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What's your supporter experience like?

Nhu Te
4 min read
Jan 30, 2024 2:46:27 PM
065: What's your supporter experience like?

 

Your supporters are your org's lifeline. Without their generosity and support, you would have a pretty hard time carrying out your mission. So, if engagement, retention, or even attention is top of mind this year, you need to look at fundraising and marketing at an experience level.

I coin experience as a high-priority item for this reason: Knowing the gaps in your supporter experience means you have the potential to build deeper connections with them.

Sounds great but can often fall by the wayside if you aren't constantly auditing your supporter experience. Follow along as I share resources on strategic approaches like integrated fundraising, habit-forming experiences, and expanding community with search.

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Inflight Briefing-assets

Snackable snippets 

The role of integrated campaigns in fundraising 🎧
No one channel rules them all. Organizations need to engage supporters across multiple channels, meeting them wherever they like to consume information. Perhaps even more important is the ability to integrate these channels to give supporters a unified experience.

Jen Newmeyer, Digital Fundraising Director at PBS, sits down with Noah on Good Marketing Unplugged to talk about the different integration types within nonprofits and shares actionable steps to take.

Tobes Kelly kicks off this week’s newsletter by diving into the pitfalls of one-off marketing efforts. These initiatives lack consistency and often lead to a fragmented and lackluster experience.

One part that stood out to me was his first approach to improving donor retention: auditing your donor journey. This is particularly helpful because you gain an in-depth understanding of what areas need to be improved upon and whether or not your experience is attracting the right donors to your doorstep.

Creating habit-forming donor experiences 📖
This is another retention-focused resource, but it’s worth a read. What I really enjoyed is the use of “habit-forming experiences.” This means hooking your donors so much that they keep coming back for more. Isn’t that the nonprofit dream?

Mark Miller shares Nir Eyal's habit-forming framework, which includes using psychological triggers, making the action simple, offering unpredictable rewards, and encouraging investments beyond the financial (my fave!).

Leveraging search to expand your community 📖
You’re likely already using SEM to get in front of your target audience, but how can nonprofits and associations use it more effectively?

Relevance is a big part of successful SEM efforts, as Megan Donahue puts it, so content matters. Search engines often prioritize content that is relevant and valuable to users, and these factors contribute to a better user experience (and better ranking of SERPs).

Digital ads continue to become more ‘relevant’ 📖
Here’s a fun fact: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first digital ad—thanks, AT&T! Thanks to sophisticated data practices, advertisers can now deliver more personalized and relevant content to their audiences.

Recent data from CivicScience finds that 44% of US adults believe that the majority of ads were at least somewhat relevant to their interests. This was even more predominant among younger adults between 18 and 34 years of age.

 

In the news

Starting in February, Google is tightening up its rules for groups that send more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail accounts. If you fall into this category, there are three things to stay on top of:

  1. To help verify the legitimacy of the emails, bulk email senders have to authenticate their messages through protocols such as SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.
  2. Bulk senders have to include a simple, one-click unsubscribe option and honor these requests within two business days.
  3. To avoid getting their email marked as spam, bulk senders have to stay under a clear spam threshold. Otherwise, these emails risk getting filtered out as spam.

If you need any help with making sure you’re authenticated, I’d recommend giving Katelyn Baughan a follow. She is constantly sharing valuable email marketing insights for nonprofits. 

*****

The date is set: January 29. Next week, Amazon will turn on ads for its tens of millions of Prime Video viewers, surpassing the likes of Netflix.

This goes to show the adaptation of digital ads, as this marketing channel continues to find relevant ways to reach and engage target audiences. Will this be the beginning of the (re)boom of DRTV?

For your inspiration folder

Nonprofits have traditionally started their strategic plan based on the campaign they want to launch, and then they move on to figuring out which donors they should be reaching. Unfortunately, this often leads to a focus on one-time gifts.

However, Vidya Chadaga of RKD Group challenges us to rethink this approach and instead start with donors. This way, strategies are crafted around supporter preferences, an integral part of developing long-lasting relationships.

 

Source: RKD Group

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