by Andrew Thompson
Earlier this week, we discussed how your expense budget affects the efficiency of your program. For years now, directors of development and annual giving programs have been striving to increase the volume of gifts that come via online contributions.
Hopefully, your institution long ago made sure that visitors to its site had a clear and easy path to making a gift online. Likewise, any donor making an online contribution should be inputting enough data that you will have the opportunity to continually cultivate a relationship with that donor pro-actively in the future.
By no means, however, is that the end of the story. In future posts, we'll explore a variety of ways that you can make your online giving program more effective, i.e. specifically to produce more revenue, but here we'll only touch on that point as we stay focused on the efficiency of your program. You need no daily reminder that these are tough times. But, these ARE challenging times in the world of fundraising, and you have to come to work every day with both a sense of urgency and the need for greater efficiency.
In doing so, improving revenue numbers will certainly help. Remember, we're looking at the ratio of the cost it takes to raise every dollar as the method of defining efficiency. Thinking in those terms really helps to properly frame the problem. Ask yourself, which methods of fundraising bring in the most at the least cost? Phonathon? Direct mail? Online giving? In person visits?
As a former planned giving director, I was constantly reminded to tell our team how efficiently we raised money. At the American Cancer Society, we liked to say it costs 22-23 cents to raise a dollar, but less than 7 cents to raise "major gifts" and even less to raise legacy and planned gifts.
Over time, however, I came to understand that there were many different ways of calculating these numbers, and thus, many different results as well. So the question is then, how does online giving truly compare to other methods of raising money, and even more to the point, how can it be done in a a way that helps to produce a more efficient annual giving program?
Here are two important points to consider.
First, you probably already know that online giving can appear much more efficient than it actually is. The blessing of having someone you did not solicit make a gift nonetheless, carries with it the burden of not knowing what s/he responded to. It also means there is no group or category from which s/he emerged and can necessarily easily be placed.
Thus, if you want to replicate the result, you have to spend time and energy figuring out what it was that got his attention and use it to target others who would do the same. But because s/he was unique in this way, you will find yourself targeting more or less unique behaviors which can be very time consuming and inefficient.
Achieving greater efficiency online demands an understanding that these attracted but unsolicited donors respond in much the same way as any other online customers. Hence, the process of search engine marketing has been your ally and you can make it work even more to your benefit with proper optimization techniques. You will gain efficiency in online giving when you match the reasons these donors are looking to the messages they can find and will see when they are attracted to your site.
The second point to help you in this process is to always keep in mind that the efficiency is largely gained after the donor has made an online contribution rather than before. You now have a tremendous source of new information and an opportunity to cultivate a long term and growing relationship with him or her because you made that first gift possible online.
Right at the outset, you have a unique chance to capture some additional funding with reminders that their gifts may be eligible for a match from an employer. Immediately after a gift is committed, you can redirect the donor to another page where they can determine the eligibility and sign up instantly for the match. I've worked with Brian Lacy and Associates on this in the past, and it is a tremendously effective way to improve giving results before you've even had contact with the donor himself.
Online giving opens a diverse array of giving options to pursue. Carefully crafting your program to enable and improve your overall efficiency can solve many of the difficult problems you may face in a challenging economic environment.
