Feature Showcase: Membership Options
This week, we’ll take a look at some of our clients who are offering membership options on their DonationPay pages. Enjoy!
Feature Showcase: Events, Events, Events!
A quick look at how some of our clients- the Diabetes Foundation, Cancer Support East Tennessee, the Georgia Conservancy- are using DonationPay to collect payment and registration info for events. Enjoy!
6 Questions with Rachel Masters
While I was participating in the Astia Program Week this October, I had the pleasure of seeing a presentation about the importance of social media to growing businesses, by the dynamic and crazy-knowledgeable Rachel Masters, co-founder of Red Magnet Media. Red Magnet offers digital strategy, business development, digital marketing and community management for creative brands (per their website). Rachel’s presentation was full of tips and data that really helped illuminate the role social media can play in business or organizational development, as well as the role it’s playing, worldwide right now, a la this mindblowing infographic by Shanghai Web Designs below:
All that is happening in the social media sphere, every 60 seconds. Seriously.
Rachel was kind enough to let me pick her brain a little bit for some ideas about how non-profits can modify business social media practices to strengthen their donor bases, engage their community and advance their organization’s position as a creative leader in the industry. Rachel’s answers to my questions are in italics below and our conversation has been edited a bit, to omit my ‘ums’, ‘likes’ and nervous chatterboxing (gad, how horrible is it to hear your own voice on tape, amirite?!).
Me: What are five basic things you’d tell an organization to do to begin getting started with social media from scratch?
Rachel: What I would tell them is to look at different non-profits and charities they admire and they wished they were more like and see what they’re doing. The problem is, a lot of organizations just don’t do that great a job with social media, so a good strategy is to look at the ones that are really strong, like CharityWater, UNICEF, the ASPCA-they do an awesome job with their social media- so I would check out first organizations that are well respected in the social media sphere. Also, Mashable is a really excellent blog that’s all about social media and they spend a lot of time on public good and they just had a conference for non-profits. Get a ton of ideas and inspiration of organizations that are doing it right. Start with a presence on either Twitter or Facebook first.
Which one is typically better to start with, for organizations that are just making their first foray into social media?
It depends- if you’re trying to build thought-leadership and build your brand and get more people to know about your organization, then I’d start with Twitter. If you feel like you already have a lot of people involved and you need to focus on fundraising and engaging folks you’ve already developed relationships with, I’d go to Facebook.
How do you recommend organizations use their limited staff resources to focus on social media?
I think that having a process to manage it and making sure that everyone knows it’s an organizational priority and if they can somehow create a framework so that anyone in the organization can participate and give ideas, but there’s one person who’s managing the editorial calendar. You need to set a process for social media management like any other function within the organization- kind of like how with traditional PR, you have one regular PR person but they don’t know everything that’s going on in the organization. They need to interact with other people to tell them what’s happening- same thing needs to happen with social media: it can’t be an island off on it’s own. In order for it to be really successful, there needs to be a controlled way for everyone to give input.
What are some social media mistakes that you see from organizations that put you off?
People who only use it to sell, sell, sell, or for constant ‘Donate Now!’. It’s important to use social media to build relationships, connect with people, and give them a behind-the-scenes look into your organization in terms of the good work that you do. You need to tell stories and show pictures and post videos and then you can soft sell people to participate with your organization.
What are some of your suggestions for organizations looking to make revisions to their social media campaigns without being too disruptive to their ‘voice’ in social media? What if their social media presence isn’t as effective as they’d like it to be?
It really depends; I think that a lot of organizations don’t use pictures and videos enough. I think, though, recently on Facebook, one of the Facebook blogs showed that single posted photographs get a lot of response and interaction, so I’d have to know the specific situation to make correct recommendations. I always recommend having more specific calls to action and asking people questions to get them involved.
What companies or organizations do you think are doing a great job with social media?
Virgin America does a great job with their social media and branding and tying it in with their customer service. They have a special dedicated area of their social media for customer service. It’s important to have, for instance, one Twitter feed that’s for branding and one that’s for customer service issues. You don’t want to mix customer or donor complaints with all of the positive things you’re trying to do. That stuff needs to go into it’s own bucket.
Major thanks, again, to Rachel Masters for gamely answering all my rudimentary questions and for agreeing to a follow up interview early in 2012, when we’ll dig a little deeper into what makes social media so essential for non-profits. Learn more about Rachel Masters and Red Magnet Media here.
Feature Showcase: Social Networking and Elemental, The Film
Today, because I’m feeling lazy as sin, I’m going to put up another short video that shows how our social networking features work. Most of our clients are already including these on their DonationPay pages, but if you’re not and you’d like to, give us a holler! The demo is on the page of one of our newer clients, Elemental, the Film, which is supported by the Kalliopeia Foundation. Enjoy and have a great weekend!
