Online fundraising involves using all available internet resources, such as email, your website, blogs, crowdfunding, search engine optimization, and social media, in combination with each other and with offline efforts to help raise money and build relationships with donors. Social media allows anyone with access to the internet to follow your work and comment on it. Crowdfunding and its sibling, peer‐to‐peer fundraising, make it possible to aggregate lots of gifts into a significant amount, allowing people who can only make smaller donations to do so and to feel good about it. Peer‐to‐peer fundraising is also the driver behind the “Big Give” days like Giving Tuesday. The rapidity of both of these methods has worked well for getting money quickly to on‐the‐ground organizations for natural disaster aid; for funding special, time‐limited projects; and for fueling a lot of political campaigns.

The very democracy and immediate access the internet provides, however, means you are in an almost unimaginable competition for attention. According to research compiled by DataReportal (https://datareportal.com/global‐digital‐overview), internet use is huge and growing. As of April 2021, there were 4.72 billion internet users in the world; the total number of users around the world grew by 332 million from January 2020 to January 2021—more than 900,000 new users each day. More than six out of ten people in the world have internet access. In the United States and Canada, more than 85% of the population has access to the internet. A total of 300 billion emails are sent each day, and more than 500,000 new websites are launched each day, with about four million active websites in use around the world. (All of these figures are more than double those cited in the previous edition of this book, which was published in 2016.) One of the biggest changes in internet access is in the use of mobile phones, with about half of all internet usage originating on a phone. During the COVID pandemic shutdown of 2020–2021, the internet enabled, or even forced, many people to become comfortable with videoconference platforms such as Zoom and become much more familiar with all aspects of the internet. But we also saw the digital divide in the United States and around the world, particularly between urban and rural areas, and between people with more resources and those with fewer. A family of four living in a small apartment in a big city might well have good internet access, but if they only have one computer, and two parents need it to work remotely and two children need it for remote schooling, the definition of “access” is being stretched.

Universal access needs to be added to the list of human rights and every nonprofit needs to fight for it. Finland has set the pace here, putting broadband access for everyone into their constitution.

While we wait for that to happen, NGOs will need to be conscious about what the digital divide means for their constituents, not just by geography and wealth, but also by comfort with technology, which varies most by age.

Online fundraising is here, and it is the fastest‐growing form of fundraising around the world. In 2020, 13% of all fundraised income came from online giving, with 30% of online donations made from a mobile phone.

So how can a small social change organization with few staff members dedicated to fundraising and a somewhat willing board take advantage of the power of the internet in a meaningful way? First, you must see all internet options as tools in a much larger strategy toolbox. Experts in online fundraising will tell you that much of the success of any online campaign will depend on the basics: Do you have people with whom you're in touch about your work (i.e., an email list, social media followers, or frequent visitors to your website)? You need to have a way to reach out to people online to ask for support. In addition, do you treat your donors properly? Are you interested in building relationships with your donors? Can you sustain the work of maintaining these relationships over time? The answers to all these questions go far beyond a simple use of the internet for fundraising.

Online fundraising must be part of any organization's plan, but it should not be the whole plan. Like all fundraising strategies, online strategies do not work instantly—it takes time to build an e‐list, to drive traffic to a website, to create an audience for a blog, and to build an active following on social media platforms.

Online strategies are excellent for recruiting donors, but these donors have to be taken care of: thanked, sent more information, kept up to date, and so on. We need to take a page from direct mail fundraising. Many organizations acquired thousands of donors using direct mail, but organizations that have continued to increase the income from their donor base were those that built relationships with their donors using more personalized mail, phone calls, thank‐you notes, personal invitations, and personal solicitation. Strategies must be integrated with each other and they need to complement each other. No strategy, even our personal favorite—face‐to‐face solicitation—should be seen as the one way to relate to donors. Despite the great things technology can do, people remain sensitive to being treated as valued individuals.

With all that in mind, here is what almost every small organization should do to take advantage of online fundraising.

FOLLOW THE RESEARCH

With millions of people, nonprofits, and corporations using hundreds of platforms, it is not difficult to get data on what works, what used to work, and what experiments are going on with online fundraising. Keeping up with what is being learned, however, can be challenging. There are two places to go for accurate, easy‐to‐understand research: the M+R annual benchmarks report (http://mrbenchmarks.com) and the Nonprofit Technology Network or NTEN (https://www.nten.org/). Their websites contain a wealth of free information and access to amazing people working in this arena. Things change so fast that you might want to go to these sites before even reading further. Then you will be surprised at how grounded in some basic principles this kind of fundraising is.

