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Welcome to Fundraising Accelerator, a step-by-step road map for planning a successful GiveBIG campaign.
We want you to have an easy-to-follow guide to launching a campaign that will help you raise extra dollars this spring. Right now, focus on these three key planning elements:
1. Firm up your campaign infrastructure.
2. Evaluate your past efforts.
3. Lay the foundation for your donor and audience segments.
1. Firm up your campaign infrastructure
Now is the time to make sure you have everything you need to run a multichannel giving day campaign! "Multichannel" means you use a variety of methods to catch the attention of past and new donors. Postcards, emails, personal notes, social media posts, peer-to-peer fundraising pages, and online or in-person events are examples of these types of channels.
Check out the Tools & Resources page for messaging guidelines, graphics, logos, templates, upcoming training webinars, and other resources (frequently updated).
To run a successful campaign, you need two basic elements:
- An email marketing platform (like Mailchimp or Constant Contact).
- A list of donors or potential donors
Got those basics covered? Think about adopting some advanced tools like:
- Digital advertising to boost your social media posts. You may need to do this for the Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram) to stand out from the crowd because you’ll only get 2–5% organic reach without it.
- Personal email merge tools like Yet Another Mail Merge. These allow you to send personalized emails at a scale that will actually get delivered, opened, and read – a huge advantage on a busy giving day.
- Outbound SMS. There are low-cost tools available, but SMS has the highest read rate of any digital communications tactic (90% of texts are read within 3 minutes!).
Don’t forget to pay attention to your donor list or CRM too. Scrub your donor lists to remove bad email or physical addresses, as well as your email marketing list of subscribers who haven’t opened your last 5 emails (they’re depressing your email deliverability). Attend our webinar on April 8 that addresses email deliverability!
Finally, make sure you understand how to use key features of the Washington Gives platform, like setting up matching gifts and peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising features. Log in to pull your reports from last year if you are returning to GiveBIG. Reach out to customer service if you need help.
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2. Evaluate your past efforts
Before you start planning your campaign and timeline, take a moment to evaluate what you've done in the past.
Great fundraising strategies always start with who and why, not what and when. Your first order of business is to consider your past efforts and review the donors who've supported you through GiveBIG before. Why do you think they gave to you? Call a few donors and ask!
Tell them that their story will help you reach more GiveBIG donors.
Gather the last three years of data for GiveBIG. If possible, ensure your list includes donor names, gift amounts, and the date of each donor’s first-ever gift to your organization (not just GiveBIG). If you store information on the donor’s relationship to you in your database, such as volunteer history or specific areas of interest, include those fields too. If you do not have a database, start with a list and ask people in your organization to identify why these folks gave to you.
Review this data, take notice of important trends, and investigate them. You don’t only want to look at the revenue you raised; build a donor pyramid and look at trends like the number of gifts and average GiveBIG donation, which can tell you a lot about your overall success, which tactics worked, and how diversified your GiveBIG support is.
Finally, the information stored in the Washington Gives platform can add some tactical insights. In addition to looking at your own data, download last year’s donor data from Mightycause. Include the timestamps of gifts and review the timing of your donations. When did people give? Did many donations did you get during early giving? Were P2P campaigns successful? Is there a certain time of day when a burst of giving occurred? Did people give in response to the announcement of a matching gift challenge?
Then, review that information alongside the schedule of GiveBIG communications from last year. You may find evidence that certain types of communications or tactics were more successful than others – great information to roll into your GiveBIG plan for this year.
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3. Lay the foundation for your donor and audience segments
Time to develop the “who” of your GiveBIG strategy! First, remember that your target audience for fundraising isn’t “everyone.” Chances are, you’ll be able to spot informative patterns on who is participating in GiveBIG with a quick scan of your donor data. Find the patterns you see succeeding and use them again.
Next, think about the groups of people that are connected to your mission. Some examples include volunteers, past program participants, alumni, season subscribers, or parents of the children you serve. These people have different reasons for caring about your organization’s success, so you probably need different messages for each group to encourage them to be GiveBIG donors. What would be the best messaging for each of these groups?
Finally, thank last year's GiveBIG donors right away. Use personal email messages that reflect their giving amount and how they relate to you. Remind them what they accomplished with their gifts! You can use the mail merge function or, if you have a large number of GiveBIG donors, a personal email merge tool can really save you time.
Thank your past GiveBIG donors right away
Remind them of your accomplishments