As online giving continues to grow and nonprofit organizations focus more on virtual marketing and outreach, your donors’ digital experiences with your organization are only getting more important. When your nonprofit is able to provide a smooth user experience during online giving and connect with donors through a personalized digital marketing strategy, you can make a lasting, positive impression on supporters.
Bonterra Donor Engagement held a 30-minute panel Q&A discussion with Interactive Strategies about low-risk steps nonprofits can take to make a big impact on their online fundraising. These steps won’t require your nonprofit’s staff members to invest significant amounts of time or effort, and they don’t require extensive technical knowledge. Your organization can easily implement these tips or look for someone who can offer tech support and guidance.
Chris Rempert, associate director at Interactive Strategies, weighed in about some of the straightforward digital practices nonprofits can implement to improve donors’ digital experiences when supporting your organization. Let’s get started.
Q&A with Chris Rempert: Optimizing digital donor experiences
Q: Hi Chris! What are some simple ways I can improve my donors’ experience?
A (Chris Rempert): I think one way, which is something that we as fundraisers sometimes forget to do, is just to thank our donors. You can never thank them too often or too soon after they make a gift. It’s probably one of the most important things you can do to enhance their donor experience.
A second method is to emphasize the impact of a donor’s gift on your everyday organizational efforts. We frequently see organizations that are really good at the fundraising appeal part of their program, and that’s important if you want to keep generating revenue from your digital donors. However, reminding your donors why their gift is important can go a long way in enhancing their experience, which will in turn improve retention rates down the road.
A third important step to improving the donor experience is making your resources mobile-responsive. This is probably a given by now, but a majority of your donors are going to be visiting your website and viewing your emails on a mobile device. At this point, organizations need to do everything they can to make sure that everything they’re sending and everything that their donors are seeing is optimized for mobile.
How can your nonprofit get started?
Because nonprofits use technology to engage donors in a variety of ways, there are many ways you can start optimizing your digital strategy. For instance, you might evaluate your online donation form to remove any unnecessary questions, check for technical issues, and improve accessibility. On the other hand, you could make it easier for donors to find and follow your social media accounts by cross-promoting your accounts on different platforms, adding links to your profiles on your website, and standardizing your username across all accounts.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to make all of these changes at once, and it’s acceptable to start with easy fixes first. Instead of trying to completely transform your digital strategy overnight, aim to start small and slowly evolve over time. This way, you can ensure each change you make is deliberate and well-executed to have a direct, positive impact on your donors’ digital experience with your nonprofit.
