Individual giving

Sometimes it pays to chase up a fake email. A journalist today forwarded me an email purportedly from the Santander Foundation, which had apparently been received by some charities.

Vasileios Kospanos explains, using digital curation tool Storify, how he was engaged and moved to make a donation.

There are hundreds if not thousands of people online offering technical and content advice on email marketing for business as well as for fundraising or campaigning. I'm not a technical expert so can't pretend to understand detailed coding or firewall issues but I do know a thing or two about content and about engaging readers.

Why do we want to engage readers? Because engaged readers are much more likely to do what you're asking them to do! Note the implication in that last sentence... you have to have a clear and compelling 'ASK' in every email whether it's for funds, to buy something, to sign-up to a campaign, to share with a friend or just to get further information - include an action.

I received a well-intentioned and polite email earlier this week from someone telling me about a schools reading project in Wales. Here's how it broke down:

For those feeling daunted by 2012, a word of encouragement. It’s not all bad news. Yes, things will be tough, but we’re all getting used to that. Nevertheless, you will still need something to carry you through the year and help you raise the funds your organisation depends on.

What a week of message contradictions we've noted at Bottom Line Ideas...

First there was research from Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) which showed Britain to be the fifth most charitable country in the world (up from eighth last year apparently). The same research also reported that nearly 80% of us give regularly to charity, second only to the Thais. Then we saw the British Government veto any further support to the IMF in support of specific Euro-zone bailouts - our European cousins perhaps not feeling our generosity quite so much.

Any regular readers will know how I often lament the lack of great marketing and fundraising ideas making it to fruition.  All too often, decisions are made to bin new ideas because there is no proven track record of success or because it’s simply ‘different to the way things are always done around here...’

This week, I’ve had my faith restored by two approaches to fundraising that in one case is working and in the other, I hope works.  But both are trying something different to stand out from the plethora of charity messages we all receive at this time of the year.

Facebook's Open Graph platform allows you to build applications that pass information between Facebook and your website then publish back to Facebook.

This month at the IoF West Midlands conference, Liz Loudon brought a useful reminder of the importance of effective language in fundraising. In an excellent presentation, she gave valuable tips on making an impact with appeal writing.

There is more or less an expectation for charities to be on Twitter, but when was the last to you stopped to think why your charity is on social media and are you acheiving what you set out to?

No effective charity or business wants to waste time and money or deliberately upset customers or supporters.  That’s why targeting has long been a mainstay of the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s toolkit.  In my simple world, it helps us to achieve two things:

1. Communicate only with the people most likely to act upon our messages in the way we want them to (assuming we match the target group’s wants and needs to our messages)
2. Save time and money by not communicating with audiences who are least likely to act in the way we want them to.

I appreciate that there are further subtleties here, like recognising that our organisations will have different messages which will appeal to different or the same audiences at different times, so one general rule of targeting simply won’t fit all situations. But in the last week alone I’ve observed three examples of the consequences of all this targeting being done independently by multiple, well-meaning organisations:

Targeting postcodes for charity bag collection Several contributors to the LinkedIn Group, Charity UK, have been sharing their experiences of receiving multiple collection bags – from several every week to 3 every day!