After welcoming your supporters, sending creative messages that engages them on a personal level, and keying them into your campaign’s overall narrative, you’re ready to start using text messages to increase your donations.
Here are three ways you can incorporate SMS into your fundraising strategy to drive more contributions.
1. Send a simple text message reminder to make a donation
The easiest way to tie in text messaging to your fundraising campaign is to send out a simple reminder to donate. Sometimes people just need an extra nudge to take the final step. A text message is a short, timely way to bypass all the clutter of emails and voicemails and send that reminder without overwhelming your supporters.
Case Study: The Humane Society of the United States
The Humane Society of the United States is one of the nation’s largest and most effective animal protection organizations.
They decided to test their end-of-year fundraising campaign reminders by splitting supporters into two groups: one who received both text message and email reminders to donate online, and one who only received email reminders. HSUS found that the first group was 77% more likely to donate online than the second group! By using both email and text messaging, HSUS was able to increase the likelihood that supporters would make an online donation.
2. Ask for a donation pledge over text message
It’s not always convenient for supporters to make a donation the minute they receive your fundraising ask message. However, you can make it easier by asking them to respond with a pledge to donate a specific amount that they can finalize later. You can then remind them of their pledge when they decide to make the donation online, over the phone, or in person.
Regardless of whether or not a supporter makes a donation, it’s important to remember that every conversation with a supporter helps to move him or her further along the path to donating.
Case Study: Jewish Federations of America
In late 2012, the Jewish Federations of North America needed to raise crisis funds to help Israelis recovering from the conflict with Gaza. To make it as easy as possible for people to give without setting arbitrary limits on the size of their donations, JFNA decided to set up a text to pledge campaign. By asking supporters to text in donation amounts, JFNA received over $6,000 in pledges. Ultimately, they raised $3,377 from the follow-up phone calls with the pledgers! By leaving the gift amount up to their supporters, they were able to receive much larger contributions than if they asked for donations on the spot.
3. Include a link to a mobile-optimized web form directly in your text message
The key to getting supporters to give is minimizing the number of steps they need to take in order to make a donation. By adding a link to a mobile web form that autofills their basic information, such as name, email, and address, supporters simply have to fill out their credit card information to make a contribution. It doesn’t get much easier than that!
Case Study: No Kid Hungry
The No Kid Hungry campaign, run by Share Our Strength, seeks to end childhood hunger in America. Their fundraising strategy includes using Convio forms to allow supporters to make donations using their mobile phones. By testing various layouts for their online donation page, they were able to increase the donation rate for visitors from 17% to 25%!
This blog post is an excerpt taken from our new eBook: How Text Messaging Improves Multichannel Engagement for Nonprofit Fundraising.
To learn more about how you can launch a nonprofit text messaging campaign, please reach out today.