In today’s battle of the inboxes, tweets, Facebook updates, text messages, and banner ads flying across the screen, organizations can’t afford to ignore online fundraising 101 strategies to motivate and inspire supporters to donate money. Don’t have the budget to hire fundraising strategists to help you craft your online fundraising campaigns? No problem. Follow these five tips and you will be on your way to increasing open and click-through rates and more importantly - raising more money for your nonprofit.

1. Short, Catchy Subject Lines

Hook your supporters right off the bat with a short and catchy subject line.

Example of Bad Subject Line:

Renew Your Commitment to End Dog Homelessness

What’s Wrong with it?

Aside from this subject line being BORING, you are also intimidating your members to shoulder a very big issue – that they alone are responsible for saving all dogs. Bad idea!

Example of Good Subject Line:

Help Keep a Puppy Safe in DC’s Blizzard!

This is a good subject line because it’s focused, local, timely, and a bit emotional. Who doesn’t want to keep a puppy safe from a terrible blizzard in their hometown?

2. Short and Sweet. Tell A Story

So you hooked your members with a short and catchy subject line, now continue to engage them in the body of the text with a brief (not 10 paragraphs), straight forward appeal that tells a story.

You don’t have to be the world’s greatest storyteller to tell a compelling story to your members. Why? Because every day you work on some of toughest issues facing the world or your community. You have access to the greatest stories at your disposal around the issues you advocate for and the people you help. Now share them. Tell your members how their $50 donation is going to help X, Y,  and Z. And be as specific as you can. For example: “Your $50 donation will help feed 5 puppies in our shelter for an entire month.”

In 2009, Care2's community created more than 22,000 petitions resulting in more than 23 million signatures that drove tangible changes globally. According to Care2’s Defining Causes Report, the issues that garnered the most support in 2009 were animal welfare, the environment and human rights.

Check out the results:

• 8.7 million signatures on petitions related to animal welfare causes
• 5.1 million signatures on petitions related to environmental causes
• 4.3 million signatures on petitions related to human and civil rights causes
• 2.5 million signatures on petitions related to health
• 2.1 million signatures on petitions related to politics

The Care2 community’s signatures not only highlighted causes, but also had a direct impact on global issues including the European Union’s vote  to ban seal products, the passing of the American Clean Energy Security Act and the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling from North Korea.



You should follow Frogloop on Twitter.

Receive monthly updates

Facebook Key Findings:               

• Organizations posted to their Facebook Pages about six times weekly.
• 2.5% of each organization's Facebook fans took some sort of an action weekly such as contributing wall posts, "likes," or comments.
• Generating a high fan rate is important, since news feeds carry that activity to potential new fans.
• Facebook fans grew by 3.75% monthly. However, it’s important to note that 2% of Facebook fans either removed themselves or chose to hide the news feed monthly.
• The overall fan churn rate is 24% per year, which is higher than the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study email churn rate of 19% per year.

Facebook Recommendations

• M+R recommends that nonprofits find their Facebook fans' "sweet spot" between too many and too few posts.
• Measure your organizations stats and engagement now and focus on improving those results over time.
• Engage and provide interesting and useful info to your fans.

Be sure and also check out Frogloop’s "Five Tips to Ramp Up Your Nonprofits Fan Page."

Twitter Key Findings

• Organizations tweeted four to five times daily.
• Twitter followers grew by 9% monthly, much higher than average monthly growth on both Facebook fan pages at 3.75% and nonprofit email lists at 1.4%.

• Tell compelling stories that inspire people to take action and donate.

• Be relevant and timely. No one pays attention to old news.

• Tie action items and appeals to specific news. This can yield double the response rate.

• Follow up with constituents. Show success and movement

• Integrate advocacy and fundraising. For example, after someone signs a petition, send them to a landing page containing a short and sweet fundraising appeal with different donation levels. Amnesty International tested this approach and raised $13K verses sending out a traditional fundraising appeal which only raised $6K within the same time frame.

 Click here to download the entire presentationor you can view and download the slides via slideshare below.

2. Building Your Nonprofit’s Community on Twitter
One of the most important roles of a communicator is to build community around your nonprofit. A
good place to focus your efforts is search.twitter.com, where you can see what people are chatting
about, trending topics and join in on the conversation. Developing relationships should involve talking about the great campaigns that other nonprofits are working on as well and responding to @replies. That will make it more likely that others will want to spread the word about what you’re working on, and collaborate with you.

3. The Perfect Match: Social Media Relations and Traditional PR
Success will come to those communicators who engage in both new and traditional communications
channels. Consider building a Social Media Release (SMR) in which you consolidate photos, embedded
video and presentations.

Does this sound familiar?

• Should blog comments be moderated?
• Should we even allow public comments on our blog?
• How do we handle negative comments? Just delete them?
• How do we deal with trolls?
• What if the opposition takes our tweets and twists our words?
• What happens if some of our Facebook fans disagree with what we have to say in one of our status updates?

These are all valid questions and concerns and point to why it’s important that nonprofits develop and implement guidelines for blogging and managing social media. However, it should not be a guide someone in HR or Communications drafts and then distributes at a staff meeting. It should be a living document that is flexible and empowers staff to:

• Blog or tweet about policy issues that your organization advocates or analyses of upcoming legislation.
• Talk with people on Twitter or Facebook about the mission of your organization.
• Respond to constructive criticism online.

To the Point: Get Ready to Rummage
Time to toss what’s not working and make a new plan for 2010.

Care2's Jocelyn Harmon wrote up a great list of six suggestions for Fundraising Success Magazine's blog on how nonprofits need to step up their marketing game in 2010. Her list includes:

1. Stop thinking tactics.

2. Stop being passive about press coverage.

3. Stop debating which channel is best.

4. Stop worrying about losing control.

5. Stop saying you're not tech-savvy.

6. Stop flying blind.

Read the full article here.

5 Social Media Lessons From the Haiti Earthquake Relief Effort

Has your nonprofit been monitoring the outpour of donations by people all over the world to support Haiti relief efforts? What role has social media played in helping to connect people with relief organizations like Oxfam or the American Red Cross? Geoff Livingston of Zoetica Media wrote up a post for Mashable that examined:

What made Organizing 2.0 unique was the emphasis on organizational change, in contrast to tech tips and tricks that other conferences already explore. While participants got a healthy dose of standard fare (writing for emails, CRM fun, how to prep for a web redesign, social media 101, etc.) they also heard from multiple speakers about the challenges that online work faces within our organizations – and how to overcome them.

Simply put, the emphasis on best practices and skill sharing fails at the point where organizers function in an organization that simply hasn’t made a commitment to change.  Evidence of that is all around us in the form of Executive Directors and managers who think they can devote more attention to online tools without simultaneously decreasing attention somewhere else.

Updated: January 16, 2009

83% of adults have cell phones or smartphones. 35% of users have accessed the Internet via their phone, according to a December 2009 report by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. So in times of natural disasters like the catastrophic earthquake that hit Haiti and affected more then two million people, can a mobile strategy help raise money in times of crisis?

Just three hours after the earthquake devastated Haiti, the American Red Cross launched a “text to donate” campaign where individuals in the US can text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross to support Haiti relief efforts. The carriers are allowing individuals to donate $10 up to three times, and 100% of the donations will go to the American Red Cross. In the first 24 hours, the American Red Cross had raised an estimated $800K via the “text to donate” campaign. By day two, they raised $5 million via mobile, which accounted for 14% of the total $35 million they raised in the last 48 hours. Approximately 50% of the donations were contributed online, according to the organizations press release.