Have the following in place:

• An email list: segmented into donors, potential donors (that is, those who signed up to get your e‐newsletter but have not yet made a donation), colleagues, press contacts, board members, etc. Use the segments so people are not drowned in your emails. A good email list is foundational for successful online fundraising and communication. Your emails must be readable on a mobile device—that is, people need to be able to read them easily from their phones.
• An attractive website: It can be simple but it must be kept up to date. Many studies have shown that 60–70% of people who give by check visit an organization's website first. And, as we explored in the chapter on direct mail, many people who respond to direct mail go from the letter to the website to give online. People who visit your website are like guests who visit your house. If invited, a guest expects that the house will be guest friendly—stuff will be cleared off the couch, the bathroom will be clean, etc. On a website, they expect that the links will work, the information will be recent and relevant, and it will be easy to wander around. Of course, your website must be able to accept online donations and must be easy to navigate on a mobile device.
• A presence on social media: Facebook is the most common, but Twitter and LinkedIn are not far behind. Instagram and WhatsApp are popular with some subsets of the population but Facebook continues to dominate in all ages and markets. Research can show you where your constituents hang out. By the time you read this, something else may have emerged. In the online world, very little is permanent.

Make sure that all the ways someone can find you are listed on your website and in your email signatures, with links to each.

FOCUS ON YOUR WEBSITE AND BUILDING YOUR EMAIL LIST

The most important elements of online fundraising are your email list and your website. In fact, if you do nothing else but focus on these you will raise your profile and you will raise money. On the other hand, if you are present on many platforms but only sporadically keep up with them and you do not build an email list, your time will have mostly been wasted.

Imagine the amount of work you would do to get ready to have a hundred people visit your office for an open house. You would clean and dust, hang up pictures, put away files, possibly buy some flowers or plants, and generally make your space one you could be proud of. You want the people coming to your open house to think, “This organization looks like it gets a lot done and it welcomes visitors.” A website is all that kind of work and more. Potentially millions of people could visit your organization there, and you want as many of them as is humanly possible to easily find what they are looking for and to see an invitation to give as often as possible.

Don't try to save money by building a site for little money or using someone to build the site who understands only the technology and not the marketing aspects. Hiring a web designer is a good investment. What you pay for design can range enormously but be prepared to spend $2,000–$4,000 to get started and more as you add more pages and more options. Further, you may want to pay someone a monthly fee to maintain your site—adding content, checking for broken links, changing things up from time to time. Because an excellent web presence and web strategy can cost thousands of dollars, even for a small organization, it must be an item in our budget calculations. This is not a one‐time expense. Every four to five years you may need to overhaul your site.

Many sophisticated donors understand the need for a top‐notch website and will help you with an extra gift. Dropping unprofitable fundraising strategies and freeing up the money to focus on your website is another way to pay for it. Many organizations have found the money for their site simply by eliminating people from their snail mail list who have never donated or haven't made a gift in several years. One organization with a mailing list of 10,000 and a donor base of 2,000 dropped 5,000 names from its list after figuring out that it was costing $3 per person per year to keep those nondonors on the list. The organization invested the $15,000 it saved into creating an entire online fundraising program with its email list as a key element to drive traffic to an excellent web presence.

Building a website has hidden costs; you can't just contract with someone and, a few days later, voilà!, a great website. Generally, the work breaks down into these categories, several of which require staff involvement:

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE

Part of the planning for your site is determining who would use it and how you are going to get these people to visit the site. Here are some simple and low‐cost ways to drive traffic to your site.

Make sure your web address URL is on everything you publish—your email signature, your letterhead, your printed or online newsletter (in several places, including as a footer on the bottom of each page)—and that it is part of your voicemail message and on any information you give out about your organization.

Register with all the key search engines: Google, Bing, Ask.com, DuckDuckGo, and so on. Further, ask your web manager to make sure that your “meta tag” and “title”—two items hidden at the top of the code for your site—have as many relevant words as possible so that search engines can index your site. Get help thinking through the two‐ or three‐word description for your organization that will show up in a web search that will encourage people to click on your website. For example, if someone types the three words related to your issue into Google or another search engine, your site should come up in the results, preferably in the top ten results. If someone types in, for example, “Prison reform, Springfield, MO” and you are a prison reform organization serving southwest Missouri, your name should pop up right away. Make sure that any online directories of nonprofits, service providers, chambers of commerce, and so on list your website along with your postal address.

