Many nonprofits are wrapping up their spring appeals and fundraising events. All of that intense momentum has evened out, and now organizations are barreling head-first into the dog days of summer. The thought of coming up with a fundraising strategy this time of year can be unnerving. It’s even more difficult to conceive of if you just produced the event of your career. Queue the out-of-office responders and staffer eye-rolls. You’re officially burned out on thinking of different ways to say the same thing and honestly, your donors are too.
I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way! If your most recent efforts were particularly successful, now especially is not the time to cease and desist your communications with donors.
You can easily take action, you just need to listen more!
Send surveys, encourage feedback.
Society’s obsession with social media has given birth to a whole new form of being self-centered. Capitalize on it by asking people for their opinions. They’ll hand them over in heaps. Use direct mail with pURLs to send people to personalized micro-sites where their responses can be appended back into your marketing database. This way you can easily take advantage of what you’ve learned. You could even throw in a perk for participating. Seriously, you should reward them in some way.
See also: Use Your Data to Describe and Predict
Go digital and track activity.
Use pop-up surveys on your website to capture your followers’ attitudes online. Use their email addresses to link comments back to the record for that individual in your larger marketing database.
See also: How Do You Measure Campaign Success?
Use social as a listening device.
Read comments to your blog posts or track conversations about your organization in social media. When you see patterns, address those issues in e-newsletters, on your Facebook page, or on other channels where you are active. Let your audience know you’re actually listening by addressing their thoughts or concerns. The best part about this is that you’re encouraging a dialog.
Summer can be relaxing for those of us who are still at the office. You might not be poolside, but you can still bask in the glory not of the sun but in the fact that you made use of this time to implement simple strategies to tune into what’s happening in your orbit. Two-way communication is imperative to successful marketing for all businesses, not just nonprofits. Start the conversation and block out all unnecessary chatter. Autumn will be here before you know it, and well, we both know you’ll be drafting those appeals again! And this time, the targeted writing will be working hard for you.
Like what you see? Stay in touch!
You might also find these articles interesting:
+ Use Your Data to Describe and Predict
+ How Do You Measure Campaign Success?
