Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits: 6 Key Strategies

As digital fundraising evolves, your nonprofit should track trends and adapt your fundraising strategies accordingly. The year-end season is essential for fundraising, and it can provide you with necessary insights about your priorities going forward. If you aren’t sure what to focus on going forward, the following takeaways will help you future-proof your digital fundraising strategy in 2023.

1. Automate your operations

Nonprofit software solutions are more powerful, user-friendly, and affordable than ever before. There are digital software solutions for any size or type of nonprofit that can optimize every facet of your operations. Here are some activities software solutions can streamline:

• Grants management
• Event planning
• Wealth screening
• Project management
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Case management
• Donor prospecting
• Website analytics
• Fundraiser management
• Email communications

The most important software is often your donor database (CRM), which can be used to segment donors and tailor fundraising opportunities for the best outcomes. 

2. Optimize your web design

Your website is likely the first place that prospective donors will turn to for more information about your organization and cause. Providing site visitors with a good experience is essential to making a good first impression and allowing them to access the resources they need. 

Using a powerful website builder is necessary for optimizing your website as a fundraising tool. Your website builder allows you to reorganize your navigation interface, add essential information, and brand your site to your nonprofit. Improving all of these elements culminates in a better user experience for your site visitors. 

Additionally, you can leverage your website builder to promote fundraising. The key to getting eyes on your fundraiser’s page and your donation form is to include clickable and aesthetically pleasing graphics linking to these pages. Consider adding a clickable button with a call-to-action to learn more about your fundraiser or sign up for the corresponding event.

3. Pay attention to SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is changing your website’s content to align with Google’s search algorithm so your website appears higher on the search engine results page (SERP) for certain keywords. Only 0.63% of Google searchers click on results on the second page, giving you very little room for error. 

Optimizing your content for Google’s algorithm is an easy way to boost your SERP ranking for your target keywords. Here are some tips Google recommends to optimize your content:

• Conduct a site search to ensure that your site is showing up on Google.
• Organize your content so it can be crawled and indexed by Google.
• Mobile-optimize your content in your CMS so all readers can access it.
• Use features such as alt text to make your content accessible to visitors of all abilities.
• Eliminate unnecessary code to decrease load times.
• Post high-quality educational content that satisfies search intent and is useful to readers.

Not only is optimizing your content simple, but it’s also free. Work within your CMS to update your content according to Google’s guidelines. If you don’t see results right away, don’t worry. It takes some time for the resources to gain traction. This is a long-term strategy, but it has big returns in the long run.

4. Take advantage of Google Ad Grants

If your organization has a tight marketing budget, you can rely on Google to spread the word about your cause and boost your fundraising revenue through its Ad Grant program. The Google Ad Grants program is a powerful tool for increasing your organization’s visibility. Through the program, your organization receives $10,000 in advertising space on top of the SERP for free every month.

All you need to do is make a nonprofit account on Google, verify your 501(c)(3) status, and identify which fundraiser pages you want to promote. Or, you can turn to a Google Grants manager to handle everything for you. This digital fundraising tactic is especially useful for smaller nonprofits competing against organizations with a large marketing budget. 

5. Offer hybrid and remote event components

Hybrid and fully remote fundraising events have increased in popularity due to their advantages for both nonprofits and their attendees. With affordable online event hosting technology, your organization doesn’t have to rely on expensive in-person events anymore. Some hosting platforms even offer nonprofit discounts, further cutting your costs.

Hybrid and remote events also appeal to donors. Rather than accounting for travel time, they can attend your events from anywhere using their mobile devices. This helps to widen your potential donor base. 

Most traditional in-person events can be made virtual, such as:

• Webinars, panels, or presentations
• Galas
• Auctions
• 5K walk/run-a-thons
• Concerts
• Dinner parties
• Meet-and-greets with beneficiaries
• Giving Days

You can make traditional in-person events virtual by using a video-conferencing platform to involve your attendees in the action. 

6. Leverage matching gift programs

Matching gifts are the nonprofit sector’s best-kept secret. Billions in matching gift revenue go unclaimed each year, mostly due to your donors’ unfamiliarity with their employers’ corporate giving programs. But, once your donors know that their gifts can be matched, their likelihood of giving increases by 71%. Therefore, it’s in your nonprofit’s best interest to educate your donors about matching gift programs and streamline the giving process for them. 

The best way to do so is to leverage matching gift software. This technology allows your donors to check their employers’ corporate giving policy directly from your donation form. Once nonprofit users integrate the matching gift software into their online donation form, donors will input their employer, and the software will seamlessly submit the request and amplify the gift by a 1:1 or even 2:1 ratio. Choose a platform with auto-submission capabilities to further simplify and speed up the process.

Wrapping Up 

The last days of the year are a time of reflection and goal-setting for the coming year. If you feel like your digital fundraising tactics are lacking, it might be time to make a change. Work with your team to analyze which avenues, like the ones in this guide, are worth pursuing. Consider trying these strategies if you haven’t yet to make 2023 your best year yet!