Link to other organizations and ask them to link to you, particularly organizations you would see as allies or as offering complementary information to yours. Every so often, visit related sites and see what they say about you.

Email is one of the best ways to get people to visit your site. When someone becomes a donor, ask them for their email address and send an email newsletter or email alert at least quarterly, preferably monthly. You can use this communication to announce new content on your site or to suggest action, with a hyperlink that brings readers to the site for more details. Similarly, capturing as many emails of your website visitors as possible builds your list.

As with all fundraising strategies, never promise on the front end what you can't deliver on the back end. If you say you publish a monthly e‐newsletter, it has to come out at least 10 times a year and not twice a year! Many of us have signed up for e‐newsletters and never received any of them; at the same time, we receive a lot of e‐newsletters that we never wanted. It does not make sense to add someone to your list who hasn't asked to be on it, and it really doesn't make sense not to add people when they have used your website to sign up. Be sure that “fulfillment”—the cost in time and money to fulfill promises made—is built into all your planning.

CROWDFUNDING

Crowdfunding is the process of raising money (usually in small gifts) from a large number of people over a short time frame using an online giving platform. Crowdfunding appeals follow the formula we have been discussing in this section: a good cause described using a good story, a goal, a timeline, and an invitation to the donor to be involved. The difference is that crowdfunding is done on a specific platform, such as Kickstarter, MightyCause, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, CauseVox, and dozens of others. (Guidestar reports that there are 171 online giving platforms as of June 2021.) Each of them is slightly different. Some are more focused on individual needs (“Kahlil needs braces and has no dental insurance”) and some are more designed for organizations. You will need to research them to see which one might work for your organization. Crowdfunding campaigns can be promoted on social media and through email.

The main caution about using crowdfunding is that it is very difficult (and depending on the platform, sometimes impossible) to capture information about those who donate so that you can begin to build a relationship. Crowdfunding is designed for immediate and urgent needs and can be an excellent way to meet them. It is not designed to build long‐term relationships, something small organizations need to consider carefully when deciding whether or not to do a crowdfunding appeal.

PEER‐TO‐PEER FUNDRAISING

Peer‐to‐peer fundraising is very similar to crowdfunding. With peer‐to‐peer fundraising, each solicitor has their own fundraising page, whereas a crowdfunding campaign takes place on a single page. In peer‐to‐peer fundraising, you recruit participants to ask their friends and family to make donations to your campaign. Many donors make small donations the same way they do with crowdfunding. But in peer‐to‐peer fundraising, each participant has their own crowdfunding‐style page. Peer‐to‐peer fundraising is usually accompanied by an event, such as a walk or a run, or it may be part of a “big give” day like Giving Tuesday, GiveOUT, Give In May, and so on.

Giving Tuesday is particularly popular, and the popularity of many of these days of giving means that most organizations will want to experiment with participating in one of them. The advantages are clear: there is lots of publicity about it, people almost expect to be asked on those days, solicitors can be recruited because the time frame is very short and the competitive nature is attractive to many, and it gives your organization visibility. The disadvantages are built into the advantages: lots of competition, and everyone's email inbox is jammed with requests from a variety of great causes. The most overlooked element—and this will be a disadvantage if you overlook it—is the preparation ahead of time.

The best ways to learn about either crowdfunding or peer‐to‐peer fundraising are by talking with people who have done them several times, including people who have not had good luck with them so you learn from their mistakes, and reading a dozen or so articles and reports on this kind of fundraising.

You will see a great number of commonalities to all fundraising, such as setting a goal, having good materials, taking enough time to prepare and launch properly, and doing your follow‐up.

The following report will help you pick a good platform to use, but as with all things online, go online yourself to find the most recent data: http://cathexispartners.com/wp‐content/uploads/2018/09/P2P_Landscape_2018.pdf.

In this chapter we have explored in some detail three online fundraising strategies: using a website, using email, and using crowdfunding or peer‐to‐peer fundraising. There are other online strategies, such as text‐to‐give, but the ongoing success of those strategies in building a donor base all begin with having an excellent website and a strong email program.

Beyond that, the best way to find out what is working in online fundraising is to review lots of examples and ideas on the internet itself and talk with colleagues about what they see working. Some organizations will want to consider hiring a consultant with this expertise. Like all consultants, if they are good, they will more than pay for themselves.

Online fundraising provides us with some of the most exciting and far‐reaching tools in our toolbox, but for maximum effectiveness, these tools must be used in coordination with all the others.