Before the Ask:
How to Market a Fundraising Campaign

Lou
Kotsinis

Fundraising is hard. 

Marketing can help ease the fundraising process and increase your chances of success, but you have to first clarify what you think your marketing will achieve, and then ensure that your cause’s model is structured in a way that can actually get results.    

There are three parts to building a successful marketing strategy for your fundraising campaign: 

• Setting the proper expectations around what marketing can achieve

• Ensuring that the foundations of your marketing are in place

• Implementing the right core tactics to ensure reach 

In this post, I’ll discuss all three steps and provide a roadmap to support your next fundraising effort. 

1. Setting the Proper Expectations around Your Marketing Efforts

When clients approach us about marketing their fundraising or capital campaigns, my first instinct is to try to talk them out of it. That’s because their first question usually goes something like this: 

“We want to raise x amount of dollars in this campaign. How much do we need to invest in marketing to achieve that?”

It’s comforting to think that “strong marketing” will reduce some of the fundraising burden, inspiring potential donors to give based on messaging alone. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing’s proper role in fundraising efforts. 

Before you commit time and dollars to marketing a fundraiser, I encourage you to embrace two truths: 

Marketing is supportive of – not directly responsible for – fundraising success. 

Fundraising takes a village. If your board isn’t actively fundraising, if you don’t have an impactful goal that resonates with your target donor base, and if you don’t have a clear picture of who that base is, no amount of marketing dollars will move the needle.  

Marketing acts as a propellant to an already well-structured campaign. It’s the reinforcing of impact to a warm donor; it’s the carefully-placed ad that reaches the family member whose loved one’s been affected, and so forth. Marketing is not the “viral” campaign, or the video that miraculously inspires a complete stranger to give.  

Marketing success in fundraising is directly tied to the strength and reach of your cause’s brand

Unless you’re making an ask on top of a crisis, or an event that’s hit a nerve, strangers aren’t likely to give strictly based on marketing alone. But if you have an established brand – if a large swath of people already know who you are and what you do – that provides the foundation for fundraising success.     

If you’re Charity: Water, or the American Heart Association, I wholeheartedly support your desire to spend the appropriate amount on marketing your campaign. Your brand is so far-reaching and recognizable that you will, by definition, capture donors based on messaging alone.

But, If your cause has little name recognition outside of your existing pool of donors and constituents, marketing is not going to help you move the needle. Those dollars would be better spent on brand-building:

• Awareness campaigns to grow your audiences

• Content across web and social platforms to reinforce mission 

• Investments in your website to underscore impact, and improve user experience.

• And of course, doubling down on program quality to spur word-of-mouth growth

2. Get the Foundations in Place

If you’ve thought carefully about marketing your fundraiser, and have set realistic expectations around outcomes, then it’s time to get the core assets of your marketing in place. 

Audience 

As with any marketing initiative, knowing your audience is crucial. You likely already have a list of existing donors that you’ll want to reach. But if you’re hoping to address a wider audience, using tactics like paid social media advertising, you’ll need to think about audience personas – i.e., aspirational snapshots of the new donors you’re hoping to bring into the fold. 

You can begin building your personas just off of intuition; you know your ideal donors and prospects best. But to really refine your snapshot, you’ll want to dig a bit deeper. I’ll save the mechanics of persona building for a future post, but a great start is to access your social channels’ ad platforms and experiment with different audience types, demographics and interests. This will help you get a feel for potential audiences that align with your chosen personas.

Campaign Landing Page

The campaign landing page is a crucial component of any fundraising initiative. It’s simply a single web page of any length that carries the messaging, content and action items of your campaign. Think of it as a mini-website – and sometimes it’s indeed just that – to which the potential donor is directed and which moves the donor to action. 

Why send a visitor to a landing page and not to your website? While your website should indeed provide a great experience and carry your messaging, brand and impact, a landing page is expressly designed to speak to the specific campaign you’re running, providing continuity from the ads and fundraising messaging you’re sending out. 

If you’re sending visitors from a campaign ad or solicitation based on a certain look, feel and set of promises, and they then arrive at a generic page on your website, that discontinuity becomes a source of friction that will disincentive them from giving. 

(For some inspiration, check out the landing pages we created for Parents League of New York, SpreadMusicNow and Bronx Charter School for the Arts) 

Donor Benefits

While we all want to feel that our cause is worthy of funding just on the merits, we should recognize that people are generally motivated by self-interest. Even while individuals give to your cause because they believe in your mission, or see its impact, or because they have been personally affected by the issue you’re solving, they’re satisfying an internal desire – be that the need to feel good about themselves, the ego rush of being able to say “I gave” or simply the satisfaction of giving to a cause they find worthy. 

To this end, you’ll want to put yourselves in your donors shoes and develop several answers to the question “what’s in it for me?” I’m not referring here to a physical “thank you” giveaway – but rather, the communications and messages that provide the emotional and spiritual satisfaction they’ll derive from giving to your specific campaign. 

These can include a:

• thank you video from the executive director or a program beneficiary

• handwritten thank you from the director of development

• Video, graphic or data visualization showing impact based on the donor’s specific contribution (more on this below) 

Having this “ROI” in hand prior to any campaign will help you structure your outreach and refine the types of messaging you’ll be using. 