Feature Showcase: Nikela and New Global Citizens
This holiday season, we’ll be showcasing some of the innovative ways our clients are using our service by taking a quick tour through their DonationPay pages to showcase particularly awesome features. We’re so proud to support all of our client’s fundraising efforts this holiday and at any time of year. Today, I’m starting with pages from the New Global Citizens and Nikela- enjoy!
On Astia and Social Good: Part 3
So I’ve now written quite a few words on how Astia and it’s dynamic community have impacted us here at DonationPay, but I haven’t talked specifically about the other business owners I encountered during the workshop week. Too numerous to count and individually namecheck were brilliant individuals in varying states of business development: some just starting out with an amazing idea and a solid plan, some with their product or service already deployed to their market and some who already have established presences in the community. The 2011 Astia ‘class’ is truly full of spectacularly talented, generous and innovative men and women; I felt very privileged to get to know everyone and be on the receiving end of their support and guidance. Though Astia is an incubator for for-profit businesses, there were many I encountered during the program week who have socially conscious missions and I thought I’d share a few of my favorite examples:
Fertility Planit is the social network for people around the world who want to start families. Founded by Karin Thayer after her own experience with fertility treatments and the process of having her (now 6 month old!) son; she’s created a supportive online network where people can support each other, share resources, write reviews on related goods and services and generally get connected to the community . Fertility Planit supports the desire to have a family regardless of gender, relationship status, religious background or sexual orientation. . . which is, obviously, awesome!
Is totally rad! In their own words:
Local Orbit is a new way to buy food and other local goods direct from producers in your community. Our marketplaces offer a diverse selection of local produce, meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, baked goods, grains, prepared foods, personal care products and specialty items.
Farmers manage both wholesale and retail sales through a simple business dashboard. They can sell their products in multiple markets from a central account.
Consumers pick up their orders from a central location, or hub. Wholesale orders are delivered to the business.
Hubs are run by farmers markets, entrepreneurs, farmers co-ops, community organizations, institutions and businesses who are working to expand access to local food in their communities. They manage each local marketplace, approve sellers, and work with Local Orbit’s marketing tools to promote sales.
Check them out immediately, if you love local food or if you’re closet hippies, like us.
Founded by the awesome Freena, Autitouch helps speed diagnoses of autism using intuitive software. From their website:
We develop intuitive software (through a Natural User Interface a.k.a. NUI) on multitouch platforms. This software makes it possible for children starting the age of 3 to “make contact with” and “communicate through” hardware like e.g. the Microsoft Surface. Per their website:
Our mission is to develop intuitive software to aid in diagnostics and treatment for children and adolescents with autism and/or related disorders, with help of hardware based on multitouch technology, e.g. Microsoft Surface. Our focus lies on improved diagnostics and new treatment methods for development of social and communication skills. In other words, stimulate (spontaneous) social behavior and communication skills (collaboration).
It’s the Autitouch vision to, in time, make mulitouch diagnostic and treatment methods usefull to a broather audience then is described in our mission statement. Other age groups, other disorders, supplemental techology and an ongoing expansion of our market. It’s the Autitouch vision to be one of the leading companies in the world to build intuitiv software for diagnostics and treatment of autism and related disorders using multitouch technology.
So awesome, right?
OllieMe is a new social network for teens looking to engage in a productive online space. They are a teen-only mobile and online community, organized around networking and gaming concepts that kids can understand and get behind. They’re in beta testing now, so if you know any interested teenagers, send them over to Ollie to become beta testers!
That about wraps it up: our experience with Astia was all-around amazing and it helped us feel much more connected to the business community, as well as providing a lighted path for us to follow as DonationPay grows up. Back to regularly scheduled non-profit programming from here on out. . .
Happy Fundraising,
AJ
On Astia, Origin Stories and Social Good: Part 2
On Origin Stories
Being a mission-based business that is in the process of expansion can be a tricky minefield to navigate. Staying true to our vision of the company, product and service is difficult when you’re also weighing all the factors necessary to effectively grow. Me, Noah and the rest of our powerhouse DonationPay team are all devoted, truly, to helping non-profit organizations reach their fundraising goals. Noah and I founded DonationPay because we happened into a relationship with a banking partner that would offer technical services to our non-profit clients for next to nothing and because, as a web development team, we knew that there was enormous frustration in the non-profit sector with the available options for online fundraising. We’re not business school students, or cutthroat serial entrepreneurs or numbers wunderkinds or anything like that- we’re two people who have worked within and been deeply connected to the non-profit sector for many years and we founded DonationPay to alleviate some anxiety in the industry around the next frontier of online fundraising.
