From acknowledgment letters and emails to email marketing, text messaging, and social media campaigns, communication is key to fundraising success. You need a system that facilitates the communications most critical to your organization.
Most systems make it easy to create and send thank you letters and emails for gifts and auto-responder emails for online donations. Some provide seamless letter and email creation and mail-merging with built in word processors and email delivery tools. In general, systems include built-in letter and email templates that you can customize or allow you to create new templates that include mail-merge tokens within the system. These templates may only allow limited customization, or they may allow you to add headers, signatures, and custom formatting. A few allow you to create templates in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or build full HTML emails and upload them into the system. There are still some, though, that require you to export data into Microsoft Excel and create your mailings outside the system. Some allow you to create label and envelope templates within the system, but many still require you to create these by exporting address data.
Systems often will let you choose a letter template when entering a gift and then run off the right letters in one shot, with labels to match, but you should also check their support for generating one-off thank you letters. Some systems make you create every letter as part of a batch process, which is less than ideal if you frequently enter and acknowledge one gift at a time. You should also check the export formats for letters created in the system—some allow you to export the letters in Word format so you can further personalize the content, while some only export letters as PDFs.
Systems may handle individual email sends differently than bulk (or broadcast) email sends. Individual emails and auto-responders are usually sent through the vendor’s server, although some vendors allow you to set up your system so that emails are sent using your organization’s DNS information (which is not recommended for bulk email sends). Some systems have built-in broadcast email capability that allows you to send emails to large groups of individuals, such as campaign solicitations or event invitations, while others integrate with third-party broadcast email providers for marketing emails. This integration can range from a simple upload of a group of contacts to the third-party provider to a two-way integration that allows you to bring in donor unsubscribes and performance data for each email campaign. Systems vary on the type of email performance metrics they track—some provide detailed statistics, while others only record a few (or no) metrics.
It’s also important to consider how the system logs the letter or email into a donor’s profile once it’s been mailed. Is it logged automatically, or do you need to go through one or more extra steps to log it? For emails, will the system also log a recipient’s interactions with the message (e.g. opens, clicks) on the contact record?
For both letters and emails, more advanced systems let you merge in conditional text (for example, to include a special greeting to donors who attended a recent event) or custom gift strings (for instance, to solicit 15 percent more from each donor than they gave last year).
An increasing number of systems now support text messaging, either natively or via a third-party integration. This can range from simple broadcast texts that allow you to send out updates or links to an online form to two-way text messaging that is saved as an interaction on a contact record, or text-to-give or text-to-action functionality that allows a constituent to text a shortcode to a number to receive a link to a mobile-optimized donation or sign up form.
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Enhancing Social Connections
While social media is nearly ubiquitous in many people’s daily lives, nonprofit fundraisers have struggled to figure out how to make the channel work for them. We first added the capture of donor social profiles to our evaluation criteria in the 2017 edition of this report, but since then, several systems have enhanced their functionality around social networking tools significantly.
Salsa wanted to make use of the data it could pull from Facebook, the largest social network, to assist with clients’ marketing automation and advertising. As a result, nonprofits on the Salsa Engage platform can use the Facebook Pixel—code that collects data that helps track users—on their donation forms to create retargeted Facebook ad campaigns for individuals who visit a donation page but do not complete a transaction.
Salsa also used Facebook’s API to integrate Facebook Lead Ads with Salsa Engage, so that individuals who interact with a Lead Ad are automatically added to the database and entered into a triggered email series.
Other vendors have similar features that help nonprofits use social media for acquisition campaigns. EveryAction includes an integration with Facebook’s Ads Manager, which can push a list of contacts directly into a custom audience in Facebook for use in targeted messaging or to create a “lookalike” audience. NationBuilder’s Twitter integration allows you to import a Twitter account’s followers, or the accounts a Twitter user is following. The system also lets you tag the contacts who engage with your Facebook posts. Virtuous offers an optional “Social Insights” feature that appends social media handles, profiles, and images to contact records.
Nonprofits continue to experiment with ways to integrate social media into their fundraising plans. If your organization is one of those experimenting, you should look into ways your fundraising system can help you do this.
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Engaging Supporters With Video
The written word dominates donor communications for nonprofits, but video is increasing in importance. Network for Good has taken video one step further by incorporating video messaging tools into its platform. These tools allow you to record and send video acknowledgements, personal video messages, and group video messages to donors. The recipient will receive a text message or email with a preview image that contains a personal message and a link to the video. After watching the video, the recipient can like it and add a comment. The system is set up to encourage the use of video messaging, so once you send one video you will receive suggestion of what video to send next. Some of the suggestions include birthday messages, “donor-versaries,” and donors who are in danger of lapsing.