Impact Stories

Impact is one of the strongest motivators of fundraising success. If I can see that the money I’m about to give will have a demonstrable effect on the problem at hand, I’m more likely to give. To that end, prior to marketing your fundraising efforts, gather relevant content to show that the work you’re doing – and for which you’re fundraising – shows clear impact. This can be:

• Testimonials from satisfied program recipients

• Data in the form of charts, data visualizations or even infographics

• Video of impact or satisfied individual

• “Before and After” case studies

Video and Photography

A great way to improve your chances of fundraising success is to use video in your marketing campaigns, either in your campaign landing pages, via email and social, or preferably, across all channels. Video remains the strongest means of engaging audiences, so you should look to invest as much as you’re able into high-quality, impact driven video content. 

Additionally, use custom imagery that tells the story of your mission and establishes an emotional connection with your prospect. Again, we’re trying to encourage individuals who may not know about us to give. They won’t be moved by stock imagery, which they will rightly see as inauthentic and which will thus add one more obstacle to giving. 

Campaign Graphics

If we think about our landing page above as the central “design element” to our campaign, then we can use that  to build additional “sub-graphics” that can be employed across the rest of the campaign. Think: 

• Smaller graphics that can be used alongside social media posts

• Email banners

• Design elements to be used in campaign ads

These don’t have to be works of art, but they should suggest quality and speak to the overall theme of your campaign. A good designer can help on this front, and you can even turn to a volunteer with design skills to work in a product like Canva to produce what you need. 

Existing Branding and Marketing

Whether or not your marketing is successful in bringing in donations, your outreach will inevitably attract visitors, some of whom will want to learn more about your cause, programs and impact. They’ll visit your site, check you out on social, and even sign up for emails. This is a good thing, but you’ll need to be prepared. 

Prior to launching a marketing campaign around your fundraising, it’s important to assess the overall quality of messaging and brand across your website and other online properties: 

• Is your mission clear, concise and consistent?

• Can individuals who have never heard of you before immediately recognize what you do and the value you bring?  

• Does your website provide a good overall user experience? (can people find what they’re looking for; does the functionality work properly? Can individuals easily and securely make a donation?) 

In short, you’ll want to make a great impression on every online visitor. They may not be donating this time around, but can return at some point based on the strong experience they had on this initial visit. 

3. Implementing The Right Core Tactics

So, we’ve now established the right mindset, and have thought about whether or not marketing will be the right move based on our brand; we’ve also gathered the foundational assets to feed the campaign. Now, let’s look at the basic tactics we should have in place to ensure that we’re reaching the widest – but most logical – potential audiences. 

The tactics you’ll use in your fundraising marketing will be dependent upon your specific cause, existing marketing infrastructure, audience, budget, and more. While there are myriad things you can be doing to reach a potential donors, there are a handful of items you should be doing in any campaign to ensure that you’re covering all bases. These are as follows:

Website Messaging

While I’m not the biggest fan of website popovers, they help to emphasize important temporary initiatives, like a fundraising campaign. Whether you employ a popover or a push-down on your home page, or even if you’re updating your home page itself, you should be making mention on your website of your fundraising initiative, its impact and ways to support. 

This is different from your landing page above, which is solely dedicated to the campaign. Here, on your website, you’re simply reinforcing the impact and benefits of your campaign; it’s one more touchpoint in the process of informing and engaging your potential donor base. 

Social Media Messaging

Your social media channels represent your online community; as such they play a crucial role in informing and engaging your audiences. As your campaign is running, you’ll want to weave in mentions of your fundraising effort along the way. Notice that I said “mentions” here. Don’t make the mistake of taking over your entire social feed with posts featuring and pointing to the campaign. 

The approach should be fluid, engaging and relevant. People who follow your community shouldn’t be hit over the head with asks; rather, campaign content should be posted casually – think once or twice a week — and tied to the regular posts you’re already publishing about your programs, impact and mission. 

Ideally, you’ll have created some nice social media post graphics (see above) that match the design of your landing page and that will reinforce your campaign’s theme and through which you can package your associated social media posts. 

Email

E-mail should, of course, be part of your marketing/fundraising outreach. I won’t get into the specifics of the ask or the overall email content, which is dependent upon your campaign needs and fundraising approach, but I do want to emphasize visuals and brand consistency. Whether you’re employing a DRIP campaign, or are delivering a more individualized, high-touch approach, be sure to incorporate the thematic and visual elements developed in the landing page phase to again, underscore consistency and campaign theme. 

Paid Social Media Advertising

If there’s one “optional” item on this foundational list, it would be paid social media advertising. This is because despite how potentially successful this tactic can be, it’s more complex to set-up than the previous items listed here, and potentially cost-prohibitive, depending upon the size of your organization and allotted campaign budget. 

That being said, a well-executed social media ad campaign can be an enormously powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, given that you can:

• Target specific audience types that might be open to consider giving (you can even build a look-alike audience based off of your existing pool of social media followers)

• Rapidly learn which themes and asks are working

• Experiment with multiple sub-campaigns at once, and develop messaging quickly to take advantage of trends, news, events, etc. 

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Under the right circumstances, marketing a fundraiser can be a wise move. But you’ll have to think carefully about whether or not your cause is positioned properly for that marketing to pay off. Sometimes, it’s better to acknowledge that marketing’s not a fit, and to invest into other channels that may bring higher ROI, rather than to simply throw up a Hail Mary in the hopes of attracting funds.

If you’ve done your homework though, and have a reasonable expectation of success, then prepare accordingly. Have your key assets in place, and deliver consistently across your core platforms, refining and building along the way.

Good luck! If we can help you in any part of this journey, we’re only an email away.

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