By: John Killoran, CEO, Snowball
While it’s true that new tech tools won’t solve your fundraising problems, they certainly help when used in smart ways. Mobile fundraising and text-to-give platforms are a perfect example. There are a number of benefits to crafting a smart mobile fundraising strategy, particularly in regards to Principle 7: Renew & Refresh™. Renew & Refresh is the principle of renewing your current donors, while acquiring new donors at the highest rates possible.
Effective strategies can go a long way to help you build stronger relationships and retain more support. If you’re new to mobile fundraising, we recommend the comprehensive Snowball text-to–give guide. For now, we’ll walk through the most common mobile fundraising mistakes and how to avoid them:
Mistake 1: Requiring too many steps to donate.
Forcing your donors to complete a lengthy data input process defeats the purpose of mobile fundraising.
At Snowball, we’ve found that the average donor abandonment rate is around 60% or higher, meaning only 4 out of 10 donors actually complete their donations. Requiring too many steps amplifies the issue by creating a slow experience.
An analogous problem comes from the world of eCommerce. According to this guide on shopping cart abandonment, consumers abandon their transactions because of sticker shock, poor user experience, and security issues.
The Solution: Trust your donors and streamline the process.
Prevent sticker shock and poor user experience by keeping required data input to a minimum. Try a mobile-based pledge fundraising campaign to test it out. This style gives donors a lightning-fast user experience that prevents them from rethinking their pledges.
This also helps boost your retention or refresh rates. Simply making it easier to support your work recognizes that your donor’s time is valuable. It shows that you’re not just greedy for data that’s irrelevant to the actual donation process.
Mistake 2: Forgetting options that build relationships.
As you streamline your mobile donation process, don’t lose sight of the fact that the most valuable long-run purpose of your text-to-give tools is to help you build more relationships.
Simply securing donations is great for one campaign but not necessarily the overall health of your organization’s bottom line. Forgetting to include options in your mobile fundraising process that offer actual value to both your nonprofit and your donors can be a serious mistake.
The Solution: Provide smart options that encourage more engagement.
There are two great examples of how you can encourage more engagement and support with your work by offering options in the mobile donation process:
- Recurring donation options are a perfect option to offer donors. Preset amount buttons allow donors to choose the size of their automated monthly gift, or you can offer the choice once their initial donation has been secured.
- Matching gift search tools can be embedded into your thank-you emails. Donors pleased with the fast experience will be happy to search for their match eligibility, potentially doubling the impact of their gift.
The most important thing to remember is that donation options like these should never hinder the main donation process itself. Creating an extra step will waste valuable time and cause many potential supporters to drop out.
Mistake 3: Neglecting your mobile fundraising data.
A successful mobile fundraising campaign that reaches a wide audience will generate a lot of data. However, many nonprofits fail to make the most of it. The campaign data that you’ve generated is invaluable for refining your fundraising and stewardship strategies.
Many nonprofits shy away from some mobile fundraising techniques because they’ve failed to learn from their first attempt, instead assuming that their base of support will be uninterested in any form of mobile giving.
The Solution: Focus on a few KPIs to learn more from each campaign.
It’s essential that you take the time to study your data for every campaign your organization conducts. Smart mobile fundraising platforms will help your track key metrics that can help you refine your strategies going forward. Some of the most strategically valuable are:
- Donor growth over your previous campaigns
- Donor retention rate from your previous campaign
- Pledge fulfillment percentage
- Recurring gift percentage
Tracking changes in these KPIs against any changes you make to your mobile fundraising process or methods will yield invaluable insights. Most importantly, it will help you to identify the techniques that really connect with donors rather than just pander to them.
Mobile fundraising is a challenge for many nonprofits. Developing smarter strategies for improving the donor experience and gleaning more insights can take your mobile fundraising and text-to-give campaigns to the next level.
John Killoran is CEO of Snowball, an exciting new fundraising technology that makes it easy for people to donate in two clicks from text, email, web and social media sites. John pioneered SMTP payments and has been a major innovator in the mobile payments space for the past 5 years. When he is not running a company, he is cooking food for his family and telling his dogs to stop barking.
