the digital marketing therapy podcast. But before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by our September freebie. If you need your year end donation checklist, we've got you covered. Download our guide at thefirstclick.net/resources, to hear or read about all the things that you should be putting into place in order to plan, execute and follow up on your year end fundraising campaign, it will have you putting your goals together, thinking about how you're going to follow up with your donors once they join you, and how you can create and craft beautiful stories that engage and encourage people to come alongside you. So again, you can get this and all of our other freebies at thefirstclick.net/resources, let's get into the episode.

Intro
You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
So when it comes to our year end fundraising, we know that there's opportunities for a few things. One, to re engage, engage and get repeat donations from our existing audience, and also reach out to and engage with new donors that might be new to us have thought about us but never given to us before. And so we have lots of opportunities to build new relationships and grow our existing ones. And how we do that is the question mark, right? It's a lot of work, and it's during the holidays when we know that our team and ourselves are wanting to spend time with friends and family as well. I mean, Giving Tuesday is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Like there's a lot of things that need to come into play, so let's involve and engage our teams, our board, our volunteers and our hero donors, to help us kind of lift the load and make it easier. Now this doesn't mean that you aren't still going to have to do the work, pick up the phone, send the letters, all the things, right? But how can we use our existing audience to help us cast a wider net, and we also know that we are more likely to engage and interact with content from people that we know versus a brand or an organization that we don't have a close relationship with. So what are we going to do? Here's some ideas. Number one is really get specific with your board. We don't just want to say, hey, here's our year end fundraising goal. Who can you reach out to? It's Hey, we have a goal of every board member introducing us to five new people for year end so that we can send them this particular mailer, right asking them specific questions, and not necessarily around and ask. So we're not saying, hey, I want you to pick up the phone and call five people and ask them for $500 you could do that also, and that could work really well, but remember that some of your board members are not necessarily going to want to do that. That's going to feel awkward, and that's not their best skill set.

But if you said, Hey, could you get me five or mailing addresses for people that you think would be interested in our cause so that we can email or send them our direct mail piece. That's very different. And so think about specific ways that you can engage with your board to make asks of the right people for the right skill set that they have to support your organization when it comes to your year end fundraising campaign. I also like to create a promo kit, and we'll link up that episode in the show notes. I don't have it on the top of my head, but we'll link up the episode for promo kits in the in the show notes, this promo kit includes sample email language, sample social media, copy, imagery, all of the things that are going to make it easy for your board members to click, copy, share, right? That's what we want to do. We want to make it easy for them. And I think that's where a lot of times we say, well, the board doesn't engage, or they don't want to do it, or they won't do it. If we make it difficult, if we just say, hey, here's our year end fundraising goal. Go ask people it's harder if you give them a specific task list, they're going to be ready to go, and they'll enjoy checking that off. Make it fun. Make it a competition. Create some things leading up in the October, November, December, board meetings that are festive and fun and competitive. Hey, who brought in the most? Don't. Owners who brought in the most money, who brought in the most new donors, you know, things like that that you can kind of have fun with, give prizes, have a big banquet, whatever it might be, but really be specific and be intentional with how they are approaching year end fundraising.

You can do the exact same thing with your volunteers and staff, but just keep in mind that the closer they are to the organization, the more engaged they are and be hyper specific. The next thing that I would love for you to try, number two, is to create a peer to peer fundraising campaign strategy. So who can you reach out to that you know is just obsessed with your organization, and this has nothing to do with their capacity to give, right? This is what I think is so beautiful about peer to peer, is that if we can reach out to the people that we know are real champions of our organization, who are the ones shouting about us, to the community, who are always wanting to figure out how they can do more to support you, those folks are the ones that we want to reach out to, to set up peer to peer campaigns and say, Hey, how would you be willing to share this link? To run a Facebook fundraiser? To run maybe you have the capacity to do it through your donation software. We'll give you all of the materials, we'll give you all the assets, we'll give you all the language. All you have to do is share it with your friends and family and have some fun with it and raise money. They get the accolades. They get, the good, warm fuzzies of knowing that they helped to support you, and they don't have to give you any more money. They can if they want to, and maybe they will with their own campaign, but it's just a way for them to support your organization without having to financially. So again, great for those heroes that maybe don't have a huge capacity to give, but also great for those donors that do have big capacity to give, and also have big capacity donors friends, right?

So think about maybe they're going to run a campaign, and their goal is for their friends and families. They're going to raise $2,500 but you know that they have capacity, and their friends have capacity for a lot more. Now is your chance to get them in the door. They're giving because their friend is somebody that they trust, and this is a cause that they're super excited about. They give a little gift, maybe it's only $500 you now have an in now you can nurture them. Now you can send them all of the impact reports and the emails and connect with them and start to build that relationship, because they've given you that gift, so it can connect you to people of higher capacity, net worth and capacity for giving with with kind of a easier entry point, right? Because you're not the one reaching out. They're being reached out to by a friend or a family. So peer to peer campaigns can be super fantastic. Now, I also love around year end, reaching out to all of your corporate sponsors and figuring out, how can you create a fun campaign within their employee base, right? How can you maybe get fun with it? You know, is it a food drive? Is it like everybody bring in $1 on this day, whatever it might be. But how can you kind of connect with your corporate sponsors and say, Hey, we know that your employees want to give back during the holiday season. How can we have some fun and think outside the box? Get creative and again, bring in new donors. The beauty of this is, if we can bring in a lot of donors at smaller amounts, now you have a whole pool of people that you can be reaching out to, connecting with and working with in the year ahead.

Now, yes, of course, we still want to be having some of those conversations with our higher givers and our repeat donors, and so now is the time to also find those dedicated volunteers that you know are great on the phone and they can start making phone calls. It's not too early to start. I would say, start now. Start having phone calls with people. Start making your list, writing your scripts and enlisting shifts of people to come in and make phone calls on your behalf. Yes, this could be board, this could be staff, but volunteers are great for this, and have them just make phone calls and check in and just say, Hey, how are you doing? I would love to just share with you a little bit more about what our organization is up to these days. Could I send you something in the mail? Yeah, sure. Great. Send them a little card with some information that obviously has an ask, but now they've had a personal touch. They've gotten it a little bit of an impact piece, and they're ready to go. So that is my number three. Are we on three anyway?

When it comes to your year end, giving, really think about how you can get creative and enlist as many people as possible to make phone calls, to connect, to reach out to their audiences and new audiences, to bring in donations, big and small, so that you are not just focusing on. On what are we going to be raising at year end? I get that that's really important. But also, how are we building our base of donors so that we can increase our donor base and our donor retention and our donations in the year to come? And that is my quick tip for this episode. As we talk through year end giving in the month of September, you can find the show notes and additional resources like the podcast that I mentioned that I don't know where it is at thefirstclick.net/275, I hope that you will really think about how you can engage with others to help you raise more money this holiday season. If you have ideas that you think other nonprofits should know about, hit me up at Hello at the firstclick.net Thank you so much for listening. I hope you subscribe. Wherever you listen or watch. We are here for you every week, and I can't wait to finish rounding out our year end giving month with you again. Don't forget to check out the resources in our year end giving checklist at thefirstclick.net/resources, see in the next one you.