Most charities or not for profit organisations need to rely on donations in order to survive.
Donations can come in the form of goods and services as well as financial donations. Because donations are so crucial it is important for the organisation to understand where the donations come from, why someone may make a donation and how to keep donors making repeat donations. This is often called “The Donor Journey”. Put simply it is the path a donor takes from first hearing about your organisation, through to making the decision to become a donor and making donations.
Awareness
The prospective donor needs to become aware of your organisation. Every charity needs to work hard on marketing and promotion through social media, other media, google ad grants and other advertising, email marketing and word of mouth, events and more.
Learning
Once a prospective donor is aware of you, they then need to learn more about you as they consider whether you are a good organisation to support. So first impressions are important, good communication and great content on your website.
A good charity CRM like infoodle.com helps with your email marketing.
Action
Once you have successfully motivated prospective donors to support your organisation, they will want to take action. Making the donation needs to be as easy as possible. Make your online donation buttons easy to find, and minimise the number of steps required to donate, using a secure donor management platform like infoodle.com that will track donations and send out donor receipts.
Engagement
But you don’t want just one off donations, you want recurring donations or repeat donors who will give to other campaigns. Therefore you need to keep your donors engaged.
There are many aspects to keeping a donor engaged so they continue to support the work of your organisation. This can be compared to any relationship, just a little appreciation and thankfulness as well as good communication.
- Appreciation: Automatically send a personalised thank you email after a donation. Make particular mention of how much they contributed to your work. If it is a large donation, a special letter or personal call from the CEO expressing your appreciation. Using platforms like infoodle.com sends automated personalised emails and notifies of large donations.
- Communication: Let your donors know what the results of their contribution was, send letters with testimonies or stories about the people who were helped, not just statistics. This can be done via newsletters, added information to tax receipts and statements, letters or invitation to events.
- Involvement: Give donors an opportunity to volunteer or help in a practical way, have a special event like a dinner to thank donors as well as share about the work and give the opportunity to donate again.
Tracking and measuring your success at each point in the journey will also allow you to understand what works, what doesn’t, and how to be more effective next time.
Management Tools
Throughout the donor journey you need a Charity CRM platform that will help with your management and administration. Infoodle is a CRM that helps with storing your contacts, sending the different types of communications, receives payment donations, tracks donations, automated workflows, reports, event registrations and management, volunteer management and much more. If you want to learn more go to infoodle.com or contact sales@infoodle.com
