Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

You’ve probably realized that having a “Donate” button on your website is not enough to improve your online fundraising. But do you know what else you need on your site to encourage donations?

You only have 10 seconds to prove yourself. According to Nielsen Online, the average website visitor spends less than 60 seconds on a web page. As if that wasn’t enough, you want to do even more – convert the visitors to donors. Can you start that process in 10 seconds?

Join Glennette Clark, CITI Online Strategies Consultant, for a webinar on Optimizing Your Website for Donations, Wednesday, August 19th from 1 PM to 2 PM, in partnership with Kivi Leroux Miller and Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com.

Donors are looking for specific information to help them make the decision about whether or not to give to your organization or another.  Recently, two studies on nonprofit websites independently concluded that technology is not the problem when it comes to increasing donations online.  Instead, web visitors cited that nonprofits are not providing the information they need to make donation decisions.

Whether you are a novice or pro, this webinar is for you if you want to strengthen your online fundraising efforts by giving donors the information they want.

During this webinar, you will learn:

• What donors want to see
• What donors want to read
• How to avoid the donation killers
• How to optimize your website for donors
• How to use social media to your advantage

Register and get full details here!

As I was looking through the piles of information I gathered from last month’s NTEN Conference, I came across some information about Amazon Payments for Nonprofits. I decided to do a bit of research and compare the Amazon Payments to Google Checkout and Paypal.

Across the board, the fee structures were the same for transactions over $100,000 (1.9% + $.30 per transaction); however, if you are not collecting quite that much, here is the fee breakdown per transaction.

There are a few things that are different about the three, if you are a Google Grants awardee, all of your transactions are free and Amazon Payments charges fees based on the dollar amount of the transaction. If the transaction is less than $10 you are charged 5.0% + $0.05 regardless of the transaction total.

With that in mind, it would appear that PayPal offers nonprofits the better deal allowing you to keep more of your money. Also, with PayPal all you need to start collecting money online is an email address and a bank account. As will all of the other companies, in order to get the nonprofit discount, you will have to provide proof of your status.

The Washington Post’s article yesterday To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (subhead – “Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising”) was sure to raise hackles in the nonprofit tech blogosphere. The bloggers who have been exploring social networking for nonprofits had had this discussion already.

Beth Kanter issued a concise rebuttal: Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success. Even if you’ve followed some of the discussion in the past, it’s worth reading her post, and the links therefrom, particularly the one to Allison Fine’s blog. Between the two of them, they nicely summarize what you can and can’t expect out of an investment in social networking for your organization.

Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop includes a link to the Frogloop Social Networking ROI calculator. The calculator is a nifty tool for looking at the costs vs. funds raised. It doesn’t pretend to calculate the indirect and non-financial benefits that Kanter and others point to, but it does provide the opportunity to decide what those other benefits are likely worth to you before diving into a social networking campaign.

According to a recent study, the majority of donors want to hear about an organization’s impact, its success stories and other organizations they may partner with. This can go a long way in gaining that all important donor trust and, most importantly, donor dollars.

The Social Media for Social Causes Study, co-authored by Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter, and Geoff Livingston, took a look at social media as an area of growth for donations. The statistics look promising but the demographic breakdown is not surprising.

Across the board, demographically, those who engage in social media fall into the same patterns as those who do not. Those 30 and under are less likely to give more than $1000 while chances for getting a high dollar donation increases after 50.

Don’t Give Up on Email

According to the survey, email is the the preferred method of contact from charitable organizations among those 30 and up. To a smaller degree, 45 percent of 30-49 year-olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks indicated a growing interest for getting information through social media.

When you are communicating with donors, whatever the medium, be it web site, email or social media, here are a few tips:

1. Show – A picture is worth a thousand words. Show your organization in action.
2. Tell - Share stories about your organization and how it is accomplishing its mission.
3. Remind - Remind them about your mission and what your a trying to accomplishing. Is your organization ending world hunger? Remind them of that.
4. Ask - Don’t forget to ask for their support. Give them the opportunity to help you to achieve your organization’s mission.

