Hey there, moneybags

More on Non-Profit Marketing

It’s easy to make presumptions about how much money you think your organization should be raising, or how much you think others of a similar variety might be making from their donor base.  As it turns out, even in these recession years, there is an upward trend in giving online, to non-profit organizations.  This is good news, and you should be rightfully concerned if your organization is not moving forward with some new, improved online or practical fundraising options.

Convio has recently released their Online Marketing Non-Profit Benchmark Index, a survey and synthesis of online marketing data from 500 non-profits from 15 sectors.  The information is free at their site, though you have to put in your own information (email, etc.).  The survey was made of non-profits who use Convio’s services and software, so full disclaimer, but the information they gathered is actually very useful for any NPO starting to build up their contributors.  From the data in the report, it looks as if this report was taken from many already-quite-established non-profits, not so much of ones just beginning to cultivate their online donor base.

Alison Kapin from Frogloop (one of our favorite non-profit blogs, btw) has written a fairly extensive article on this subject, with an excellent, far less dry (and less shamelessly promotional) summary than the one at Convio.

It’s so hard to get an accurate idea of what should be happening with your online fundraising.  Sometimes even when you use the tools available and are doing everything right, you still can’t seem to squeeze a penny from the folks visiting your website.  And sometimes (much less often, I’ll add), you can be making errors right and left and taking your donors to a decision page before the donation form and not properly displaying your donation button and all these other basically heinous mistakes and still, STILL be making money for your organization.  But, those two examples aside, the best ways to truly build an online donor base that you can tap into again and again is to use all the best practices, make use of every tip you can find, and try, try again until you get it right.

Filed under: Marketing, Non-Profit News, Online Fundraising by AJ