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For all the efforts you made in bringing donors into your organization this holiday season, you're probably wondering, is it worth it? Are the amount of money you raise and people you enroll enough to help you grow? Or does it feel like you didn't receive all that much money despite a lot of new people delivering funds to you?
Those are quite a few questions, so I'll just say yes to all of them.Well, let's be a little more concise by posing a single question: Have you earned more donors and money than you have lost this past holiday season? When you're working in a nonprofit, make no mistake: You're working with a lot of people all the time. Even if your cause isn't directly affecting somebody, you're dealing with many individuals and groups who have a stake in what you do or your intended mission. You're building connections with people every day. The question is: Is your entire organization capable of making those same bonds and building on them?
It's great that you've been receiving a lot of donation for this holiday season. However, you know that after the holiday season is over, it's back to the usual business of focusing on the mission. The thing is, you get a lot of your money from the holidays. In fact, according to the Network For Good, one-third of all online donations are made in December. The only other time you'll be able to raise as much money is either through consistently scheduled annual or semi-annual fundraising, as well as if a timely event makes your cause a more urgent priority, like after a natural disaster. Considering it's the holiday season, it only makes sense that people seem more than willing to give money to their favorite cause or charity. Their donations help you pursue your organization's mission by funding operations, run campaigns that raise awareness for your cause and expand your outreach. With that said, people donate for various reasons other than to provide you help. One reason is that, quite simply, giving feels good. When running your holiday campaign or any other fundraiser, make sure your supporters are happy making a donation. This seems obvious, but this sort of thinking will help ensure they feel more inclined to give more with greater frequency. You're building a relationship with the constituent by making them feel good, and when you use nonprofit CRM software to manage their donations and support, you can make them feel better. Giving makes people feel warm and fuzzyStudies have consistently shown that donating money to a charitable cause is heavily tied to positive emotions, including happiness. The Non Profit Times recently cited a study by Harris Interactive on people's emotions when they donated. The results showed that 60 percent of people who donated felt hopeful their contribution is making a difference. Forty-eight percent stated giving makes them feel satisfied, while 43 percent said it makes them excited. We're now entering the second half of holiday donation season, and this can be a high mark for your organization. Donors give more money this time of the year as it is: The most recent survey from the Center of Philanthropy found that people give about 24 percent of what they donate on an annual basis to nonprofits and charities around the holidays. With the season's end fast approaching, you want to make sure you get the most out of your supporters in ways that build your relationship with them. This is especially the case as more people donate online. Give them a guiding handAs more people donate online, it's a good idea to give them a little guidance. If you aid them throughout the donation process, they'll feel inclined to make a larger donation while trusting you at the same time. The first thing you probably want to do is make sure your site is it's mobile-enabled. As Google noted, providing a great mobile site experience is essential. With so many of your supporters connecting to the Internet with a smartphone or tablet, more are going to find out about your organization on these devices. In 2012, nonprofit organization 92nd Street Y, in conjunction with the United Nations Foundation, created Giving Tuesday. Strategically placed days after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the event with the hashtag #GivingTuesday was meant to bring something that has always been part of the holidays back into the fore: the spirit of giving. Many organizations sought to use Giving Tuesday to reach out to regular and infrequent donors alike to boost their support. Nonprofit organizations are a hard-working bunch. Whether it's maintaining a strong network of contacts with donors and members, or writing up requests for the sake of winning grants from government and philanthropic organizations, there's so much to do. It takes a lot of effort to keep things rolling, but if you work for a nonprofit, you probably persevere because you believe in your group's mission and goals. Being more organized may greatly help you perform better at and handle outreach in a way that comforts your organization's supporters. Sometimes it helps to take a few pages from big companies in how they handle their customers, in other words: through customer relationship management software. We're proud to feature this guest blog post by Laura Shapiro, an absolute nonprofit technology rockstar who uses Soapbox Engage to work online wonders at Global Fund for Women. Those wonders include powering the IGNITE: Women Fueling Science and Technology campaign's online fundraising and advocacy efforts with Soapbox Engage.
As Director of Online Communications for Global Fund for Women, I work at the intersection of social justice and technology. It’s impossible for me to be active in the online space without noticing the limitations and even the dangers burdening women in tech – socially, economically, and creatively. That’s why I’m happy to be part of our new IGNITE campaign. IGNITE: Women Fueling Science and Technology, is a global campaign and media project that explores the roles of science and technology in advancing gender equality. We’re looking at the great work that’s being done by women in the STEM fields now, and envisioning a more just, more creative, more innovative future. On the eve of #GivingTuesday, we wanted to highlight the great work Soapbox organizations and friends are doing around the world to make more truth shine, more peace reign, more hungry folks fed - and more of so much more. As your nonprofit ramps up efforts for its end-of-year giving campaign, here are five easy improvements that you can make today to your donation form to increase online giving - all in under five minutes! 