They’re popping up all over.

Today it’s Target Analytics’ 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis. The 24 organizations studied are all large, and surely have robust direct mail programs, and, it’s safe to assume, well-developed online solicitation programs. They do offer a decent spread of missions.

I started to try to summarize some of the key takeaways, but realized I’d pretty quickly be duplicating their entire list. Click on the link and read the summary on page 2 — a long list of interesting points comparing online giving with direct mail giving. Different donors, different behaviors.

Glennette Clark, our Online Strategist, held her “Six Steps for Online Success” seminar last night at CITI HQ. We had over 30 people come to hear her speak about developing long-term strategies for online technology and message delivery. A wide variety of organization were represented including the Landscape Architecture Foundation, AARP, Sojourners Magazine, and the Social Enterprise Alliance. It was fantastic to see so many of our clients and so many new faces.

Glennette gave a great presentation covering a lot of the fundamental choices that non-profits face when working online. There were some great slides from the seminar that are available here.

Some of the best moments were the discussions that came out of the topics Glennette was presenting. Some really fantastic guests, like Jeffrey Newman, Shyree Mezick, or Miroslava Lutova, had great questions and comments to share with the group –regarding crowd sourcing, micro-donations, and email donation requests. Sharing knowledge and experience is what social media is all about and we were happy to have people trading stories and ideas with us!

Thanks to everyone who came out — we love having you here.

Glennette will be giving another seminar on the same topic soon, so if you missed her this time around you can catch her the next time.

I think we’re all hearing and thinking about what the tough economic environment is meaning for fundraising for social mission organizations – with economic uncertainty for many nonprofits looming.  This post from Bruce Trachtenberg at Communications Network points out a flip side to raising less money is attracting more scrutiny of the money you do raise.  Particularly in light of the Maddoff scandal and the losses to foundations there.  As Trachtenberg puts it,

Seems to me that if you are responsible your foundation’s communications you better become ultra-familiar  — if not already — with your organization’s finances: your balance sheet; how the endowment is invested, including types of asset classes; the returns (and losses); as well as how your foundation selects, monitors, and evaluates its investment managers; the performance benchmarks it uses, etc.

Many if not all nonprofit staff have trouble addressing most of these points, depending on the savvy-ness of their finance and development staff.  And of course the culture of communication within the org.  With fundraising databases and software, you know from both an ethical and a PR- standpoint you should know what you’ve got going on, but social mission orgs often have fundraising data one can politely term … disorganized.

Of course, whipping that data into shape isn’t as sexy as using social networks to raise small sums instantly – yeah, right – but in this climate, knowing your data is rock solid may be the best investment you can make.  Because if your list is right, you can better reach the right people with the right ask.  Whether or not your CFO makes the right investments - and whether you have the right checks and balances in place to know – is up to you.

In Seth Godin’s blog today  a post on a good email relationship – the casebook kind you are supposed to do, over time, developing value, with information relevant and interesting to subscribers – and it does seem that as the economic cart topples over, the emails I’m getting are verging from just desperate to absolutely panicked fundraising intrusions from out of the blue.  It feels like strangers shouting at me from my inbox. To be fair, when three colleagues just got laid off so you have their work on top of your own while you try to perform in a way to keep your own job, you can think any quick easy and cheap campaign, if it turns up even just one donor,  seems like something you should try.  But I think Seth’s point in this economic situation holds even truer – your constituents and clients are having a hard time too.  Everyone’s desperate.  When you are desperate, you turn to comfort food, you regroup, you consolidate, you go with what you know will work.  So your communication needs to convey the value you bring to your established relationships – how we will all get through this together.  People considering building a relationship with you need to be reassured that you will not waste their time, since they haven’t got enough time to meet the new challenges this fundraising environment brings.