Take a moment and think about your last annual report. What words come to mind?

Boring?

Snooze-fest?

Good for the litter box?

Time suck?

Unread?

You get the idea.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A good annual report can make a huge difference for an organization.

One time I worked on an annual report for an international relief organization doing work in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report was GREAT. So great, we used it to help us close some very large (7-figure!) gifts. There’s no way we would have received those donations without the annual report.

What made the report so compelling? The biggest thing was the way we told stories, both verbally and through images. These stories made it crystal clear to the reader that we were truly helping some of the world’s most impoverished people. It was extremely powerful.

So even though the process of producing the annual report was intensive, the benefits were enormous to the organization.

Now, most of the time annual reports ARE boring. Far too often the annual report gets short shrift. It’s considered a burden. Why? In part it’s because production starts soon after fiscal year-end and everyone is exhausted.

So in 2017 one of resolutions for you is this: your nonprofit will have a kick-ass, widely read annual report that you and your staff will enjoy creating and that will make a real different for the organization!

Sound like one of those resolutions people break in February?

Trust me; this is one you’ll keep, and love doing it.

Here’s why…Continue Reading

What could you do with a bigger email list?

More donations? Volunteers? Capacity? Impact? Probably all of the above.

After all, according to a recent M&R Benchmarks report:

• In 2015, on average, nonprofits received $44 in donations for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent.
• Nonprofit email revenue grew by 25%, faster than the overall rate of online revenue growth
• Among the nonprofits with the largest year-over-year growth in total dollars raised online, 34% of all online revenue can be tracked directly to email campaigns.

So it’s clear that nonprofit list building is very important. It drives donations, scales communications, and provides real-time feedback about what constituents truly care about.

So how do you get more people onto your list?

Today I’m going to show you how some of the top nonprofits are doing it, the big mistake they’re making, and how you can do it better.Continue Reading

Most nonprofit websites aren’t as effective as they could be.

But there’s a good reason.

As Joan likes to say, nonprofits are messy. It’s in the DNA.

Frankly, when you have too many a lot of very passionate cooks in the kitchen; when you’re working on something very important with unmovable timelines; when every dollar you spend on a website is a dollar that doesn’t go directly to your programs… well… that leads to messy.

Add in the fact that few nonprofits have serious in-house digital expertise, and that mess translates to your website. Which impacts its effectiveness. Which means fewer donations, less advocacy, fewer people helped, less influence.

So how do you pull yourself out of this catch-22?

Here are four improvements your nonprofit can make to its website (along with examples) that, combined with a smart digital marketing plan, almost guarantee you better online results and an increase in online donations.Continue Reading

Joan Garry and I work on a lot of digital projects together (including this website) and we’ve definitely seen a big improvement among nonprofits. (If you’re wondering who I am, I’m Joan’s digital marketing partner and President of digital agency Abstract Edge — and after 17 years of helping nonprofits optimize their websites for fundraising, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.)

Thankfully, the quality and sophistication of nonprofit websites, social media, email marketing, and so on have improved over the years. By now, the basic playbook used by most nonprofits for online donations is pretty well understood:

• A donation page with pre-set options like “$25, $50, $100, Other” and sometimes the ability to handle recurring donations.
• An email newsletter that occasionally — or sometimes obnoxiously frequently — solicits.
• A big “DONATE” button on every page.
• A blog designed to provoke an emotional response that can easily be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.

Many nonprofits also increasingly understand the impact of design on donations. First impressions matter a lot… if you walk into a dirty restaurant, would you want to eat there?

So now that they have the basics down, what can a nonprofit do to get to the next level?

THE THREE WAYS TO GROW ONLINE FUNDRAISING

It’s important to understand that there are precisely three ways to grow a business. You can increase a) the number of customers, b) the average transaction value per customer, or c) the number of transactions per customer. That’s it.

It’s the same with donations. There are really only three ways to increase your individual fundraising.

1. Find more donors
2. Increase the average donation amount
3. Get donors to donate more frequently

These are the levers you can pull. Ideally, you pull all three to get exponential results (double the people donating twice the average amount twice as frequently and you now have 8 times more money!) But even pulling just one lever can help a lot.

Here are three tactics sophisticated digital marketers use in the commercial world that smart nonprofits can learn from (hint: none of them have to be expensive.)Continue Reading