Care2's Digital Engagement Blog

Donors, volunteers, and advocates for good causes are hungry to hear from the organizations they support.

Here at Care2, it’s common for members to tell us: “I want to know how I can help.”

Many organizations have been consistently communicating with supporters throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, sending email updates and reaching out by phone to talk to their community members.

The best communication in a crisis is transparent and thoughtful. Honesty with your donors helps build lasting and meaningful relationships with the people who support you.

Here is a great example from Surfrider Foundation. In this email, Surfrider let their community know about the direct mail piece they had produced and scheduled before the coronavirus outbreak.

People donated more money to charity in 2012 than in 2011, according to a Blackbaud survey, where over 4200 donors from the US, the UK, and Australia responded to a variety of questions about their donation habits to nonprofits. They survey results showed that US donors contributed the most to charity overall, 3x as much as UK and Australian donors. Older donors gave the most amount of money in each of the countries.

As a consultant to nonprofits, I get calls and emails daily from organizations are who are looking to market their online campaigns, grow their email list, and raise more money. Often they are looking for a quick fix, which is just bad strategy and frankly a waste of money. When you focus on one-off marketing campaigns (even if they are done through multiple channels) that don’t have a long shelf life, you see a quick bump and everyone at the organization is jumping for joy. But once the marketing has stopped, everything goes back to normal. Your web traffic, sign up rates, media coverage, and donations level out pretty quickly. Sound familiar?

Many of Frogloop's readers are professional nonprofit fundraisers who watch trends like a hawk -- at least when those trends affect fundraising results across sectors and channels.

New Guiding Principles for Fundraising

My first campaign job was in 1995 at Colorado NARAL.  We didn't have an email list and we were just about to launch a website (complete with animated GIFs, natch).  Among my responsibilities was maintaining the citizen lobbyist phone trees - a job that entailed calling everyone on it every so often, in addition to activating it sometimes just to make sure everyone on it still knew what to do.  Over the many intervening years, I've worked on many campaigns.  These days, I'm far more likely to step back and marvel at how much easier it is to do some of the basic work of campaigns than I am to test a phone tree.

[Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies added his opinions to the spirited debate on the state of direct mail. Check out his thoughtful guest post below. - Allyson Kapin, Frogloop Blogger-In-Chief]