Noah and I don’t believe that the future of non-profit fundraising is in elite service providers like Convio and BlackBaud, who do great work for the kinds of extreme sums that only very robustly funded non-profits have at their disposal. Rather, we believe that the services available to the midsize non-profit is where the changes and growth in the industry will be reflected: user-friendly, comprehensive and affordable fundraising services available to organizations of all sizes (and budgets) is what we’re all about! As such, we’re dedicated to offering better, friendlier service, for less, to non-profits who want to improve their online fundraising capabilities and boost their web presence. Most of our wonderful clients already know this, our origin story, but it’s been on my mind during the past week. I met many incredible women and men who are also working to grow businesses at the forefront of industries impacted by the changing Internet landscape and, like DonationPay, are constantly adapting to the rapid migration of all personal processes and sectors to the online format.
The truth about DonationPay is that we’ve spent an enormous amount of time and care developing a better product- a product shaped in large part by feedback from development directors and other non-profit staff. The lions share of the work here was for us to build an internal infrastructure that would allow us to catalogue each built-to-order feature we developed with the input of real non-profits, for use on future fundraising pages. We’ve ended up with a cutting edge system that allows us to build custom pages with incredible efficiency and customization, while keeping the cost to our clients extremely manageable. Our library of available features grows weekly and one of the truest joys of the job is being able to build a functionality to order for one client with an innovative fundraising plan, then see that same feature put to use on other client pages, boosting everyone’s donation volume. Of course, the credit-card processing component of our business is not always 100% under our control, but our banking partner offers many technical features (including their Payment Gateway and individual Merchant Accounts for all our clients) that are invaluable to our client’s online development. This is our favorite part: the building, the strategizing, the forward motion, the page creation, the incredible work our client organizations are doing that we get to be a part of.
That said, there are many other elements of DonationPay that aren’t client-facing: the expansion plans and staffing, the systems development, the investment fundraising, the ongoing and constant negotiation with our banking partner, the beyond-our-control changing rates and regulations in the card-processing industry and many other components that I will not bore you with here. At Astia, I was so relieved to dig into these parts of our business and the support and whip-smart nature of the community there got me thinking about transparency in business development. Engaging in Astia’s curriculum gave me the time and space to take a deep-dive look into our company’s structure, financial plan, organizing principles and growth strategy and I started to feel that we should be adhering to the transparency principles I have, time and again on this blog, referred to as a crucial element of best practices for building a sustaining donor base.
Transparency is a conceptually essential part of any fundraising plan, for any organization. Donors need to know where their money is going- why and how and what and when, too. To put your support dollars behind an organization requires a leap of faith; fundraising transparency makes that leap a manageable hop and closes the gap between the call and the action. Similarly, I thought that because we’ve been so blessed to work with our ever-expanding roster of clients, I should use this format to share what’s happening on the administrative end of DonationPay and to make some commitments about the future of our service.
What We’re Up To:
-Expansion: beginning with our move to new offices in Berkeley this summer and in an ongoing way with adding additional staff, developers and investors to our behind-the-scenes team. We’re also currently developing CityPay, our companion product to DonationPay, which will offer a lot of the same customizable features for cities and municipal governments that are looking to coordinate their online payment options into a manageable whole. Sign up for CityPay updates here.
-Relationship Cultivation: we’re working on several projects that would allow us to partner with existing providers of other non-profit services (like CRM’s, insurance-providers and the like) to bring DonationPay to a wider swath of the non-profit sector. Another great thing about the Astia program was the genuine connections made between business owners- I’m sure we’ll have exciting news about partnerships that have grown from the program very soon!
Building The Team: as we have big plans for DonationPay, we’re currently expanding our team of in-house staff, as well as investors and advisors. The idea of cultivating relationships is the same as cultivating a donor base that really supports what you do. Finding investors or an advisory team that is actually behind the mission, growth plan, team, and product your business provides is just like finding the kind souls who understand and support your organizational mission and practical work enough to put their hard-earned dollars behind you, time and again.
Our Commitments:
Being Our Best Self: we’re committed to continuing to improve our service, using the feedback of real non-profits we work with. We will always keep our service as agile, customizable and innovative as we possibly can. If there’s a feature we don’t have that you want (or just think might be super cool!), please speak up and we’ll do our best to bring it to market. DonationPay is designed to adapt to your specifications, so let us know how we can help our service work best for you!
