Using Marketing Techniques to Increase Your Non-Profit Fundraising Efforts

If you are a non-profit organization, chances are high that you are always trying to improve your fundraising strategies to raise more money for your cause. As non-profits mainly depend on donations for their cause as well as to run their office, it is crucial for them to keep improvising and improving techniques for raising funds. Most fundraisers in India are organized by non-profit organizations. A few crowdfunding sites in India that focus mainly on non-profit causes are Impact Guru, Ketto a Milaap.

In this article, we will focus on how you can use marketing techniques to help the growth of your non-profit organization and increase the flow of fund, whether you are raising funds online or offline.

The key to successful fundraising is to find a way in which you can engage your donors and make them feel involved in the process. The closer the donors feel to the cause, the more likely they are to contribute and spread the word.

Next most important thing you can do is to incentivize your top fundraisers. Giving the donors some rewards will make them feel appreciated. Donors pay money for many reasons. It can be because they believe in the cause, or, they have been personally impacted by the cause, or, they feel it’s their duty, or, someone they care about believes in the cause. But most importantly, they also do it get recognition. To have a successful donor recognition program, you can take the following steps:

• Allocate enough budget, starting at 1% of the total money raised.
• Include a donor management system to help with tracking, reporting and managing donor relationship.
• Create a program parameter to decide which donors need to be recognized. For example, a certain amount of money given or a total lifetime donation or consecutive donations leading to thanking the donors in certain ways.

While incentivizing your donors and staff will take you a  long way in terms of fundraising results, your cause’s awareness will not grow exponentially unless you have a huge number of grassroots supporters to spread the word. To start a successful grassroots campaign, you must buy a peer-to-peer fundraising software, which costs between $500 and $2,000.

 It may sound like a hefty amount, but it will make sure your growth is increasing. With this software, your supporters can now form their own fundraising page complete with personal cases for support, photos, videos and fundraising trackers. They can advocate on your behalf and raise funds online, while all these pages tie back into the main event page of your non-profit organization.

There is a big misconception about marketing and advertising. People think that these two can be applied only for businesses. However, if you use marketing correctly, you stand a chance to reach out to more potential donors to raise money for your cause. You can use rebranding to draw people’s attention. You can do this by changing the organization’s name, refreshing your message, updating the look and feel or updating the marketing strategy.

Social media can play a very important role in advertising your organization and cause. It is advised that you create different types of advertisements, targeting different types of social media and people. People should be able to connect to your cause.

Lastly, you need to make sure you have asked for donations in your campaign. This tip might seem too obvious, but a surprising number of nonprofits make the critical mistake of forgetting to ask for donations outright. While a donor can subconsciously understand the message you are trying to convey, they are less likely to contribute due to unclear next steps. The call to action necessarily need not be asking for donations. You can ask your donors to sign up to your email newsletter or follow you on your social media pages, or volunteer or participate in an event. They will never know unless you ask. No matter what you are requesting, make sure it is clearly communicated to the people.