Designing a Successful Fundraising Campaign for Your NGO During Corona
In this pandemic crisis of Corona, your nonprofit organization is hit with the biggest challenge of the fund. Your NGO is unable to create awareness and sensitize people on the issues or causes on which your work. You are constraint to carry out your activities and fundraising by traditional methods as you have to observe social distancing a must in this pandemic. The scarcity of funds has thrown open a great challenge for you to first survive, remain safe, and then make your way forward to work for your cause and help the beneficiaries.
In this world pandemic, only technology can rescue your NGO and allow your organization to reach out to the people irrespective of all odds to time, distance, and crises. With the help of technology, you can not only overcome all the hurdles but also help the needy. The Internet is a wonderful environment to reach out to people and inform about what you do, raise awareness on your campaigns, have donations and recruit volunteers who can work online for your NGO to raise funds and sensitize people on the issue on which you work.
As a nonprofit organization, you have limited resources. Your NGO cannot afford the luxury of not changing with time to meet the need of the hour, You have to switch to digital mode to reach your potential donors and beneficiaries. In this era of digitalization digital marketing is an effective tool to raise funds for the survival of your NGO. In this article, we will guide you of all those steps by which you can design a successful fundraising campaign for your NGO during this Corona crisis.
Fundraising Digital Plan For NGO
Donor behavior has changed these days. Now a large number of donors will not consider sending a donation by mail or deliver it in person. These days, most donors will primarily like to interact with your organization online, If they are satisfied with your activities they will donate online for you. For this reason, your NGO should incorporate digital strategy in your fundraising plan. Your NGO website must have all the necessary arrangements to receive donations online, else you will miss the train.
Market Research for Fundraising
You carry out Market research before planning a digital marketing campaign. Marketing research will give you a chance to obtain vital information that can help you in planning the right strategy to ensure your campaign success. In fact, market research will help you to find ways to market your NGO more effectively. When done properly, the information you will gather will be useful in creating a digital marketing strategy that will work wonders for your NGO. In your market research, you must concentrate on gathering information on:
»Identify your target audience
»Know the digital areas you will be active in
»Study the competition and trends in the sector
»Identify the competitors and what they are doing
»Identify key influencers
»Discover what makes high-converting landing pages
»Study the competitor’s website, social media activity, and the keywords on which they are ranking.
Website Development for NGO
Your website is the first place where your potential donors encounter your NGO. It is, therefore, your duty that while your plan for fundraising strategy for your organization you should ensure that your website does all it can to leave a lasting impression on the visitors. You should also ensure that you engage your visitors on the website. The more time they spend on your website there are more chances of their donation.
User-Friendly Website for NGO
To engage the visitors on the website the first task you need to perform is to keep your website simple and navigable. A complicated website is the biggest buzzkill. Keep the navigation of your NGO website is clear and smooth. Ensure that all the features of your website like the most important links ( the one to your donation page) are obviously in place and when the visitors to your website want to find them, they can most easily and smoothly navigate to the same.
Consistency in Web Designing
There should be cohesion in your NGO website. All the features of your website should reflect your NGO as a distinct brand. This brand distinction will always keep the visitors to your website aware of your NGO while browsing the website. Stick to one color, scheme formatting, and font throughout all the pages of your website to avoid confusion in the mind of your visitors.
Stay Social
Your NGO’s website should prominently feature links to your various social media pages. Similarly, your social media platforms should direct friends, visitors, and followers to your website. You need to share the links of your website on the social media pages, at the same time you should encourage social media engagement on your site.
Keep Content Easily Readable
If you write huge blocks of text on your website it will overwhelming the readers. So avoid huge blocks of text on your website. You should break down the contents on your website and blogs into short and punchy paragraphs. If you upload contents in small paragraphs there is an increasing likelihood that visitors will stop and read your message.