If it’s good for you, it’s good for us: we’re absolutely committed to continuing to offer our service at a price point that is affordable to non-profits large and small. As we expand, there will absolutely be changes to our service and pricing, but please rest assured that Noah and I have no plans to stray from the base founding principle of DonationPay: offering the best value donation processing and management service out there. Also, we’re counting on you, our loyal users, readers and clients, to give us a tough-love reality check if we start unexpectedly veering into a disastrous, Qwickster-style fiasco- thanks in advance, y’all!
Supporting You However We Can: one of the best and most exciting parts of our job is that we can sometimes get out of the office and attend the fundraisers and other awesome events our clients are doing. We’re totally committed to being physically present as much as possible for our clients and, in a more ongoing way, to dedicating a portion of our staff’s and our own time to volunteer efforts with local organizations in our community. If you have an event coming up in the Bay Area or thereabouts, let us know and we’ll do our best to be there. If you have a further-flung event coming up, let us know and it’s likely we can build you an awesome online system to make payment and information collection a breeze.
That about covers it; as you’re moving into the crucial holiday fundraising push, I just want to let you know that we’re here, happily barreling into our hectic holiday season as well, and that we’re delighted to support your vital work in any way we can. More on the amazing entrepreneurs and businesses I encountered at Astia and social good through business communities coming up in Part 3 tomorrow!
Happy Fundraising and happy Tuesday,
AJ
On Astia, Origin Stories and Social Good: Part 1
As everyone who knows me or subscribes to our blog or Twitter feed knows, last week I was uncharacteristically out of the office, attending the Astia program week in San Francisco. Astia, a global non-profit that connects women-led start-ups with funding and business development services, offers a weeklong program of panels, workshops, speakers, extremely fun cocktail mixers and the like to businesses they’ve selected to join their portfolio of approximately 250 companies worldwide. They have similar program weeks in New York and London, but the SF program is the largest, flagship event. When DonationPay was accepted to join the Astia portfolio in September, we were of course elated, having read and heard about the amazing work they’re doing in the business community. We absolutely could not have prepared for the incredible curriculum they offer for the intensive program week, nor the astounding power and vitality of the Astia network. I’ll do my best to keep this blog-ready and brief, but, per usual, I may fail miserably.
Taking myself out of day-to-day operations for a whole week was a shock to my work-addicted system and having the business-development part of my brain stimulated insistently and constantly for five days really helped me to visualize DonationPay’s future with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. Astia definitely provided a great platform for business development and the program week was chock full of incredibly valuable curriculum and info that I have no doubt will impact our businesses quality, longevity and growth in myraid ways. Aside from that, though, what I was most impressed by is that the Astia community fosters genuine connections between entrepreneurs, investors, and other professionals in the industry.
The aim of the program is not only to create a forum for business leaders to advance their companies, but to build a network of individuals who can provide guidance and foundational support to each other. When you’re running a growing company, the intersection between authentic human connection and business development can pass in the blink of an eye. Astia gave me a whole week (!) to dwell in this miraculous space and seriously, folks, it felt revolutionary.
I was also constantly struck by the parallels that we, as small business owners, have to folks working in the non-profit industry. Much of the ongoing business development required for a new company has to do with legitimizing your presence out in the market and making the consumers in your industry feel comfortable supporting your service or product, rather than putting their money behind established options. For non-profits, the struggle is much the same: convincing your donor base to actually move from being generally in favor of your organizations work to being actual sustaining supporters (through ongoing financial support, volunteer work, service donation, etc.) has a lot to do with building credibility in the industry. A major component of the workload of what we do and what our clients do is in eliminating the barriers to entry for the consumer/donor. For us, we need to make sure that development directors in incoming client organizations have as much information on DonationPay as they need, that they’ve seen and liked examples of our work and that they feel comfortable working with us. There’s a lot of suspicion and anxiety around credit-card processing and online fundraising systems, as the industry is flooded with services that are criminally overpriced, under-functioning (that’s a polite synonym and I’m looking at you, PayPal!) or so confusing to interact with and understand as to be rendered unusable. Many of the folks that call us assume that, like their experiences with their previous service provider, they’ll be in an oppositional relationship with us and it often takes awhile before they believe that we’re on their side, not the bank’s.
Just saying, non-profits have had a lot of frustrating, confusing and enraging experiences with their service providers, so one of the major barriers to them migrating to our service is that they have trouble believing we’ll be any different to work with. I think we, in fact, are and I hope our clients agree. Astia gave me a lot of time and space to creatively envision the future of DonationPay and to really reflect on our founding principles, company philosophy and how we can move forward and grow without sacrificing the qualities of our service that are truly valuable to our clients. I’ll be discussing our path forward and our company’s creation, as it relates to my experience at Astia during the next few days.
