Get your year-end campaign into action early. and keep the donations coming all year long.

Transcription

1 Get your year-end campaign into action early and keep the donations coming all year long.

2 CONTENTS 01 Introduction 02 Strategy/Planning Social Media 05 Paid Search 06 Creative Consideration/Messaging 07 Other Digital Tactics 08 Opportunistic Giving 09 Backend Monitoring 10 Summary

3 01 The early bird gets the donation

4 Introduction It s never too early to start thinking about your year-end push for donations. Why? Aside from it being a perfect reason to connect with donors, the holiday season gives you an opportunity to flex your digital, social and mobile skills.

5 Because the truth is: Giving habits are changing. Donors are supporting online and across every screen. Digital is now a major player. In the past five years alone, digital gifts have steadily increased as a percent of total gifts and revenue. Competition is growing. Do you know how to rise above the noise? We do. And in a minute, so will you. Social pressure rules! It s changing everything, but we have a plan. Source: Google Trends

6 Here are some helpful tips to get ahead of your year-end campaign.

7 02 Strategy/Planning

8 First things first. Before you dive in, review what worked and what didn t from your 2014 holiday season: Overall: How did your creative and messaging perform? What calls-to-action and giving incentives worked? Paid Search: Best keywords, landers, call-to-actions and bidding strategies. Also consider if you saw any quality score issues Review subscribes/unsubscribes, open rates, clicks, clicks-to-conversions. What had the highest engagement? Display: How did your creative and offers perform? Social: Top performing content, offers and targeting 8

9 Start right now. Talk to your agency partners and get the ball rolling. Plan out holiday schedules for messaging and appeals, and line up matching grants, if possible, to incentivize giving. Don t forget to strategize bidding budgets for SEM. 9

10 Get it together. Your supporter base expects consistency in your messaging and appeals; they don t care about your internal silos. So give em what they want this holiday: Align , paid SEM, SEO, social & display initiatives and don t forget offline efforts like direct mail and broadcast. 10

11 Spring forward. Use your end-of-year campaign as a launching pad for big spring events. When you start building your organization s awareness during the holiday season, you can hit the ground running with your spring campaign at the start of the year and ramp up quicker as you begin to solicit participants and fundraisers. 11

12 03

13 Be relevant. Nonprofit list churn goes up 41% in December, thanks to the high volume of s sent. Don t boost your unsubscribes by ing too frequently and with less-thancompelling content. Carefully segment your audience. Consider cadence. Make sure your subject lines, pre-headers and offers are relevant and engaging. View your s critically, and test audience, timing, messaging and offers to discover best performers. 13

14 Become mobile-friendly. More than 50% of opens are occurring on a mobile phone or tablet. In 2014, 9.5% of online donations were made on a mobile device and 16.6% of donors gave from an on a phone or tablet. If you have not yet made sure your s and web properties are mobile-optimized, now s the time! 14

15 04 Social Media

16 Help donors share the love. A whopping 70% of individuals take one or more actions in response to a friend posting a story on social media about making a charitable donation. Include sharing links in s and landing pages, and make sure content is engaging in order to build relationships with your audience. Photos, online videos, personal stories and donations are all great examples of shareable content. 16

17 Let s get engaged. Engage donors early on with strong social content: 71% of those active on social networks have donated to a charity in the past 12 months. Of those, 6 in 10 have donated online. 17

18 Stay nimble. You may run into an unhappy donor. So be ready to respond to complaints and questions quickly in social media. Add extra staff so you can be as fast and relevant as possible, with fewer machinedriven answers. Donors know the difference. 18

19 Paid social is critical. Paid social yields 25% more conversions than organic posts and only 2% of your Facebook fans and followers will see organic posts. Plus, paid allows for more ad types, targeting, relevance and testing. 19

20 05 Paid Search

21 Paid search vs. Google Grant. You might be surprised to learn that 58% of nonprofits invest in paid search. If you re part of the other 42%, consider investing in this medium. Google Grant s max bid restriction means you re missing out on valuable traffic from searchers who are interested in your cause and mission. Set up brand and non-brand campaigns in both Google and Bing. Google Grant might be doing the heavy lifting on brand terms, but non-brand and even some brand searchers are likely slipping through the cracks. 21