Use Visuals
Visuals are eye-catching, they create interest and communicate a thousand times more than words. So you should break up your text and place interesting and informative visuals in between these texts. You will find it to be a proven engagement strategy. While selecting the visuals you should be very careful as the visuals should be logical. You should avoid incorporating too many visuals or they’ll lose
Tell Your Story
You need to publish real stories with photographs of the beneficiaries of your organization. You should not cook or steal stories of others. When you feature true heartfelt stories of your organization on your website you are more likely to engage visitors. When readers understand why you’re so passionate about the cause, they’ll trust your organization. They will become members and will start donating regularly.
Include Engaging Content
You can have the best digital marketing strategy by providing users with something valuable and of interest. This you can do by including informative articles, videos, case studies, audio, and more on your website. This will make the visitor to your website know about your cause and campaign you are doing and help them see the value in it.
Master Video For Your NGO
Video marketing is the most powerful digital marketing tool It is a communication channel that every nonprofit organization must master. Implementing a strong video strategy means that you need to know how to make a good video. Video making is all about storytelling. A powerful video with impact creating content in form story is the best fundraising and advocacy tool for your nonprofit organization
Optimize Online Donation Pages
You can do the best digital fundraising operations for your NGO if you are vigilant about your online forms like Donation pages, Membership pages, Event registration pages, Volunteer sign up pages, contact pages, etc. For success in this strategy, you need to ensure that most successful pages are designed in a way that they will themselves encourage visitors to complete the forms. Do Split Testing of pages…
Focus on Fundraising
You should emphasize on making the donation process functionality easy, simple, short, and quick on your NGO website. Ensure that donating online on your website is a happy experience for visitors. You need to streamline online donation forms, elevate your mobile donation platforms, and embed compelling calls to action throughout your website. While analyzing and developing your digital marketing you need to keep your donors and supporters at the heart of the campaign. It will act as the biggest growth factor for you. You need to factor out the complete experience which the donors and supporters have with your organization from awareness to loyalty. This will act as one of the most effective means to develop communication with people and drive will drive success to your campaign.
Multiple Donation Option on Website
On your website’s donation page, it can be more effective to give your donors multiple defined donation options. For example, if you run an animal shelter, they could make a good amount of monetary donation for leashes, a good amount of monetary donation for pet food, or a good amount of monetary donation for toys. When they know exactly how their money is helping your cause, they’re more likely to give.
Analyze the Results with Technology
As you do with your donation pages, similarly, you should keep testing your website to see if it’s working effectively. Run analytics, adjust your strategies, and continue refining your site to see improved results.
Stay Calm and Carry on
The most important quality which you must develop in yourself is to remain calm in this pandemic. We have numerous examples from the financial crisis of 2008 of organizations that reduced their fundraising budgets and eliminated fundraising staff in an effort to “save” money. Yet, they were the ones who suffered the most in the long run. Meanwhile, those organizations that braved the course and invested in their fundraising efforts they were able to raise funds as much they needed and even more. Thus looking to the lessons of recent history — panic reaction to a pandemic crisis is not your best move. Your solution lies in remaining calm. Concentrate on your efforts of raising funds by digital marketing at the end of the journey there is a bright light waiting for you to welcome.
What does Muniwar do for you?
Muniwar is a digital marketing and web development agency with a long experience working with various NGOs on a variety of issues. As a digital marketing and web development agency, Muniwar will help you to:
»To develop a marketing plan which will support your message driving traffic to your site while convincing visitors to take action.
»Define your marketing goals and help you identify your primary strategies to get results.
»Set expectations and KPIs to measure your digital marketing success.
»Uncover audience insights and align your content offerings to match their needs.
»Create a strong online brand to establish authority on the topics you write about.
Repeat & Optimise
You should do a review of your digital marketing strategy from time to time. Based on your findings, you should do midterm course corrections. Make necessary adjustments, reset your goals, keep testing, keep educating yourself on what factors influence conversions, and accordingly keep on innovating in your digital marketing strategy.
