Digital Fundraising for Beginners

This one-day interactive, online session is designed to provide fundraisers with tips and advice on how to make the most of the current digital fundraising landscape. In this short blog we will cover some of the highlights from the course to give you a flavour of what attendees can expect.

The session is split into two sections: digital marketing and digital fundraising. For both sections the content is tailored to ensure that attendees have a specific project or campaign in mind to apply the learning to. We start the session by thinking about what your charity’s end goal is. This could be to reach the most people (e.g., awareness raising), to sign up a specific type of person, to sign up people in large numbers, lifetime value versus short-term transactional value or to ensure the best return on investment.

The first area of marketing we explore is search engine optimisation (SEO) – the art and science of getting webpages to rank higher on search engines – and paid search – often referred to as PPC (Pay Per Click) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and are the ads that are returned at the top of a search.

As we explore, there are three ways to improve your SEO. Firstly, by thorough and creative keyword research and by looking at what your supporters are already searching for. By ensuring these keywords appear in your content, your pages will rank higher in searches. Secondly, page optimisation can be achieved by updating the page URL, page tags and by ensuring that all images have alternative descriptions which improve accessibility. Lastly, backlinks from other sites help raise your page’s profile. To apply this, your charity could work with its corporate partners or suppliers to help to add additional links to improve SEO (e.g., an event sponsor linking back to a page could be the most impactful change to your SEO).

Next, the training shifts to discuss organic and paid social media tactics. All organisations should have a strategy for both organic social and paid social. They should be treated very differently, often with distinct audiences in mind.

Facebook have said that their average user is subjected to over 1,500 stories per day. So, to increase engagement, the news feed only displays about 300 of these – those that are most relevant to the user. With this knowledge in hand, we now know that posting more isn’t the answer and that an effective organic social media strategy places quality over quantity.

80% of a charity’s organic social media content should be useful and helpful, while 20% should be to promote the brand or its products. That 80% will bring new followers and build trust, they’ll then see the 20% and buy into what you’re promoting.

Organic social media reach is driven by authentic engagement. By engaging directly with your followers and replying to their comments, you’re going to build a great reputation that will spread. People then look for your posts because they’ll be genuinely interested in what you’re doing.

From a paid social media perspective, we know that the sector is over-reliant on Facebook adverts, and this may cause multiple issues in the near future. As Facebook’s user base gets older and less engaged, we are in danger of reaching a demographic cliff edge. This means that marketing on the platform will become increasingly more expensive and as tools, such as Facebook Fundraising and groups become more prevalent, the saturation of market will result in a loss of effectiveness.

There are thankfully several things we can do to mitigate this over reliance on one platform. Your organisations can build up its email database, strengthen its SEO and paid search campaigns and diversify to other channels. The charity sector is slowly starting to test new channels such as TikTok, Twitch, Reddit and Spotify and over the next decade we will see spend shift onto channels such as these and away from Facebook.

The Digital Fundraising for Beginners session also takes a deeper look into how to improve your marketing emails. We discuss introducing greater personalisation and ensuring emails are relevant, timely and meets the reader’s needs. The best email strategies mix up stories with useful information and advice and utilise automation and segmentation as much as possible.

If these topics sound interesting, then THINK’s Digital Fundraising for Beginners training course on 8 March might be for you.

Tickets are priced at only £100.  To secure one of the remaining places, register now at https://www.trybooking.co.uk/BLMS  or to book a bespoke session and more details contact Matt Smith at mattsmith@thinkcs.org

Matt Smith, Head of Development & Innovation. 

February 2022

If you would like to learn more about the work THINK undertakes, or see how we might be able to help you with your fundraising challenges, please contact info@thinkcs.org. You can also find us on LinkedIn at THINK Consulting Solutions and on twitter @ThinkCS where we share useful industry insights.