Return on investment is an important topic that sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves. In particular, digital ROI needs to be a priority for your fundraising and digital teams — precisely because you can achieve it without spending too much.
Digital marketing efforts over email and social media, in combination with solutions for your existing tech stack, can optimise your online presence and help your team reach a wider audience of potential donors, transforming your digital success into impactful, unforgettable outcomes. With the right approach and the right technology, you can convert these potential donors not just to one-time donors, but possibly life-long supporters.
Let’s discuss how you can achieve big outcomes through the process of maximising your digital ROI — and how you can do all of this on a budget.
Why ROI Matters Now
Considering the present state of the economy, perhaps you’ve launched fewer online calls to action recently. This might mean your charity has had to be mindful of budgetary constraints. But it’s not just your team that has been impacted — the whole nonprofit sector has taken a hit!
It goes without saying that you heavily rely on your donor base, but with potential supporters facing economic strains themselves, they are naturally more scrupulous about how they spend their money and which causes they choose to support. As a result, charities like yours must be strategic in their approach to engaging and attracting potential donors.
Given the ROI that online activity can deliver, your charity should be leveraging digital channels for your marketing efforts more than ever before in order to connect with potential donors who may be interested in your cause. Now is also the time to build long-term relationships with donors rather than solely relying on one-time donations.
By nurturing relationships and engaging with your donor base on a regular basis, you can establish trust and loyalty. This can be achieved through personalised communication, unifying your tech stack, and keeping your supporters up to date about various projects and initiatives.
Four Strategies for Maximising Digital ROI
We should acknowledge the unfortunate reality of the economy today without wallowing in doom and gloom too much. There are digital strategies you can adopt to better reach your target audience, advance your fundraising efforts, and potentially increase your average gift size when all is said and done.
Focus on Digital Mobilisation
Just because supporters aren’t able to give as much to your organisation at this time, that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in your mission and don’t want to support it.
Encourage your donor base to take action on behalf of your organisation via mobilisation campaigns over social media and email. A mobilisation model will demonstrate your collective power to enact positive change in the world.
In fact, if your team can demonstrate that your strategy is mobilising significant numbers of participants, that could result in a fundraising breakthrough — people are more willing to support and partake in initiatives with a proven ability to change the world for the better.
Break Down Silos
You can have the most inspiring mission and compelling set of services, but if your organisation is internally siloed, that will obstruct your efforts to attract and retain supporters.
Silos impact your supporters the most when data becomes difficult to access due to your tech solutions being difficult to use. If only a few members of your organisation have what it takes to pull the right supporter data or use it effectively, everyone else will probably feel discouraged from dealing with your unwieldy database of record!
A unified engagement platform that’s simple to use will play a big role in breaking down your team’s silos, leading to a fuller understanding of your donor base as well as more productive and precise strategies for how to engage with them.
Integrate Your Tech Stack
Make sure that all of your tools are talking to each other. That will ensure ease and speed when accessing supporter data, empower more personalised, relevant approaches to supporters, and help break down your internal silos. This is the power of integrations.
Our unified platform gives you the power to sync and keep track of your important supporter data all in one place. By utilising Engaging Networks, no matter what changes your organisation goes through, your systems will remain in communication with one another and you will have the ability to update your data with ease.
Create Supporter Journeys
Personalised messaging makes supporters feel seen and heard, plus it makes their contribution feel important. Engage with your donors in relevant ways by segmenting your lists, inserting personal information, and triggering email series.
This approach can play a major role in developing journeys for converting leads to donors, or keeping your donors engaged and giving. Split-testing can also provide you with detailed insights when it comes to figuring out how well your support journey optimisations are playing out.
Increase ROI with a Unified Solution
Now is the time to reassess whether or not your tech stack is doing everything you need it to do. You might think that switching to a new engagement platform is an exhausting task, but in times like these, when saving and raising as much as you can is a must for your charity, a unified solution like Engaging Networks can be your best path towards achieving positive ROI.
Refuge, the UK’s largest specialist domestic abuse organisation, has seen steady year-over-year ROI since joining Engaging Networks. Learn how they’ve scaled their supporter base in the last three years by over 6,000%.
