Reaching out to your target audience
We’ve seen in the first article (Late Autumn 2014 issue) how focusing on more strategic factors can help charities with building a clever multi-channel online marketing plan. This final article investigates the tactical tools and techniques required to actually deliver the results charities need: highly visible campaigns, strong presence in the social realm, a growing and engaged community, and dramatically boosted donations.
Advanced newsletter tools
There’s no doubt that the newsletter is the most loved tool of charities. And with good reason; it’s powerful, measurable and it delivers serious results. However, a basic newsletter building and sending platform just doesn’t cut it anymore. To really make the most of this ROI-friendly tool, the least you need are easy-to-create newsletter templates and a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor for newsletter building without technical knowledge.
Things get really interesting when you are able to target specific groups (segmentation) with content relevant to them in personalised emails (personalisation). Also when you can A/B test your newsletter's content and layout to gain deeper insights into what most resonates with and matters to your audience.
When you get clear analytics that report on how well each campaign performs with statistics like open and click-through rates, then you’re able to start maximising the value of each email you send, enhancing donor experience, relevance and retention, and boosting brand awareness and conversions.
Social integration tools
There is no escaping social media. Why would you want to when it is the number one activity on the web (dethroning pornography, according to Reuters)? It’s free, boosts engagement, furthers reach, and can spread your message like wildfire. However, a winning social marketing strategy requires constant and consistent content creation, but manually updating each social channel as well as your website is neither fast nor fun.
A solution that is fully integrated with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allows you to write content just the once. You can schedule postings and create a content workflow within your website user interface, ready for automatic publishing to your social channels.
Meanwhile, you can display social feeds on your website to show content from your Facebook and Twitter pages and display share buttons to encourage readers to promote your website content socially – but make sure this is easy for you to do and doesn’t require back-end coding. You can also drive up registered users on your site if you allow your users to sign in with their social media logins. Why not meet your users in their comfort zone, and gain valuable insights while you’re at it?
Encourage your donors to get social. Get them liking, following, tweeting, advocating and sharing your message all around the world. Create a buzz around your brand and let your community spread it for you!
Online community tools
Online communities have the power to inform, engage and excite users, while deepening relationships and driving awareness of and advocacy for your brand. Engage current and potential donors, as well as the wider community, through blogs, forums and groups.
Be able to help your users directly with Live Chat or help them help each other through discussions and private messaging. The more personal your approach, the more personal their response. Encourage conversations about your cause and listen in to learn more about your community’s thoughts, opinions and desires.
Open source is famous for its blogging platforms, but you’ll want to have full control over your charity's published content with a review and approval workflow to ensure the quality and consistency of your brand message. You’ll also want to have complete control over the look and feel of your community, as well as its permissions and rules.
By integrating your community site with your website and social media, you can ensure a consistent voice across all channels and can connect your community with your CRM (customer relationship management system) for actionable insights.
Customisable online donations
It’s no secret that online donation capabilities are essential to the online charity. But a charity with its sights on boosting donations will need a little more than that.
An online donation system should be able to fit around your exact needs. A sophisticated solution will allow payment in multiple currencies and for you to display site content in multiple languages. And it should be connected to the most familiar and trusted e-payment gateways. It should enable one-off donations, regular payment schemes, subscriptions and memberships. And should also allow you to control and manage a full e-commerce store, should you wish to sell merchandise online.
Full integration with your CRM is crucial if you are to unleash the power of donor retention, too. Again, it’s not that charities don’t know what tools they need; they just often don’t know what’s possible with them.
For example, leading disability charity Scope has seen dramatic improvements in fundraising through using a new donation system designed to be efficient on any device. Together with a new responsive website and content management system, the charity has seen the number of transactions for the site increase by 66%, the average donation value has increased 36% and the average number of email sign-ups has shot up by 75% per month.
Event marketing capabilities
Central to many charities’ activities are, of course, events. By displaying an events calendar on your site, you can encourage attendance at your fundraisers, conferences, seminars and exhibitions, and also show how active you are in, and valuable to, the community. But with events, it’s the turnout that matters – so you need the software that enables you to invite, coax, and cajole people along.
A specific event microsite helps with branding and targeting and to deliver a clear message. It also helps with SEO and event-specific campaign analytics. Marketing automation workflows are great for setting up scheduled invitations and reminders, and integration with social media helps spread the word fast!
Online registration forms are a must, as is a customisable checkout if you’re selling tickets—preferably a “smart” one for which you can set capacity and time limits. You might even consider offering an “add to my outlook calendar” function, so registrants can’t double book themselves.
Sophisticated online marketing tools
Every pound counts and competition is fierce. If you’re going to make a noise in the charity marketing world, you’re going to want the big boys’ marketing tools.
Content personalisation allows you to personalise emails with the name of your recipient as well as with content relevant to their interests. It also enables your website to respond dynamically in real-time to current users’ specific interests based on behaviour and demographics. This greatly boosts the donor experience and breeds brand advocacy.
Segmentation and personas enable you to target key audiences more clearly and with more relevant content for a drastically improved conversion rate.
Marketing automation supports your donor retention strategies by automatically delivering a stream of highly relevant emails to your existing donor base for elevated repeat giving.
Lead scoring can be utilised to highlight your hottest potential donors and volunteers. You can then target those most likely to convert with an email, phone call or Live Chat window, dramatically boosting results.
Getting the balance right
In summary, the potential gains are out there, waiting to be tapped. So it’s tempting to head straight for the top end marketing solutions, but you’ll probably have a hard time justifying the ludicrous price tag. The complexity of these solutions can actively slow down content creation and campaigns and get in the way of your goals.
A charity’s focus shouldn’t be on accumulating a dusty cupboard full of expensive bells and whistles, but should instead be on the things that truly matter for driving up donations in a modern digital world. Yes, an omni-channel online marketing approach backed by a set of up to the task sophisticated tools, but don’t forget simplicity, flexibility, relevant functionality and justifiable price.