To be continued in Part II . . . .
-AJ
DonationPay: Now An Astia Company!
During the past few months, we’ve been in the (strenuous but enjoyable) process of applying to join the 2011 Astia cohort and we were incredibly delighted and honored last week to be asked to join the Astia Portfolio. We’re really looking forward to the 2011 Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs workshop and meeting up with all the other businesses asked to join this year.
If you’re not already familiar with Astia, they’re a non-profit organization that helps link women-run businesses up with advanced business education, venture capital and lots of other awesome stuff. I really admire the work that they are doing, which I will let them tell you about in their own words:
Astia is a global not-for-profit organization built on a community of men and women dedicated to the success of women-led, high-growth ventures and to the eradication of the need for the organization within the decade.
The Astia method is designed for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs who understand the value of extraordinary relationships and believe in giving back.
Their focus is on connecting businesses with female leadership (in DonationPay’s case, that would be moi!) with venture funding, an outstanding and far-reaching network of advisors, and access to a powerful support system; their Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Workshop begins in a few weeks and we are so delighted to be able to attend (and by we, again, I mean I). Looking forward to the workshops, panels and work with the Astia advisory team, who donate their (very valuable) time pro bono to help businesses like ours continue to expand and provide innovative products or services to the market.
Also, their CEO, Sharon Vosmek is pretty much completely amazing. Check out her video interview here about Astia’s mission and it’s practical work:
Long story short, we are totally stoked! The entrepreneur’s workshop is happening just a hop, skip and a jump away from our new offices here in Berkeley, so I will do my best to Tweet and blog from the front lines. Also, obviously the first order of business is for Astia, a non-profit, to ditch PayPal as their donation processing provider and start raking in the individual donation dollars with DonationPay!
Happy Fundraising,
AJ
Donation Page Best Practices Elementary Review
Though this will be incredibly familiar material to anyone that’s already run through the Pre-Holiday Donation Page Workout, I thought a quick brush up on some best practices for donation page optimization might be in order. Many of our clients have asked about the most important concepts to keep in mind when designing a successful donation page- basically, there’s an endless amount of components you can revise and a successful donation page is always a work in progress, but in my opinion, these 4 basic ideas are important keep in mind, in no particular order:
-Keep available navigation minimal. Make sure that your users don’t get distracted by other navigation on your donation page. It’s a great idea to have links/navigation on the Thank You page (the page that your contributors will see after they’ve made a successful donation) but don’t distract potential contributors with bells and whistles. If your organization runs lots of events or has a particularly content-rich website, be very sure that you don’t include full navigation on the donation page- it will likely be a distraction for your donors and will tacitly encourage them to explore other areas of your site instead of contributing. Let them accomplish their business (by business, I mean financially supporting your organization), then direct them back to a full-nav page of your site to maintain engagement with your organization.
-Keep It Donor Friendly. Simple, clean and usable: make sure every graphic and word of text on your donation page packs a big punch. Your donation page is not the time to give a lengthy description of your mission statement- if they’re ready to contribute, they already know what you do. Keep information about your organization’s mission brief and instead use your text to illustrate where your donors dollars will go, specifically, and, of course, to profusely thank them for their support.
-Make Your Suggested Amounts Count. Many organizations include suggested amounts on their donation forms and it’s something we highly recommend. It’s different for every organization and fundraising campaign, but using a very small amount as the example donation (i.e. just $5 will do x at our organization) is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot. Unless it’s specifically necessary to your fundraising plan, start your suggested amount buttons at between 20 and 25 dollars. Asking for 5 bucks here and there may work for Ira Glass, but it’s probably not going to yield a substantial enough result for organization that don’t have massive donor bases.
-Your Donate Button Is Not Your Fundraising Campaign. Putting a ‘Donate Now!’ front and center on every page of your website is a given, but easy donation buttons do not a fundraising campaign make. Track your Analytics (and if you don’t have Google Analytics or another program already installed, for the love of God, install it now!) numbers and figure out which page of your website is most effectively funneling donors to your donation page. Know your potential donors likely pathways through your site to conversion (donation) like the back of your hand and make sure it’s a simple leap from every page of your site. For organizations relying largely on individual donations, it’s extremely important to clarify to donors how and why they should donate. Don’t just slap a button on there; make sure your donation links are well and prominently placed and provide a logical through-line for a donors visit to your site. Be sure your website sets up a narrative-style process your donor can follow from start to finish; Home page to About Us page to Blog to Donation, know what I mean?
More fundraising season prep posts coming soon! Happy Fundraising!
-AJ