22 Sensitivity and SEM. Be aware if the season is negatively impacting your business. If your SEM campaigns are wasting dollars on non-qualified matches, adjust your negative matches accordingly. Is your unqualified traffic at an all-time high? Set display retargeting campaigns to require more than one page view. 22

23 06 Creative Considerations/Messaging

24 Reasons to donate. Use incentives to boost donations and average gift amounts. Even if you can t offer a premium for givers, consider other ways to incentivize giving. Work ahead of time to secure a matching grant for the holiday time period. Share tangible levels of services or resources each ask amount can deliver to urge donors up to the next rung on the ask ladder. 24

25 Messaging and your mission. The holidays are the most generous time of year. On average, donors give 80% larger gifts in December. Take advantage of this opportunity to develop a unique message, story and/or appeal that will create a deep connection with the reader and emotionally tie your mission with the holiday spirit. If your mission doesn t have an outright connection to the holidays, consider reminding someone they can make a gift in honor of a loved one. 25

26 Use tax deduction language. April 15 th is just around the corner. As the fiscal year comes to an end, donors are far more likely to be persuaded to give to a charitable organization for a tax credit. It will be useful to include tax savings language into your appeals, especially for those touch points going out after Christmas. This angle might just be what convinces your donor to take the plunge. 26

27 Push the urgency. End-of-year campaigns are a good time to use urgency to drive donations. As the year is winding down, holiday giving, tax deductions and urgent-needs messaging are ways to incorporate urgency into a campaign. The use of a countdown clock on a donation landing page to show days/hours/minutes left until January 1 is a great visual to encourage action. 27

28 07 Other Digital Tactics

29 Creativity + targeting = SUCCESS! It takes both good creative and smart targeting to break through the holiday marketing clutter. Integrate lists for targeting in paid social and display. Use your current lists to reach supporters through Twitter, Facebook and display and create lookalike audiences to attract new ones. 29

30 Remarket wisely. Remarketing should be part of any robust media plan. But if an individual doesn t contribute or engage on a campaign landing page, consider tweaking the offer and CTA to elevate the urgency and bring them back. 30

31 08 Opportunistic Giving

32 #GivingTuesday As potential donors are purchasing gifts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, stress the importance of giving back during the holiday season. Capitalize on this national day of giving as part of an end-of-year campaign, or highlight a specific cause for which all #GivingTuesday donations will go to (i.e., Saving the Arctic, support for families with babies in the NICU during the holidays, etc.). Online donations on #GivingTuesday 2014 were up 36% over 2013, so be sure your campaigns are making the most of the growing awareness around this holiday. 32

33 Be open. Twelve percent of 2014 giving happened in the last three days of the year, so it s important to see your campaigns through December 31st. One of BKV s clients extended a Christmas campaign through the end of the year and generated 25% of their total revenue during that last week! Make sure to have planned appeals during this time, and don t forget to follow up with donors by thanking them for their support. 33

34 09 Backend Monitoring

35 Establish budgets and check daily. You don t want days to pass before you discover you re hitting caps. Don t be so busy that you don t check your budgets and end up leaving donations on the table. 35

36 Audit and re-audit holiday campaigns. December 31st is too late to find out if something s broken! So, check for broken links, incorrect ad copy, proper tagging, etc. Mark your calendar for re-audits. 36

37 10 Summary

38 Well, there you have it: The keys to success for your end-of-year giving digital campaign. Remember to track performance across every single channel. You ll find out which tactics were a hit, which need work and which you can apply beyond Q4 to raise profits year-round (not to mention lay the foundation for a smash-hit holiday 2016).

39 So take these tips and talk to your team or agency about how you can use them to get your audience's attention and drive donations this year. If you re ready to put a particular plan in action and get the kind of creative work, strategy and media expertise that brings the heat all year round, contact the experts at BKV today!

40 Thank You! Rina Cook Director of Business Development