How to fix your underperforming campaign
You did it 🎉
Giving Tuesday is behind you and your end-of-year fundraising campaign is off to the races.
My hope is that you are feeling good. I'm currently running seven campaigns for clients and all but one saw success on Giving Tuesday.
Of course, that put the Enneagram 3 in me down a rabbit hole thinking: What do you do when your campaign isn't going according to plan?
Here are 5 things you can try today:
Assess your email open and click rates. You can compare your nonprofit's rates against the data in this Neon One Giving Tuesday Report. If your emails are underperforming - try spicing up your subject line. My best tip? Make it curiosity-inducing. It's human nature to be noisy.
In addition to assessing your email performance - check to make sure the sender is a person someone recognizes.
Try sending an appeal via MailMerge vs your email service provider. Just yesterday, I received this email from Scott Harrison, CEO and Founder of charity:water. But it looked like it was an email directly from him! I definitely opened it. Watch this tutorial if you need help with mail merge
4. Try sending a "We Miss You" Email. Each year, nonprofits lose an alarming amount of donors to churn - especially folks who give $100 or less. Try sending them a "We MIss You" email reminding them of their past donation and the specific impact it made. Need a template? The latest drop in the Fundraising Template Membership is a "We Miss You" email template.
5. Go outside of email with things like text messages or - gasp - phone calls. As you can see - it worked super well for nonprofit founder Jo Ellis of Make.Do.
Give those a try and let me know if they help improve your end-of-year campaign fundraising performance! You still have so much time!