Join us tomorrow, September 24th, at 5:30 pm for the NTEN September happy hour! Sapient is graciously hosting at their offices in Arlington, conveniently located just one block from Courthouse metro at 1515 N. Courthouse Road. Drinks and food begin at 5:30 pm before a great presentation by Sapient highlighting the top digital trends of the future for nonprofits and fondly reminiscing over the less-than-hip trends of the past.
Now with the NGO Connect platform, organizations can use enterprise-grade CRM services in conjunction with Soapbox Engage Petitions app to jumpstart their online advocacy campaigns and save time and money. "We're extremely excited to bring the next generation of online advocacy to enterprise organizations using NGO Connect," said Ryan Ozimek, CEO of PICnet. "For too long, large organizations needed to use outdated advocacy tools that created data silos. Today, with the Soapbox Engage Petitions app and NGO Connect, organizations will no longer have to make a decision between best of breed advocacy tools or best of breed CRM services. They can have both at the same time!” With Apple's much anticipated product announcement today heralding the iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch came news of Apple Pay which the company touts will "change how you pay". Working with the three major credit card services, American Express, Mastercard, and Visa, it promises a simple and secure alternative to paying with plastic. When Action for Healthy Kids chose Soapbox Engage, beyond the clicks and code of a powerful and beautiful website that supercharges their mission, they found a true partner: “I do believe that Soapbox stands by its mission,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “They speak the nonprofit language well and want to forward the mission of nonprofits. From my experience, that’s rare - and it’s true across the company. We, as an organization, really appreciate that.” Action for Healthy Kids faced a common dilemma at the core of every nonprofit: how to gauge impact. Specifically, as a nonprofit mobilizing thousands of volunteers to catalyze change in schools across the nation, how could they know how many schools they were touching? In Soapbox Engage and Salesforce.com, Action for Healthy Kids found their answer: “We purchased a list of 130,000 schools across the country and uploaded it to Salesforce.com,” explained Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We then directed users to our website where they could search for the school with which they are affiliated by utilizing the Soapbox Engage Salesforce search tool.” When Action for Healthy Kids elected to build their new website with Soapbox Engage, they chose more than just a great looking, mobile-friendly website that was easy to manage and useful for event registrations. They adopted a powerful platform integrating with Salesforce.com in ways that have transformed core business processes. “The process for applying for our grants has completely changed as a result of Engage,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “It was a painful, painful thing before. We’d have to send people to Survey Monkey and dowload responses in an Excel file.” Action for Healthy Kids has chapters across the country. Each of these chapters has events for which they manage online reservations. “In the past, we had the state chapters using their own event tools, like EventBrite. Sometimes those names would get into our system and sometimes they wouldn’t,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “For one of our bigger events, we would have hundreds of registrations. When you think about all of those Excel files that would need to be individually configured and sent to the data administrator for clean up and import...it has required hours and hours of time.” Two weeks ago, we highlighted Global Fund for Women, a leader in advancing the rights of women and girls worldwide, and its efforts to mobilize supporters around the globe with Soapbox Petitions and Salesforce. This campaign on behalf of survivors of rape in conflict areas such as eastern Congo and Syria garnered thousands of signatures in just days. As of this afternoon, more than 9,100 supporters have signed their petition.
What's more, the overwhelming percentage of these supporters are new to Global Fund for Women: When Action for Healthy Kids chose to move from Convio Luminate to Soapbox Engage and the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Starter Pack, the money saved in recurring monthly fees was enough fund a full website redesign with change to spare. The redesign was far more than a facelift or color refresh. It facilitated a fundamental shift in the online marketing presence of the organization and connects with their audience in entirely new, more mission-focused ways. “We weren’t mobile-friendly. That was an obvious need that aligned with our goal of making a more modern website,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We really wanted to speak to a consumer audience and make it more visual. We were very copy-heavy and we wanted to communicate through images rather than text.”  The desire to speak more effectively to a consumer audience was rooted in both the traditional strengths and perceived opportunities of the organization: |
By Laura Shapiro, Director of Online Communications, Global Fund for Women
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