Online fundraising involves using e-mail, your website, and other online strategies, including blogs, crowdfunding, search engine optimization, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on, usually 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 makes 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. The speed of crowdfunding has worked very well for getting money quickly to on-the-ground organizations for natural disaster aid; funding special, time-limited projects; and fueling a lot of political campaigns. However, the very democracy and immediate access the Internet provides means you are in an almost unimaginable competition for attention. According to research compiled by The Cultureist (www.thecultureist.com/) in 2015, about 2.5 billion people use the Internet every day, 144 billion e-mails are sent each day, and almost 140,000 new websites are launched each day. For every online appeal that works well, there are dozens that languish. The difference is all about the quality and quantity of your lists and the strength of your message.

So how can a small social change organization with one or two staff (or fewer) dedicated to fundraising and a willing board take advantage of this capability 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 donors? 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, 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 and to acquire new donors were those that built relationships with their donors using more personalized mail, the phone, thank-you notes, personal invitations, and personal solicitation. Strategies have to be integrated with each other and they need to complement each other. No strategy, even my 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 attuned to being treated as valued individuals.

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

FOLLOW THE RESEARCH

With millions of people, nonprofits, and corporations using hundreds of platforms, getting data on what works, what used to work, and what experiments are going on with online fundraising is not hard. Keeping up with what is being learned, however, is. There are two places I 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 are 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 attractive and comprehensive website.
• A presence on social media. Facebook is the most common, but others are popular with subsets of the population. Learn what your constituents use. For example, according to Cayden Mark at 18millionrising.org, “Tumblr skews young on the age axis and Asian American and Latino on the race axis.” Again, research can show you where your constituents hang out.
• An e-mail list segmented into donors, colleagues, press contacts, board members, etc. Use the segments so people are not drowned in your e-mails.
• Make sure that all the ways someone can find you are listed on your website and in your e-mail signatures, with links to each.

FOCUS ON YOUR WEBSITE AND BUILDING YOUR E-MAIL LIST

The most important elements of online fundraising are your e-mail 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 e-mail 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.” Imagine the care you would spend on creating materials for twenty major donors interested in your work. You would have pictures, graphs, and fact sheets, and you would put them together in a logical order in a nice folder. 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 cheaply 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 at least $2,000 to get started and more as you add more pages and have more options. A really excellent web presence and web strategy can easily cost $15,000, even for a small organization, so this is a project you might want to approach your major donors to underwrite. Further, unlike remodeling your bathroom, this is not a one-time expense. Every two to three years you may need to overhaul your site, and you need to have someone on staff, or at least on call, who can maintain it and fix the small problems that inevitably arise. Keep in mind also that your website needs to be mobile friendly. More than half the traffic to your site will be from people opening the site on their phones.

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 ten thousand and a donor base of two thousand dropped five thousand names from its list after figuring out that it was costing $2 per person per year to keep those non-donors on the list. The organization invested the $10,000 it saved into creating an entire online fundraising program with its website as the key element. Building a website has hidden costs because you can’t just contract with someone and, a few days later, voila! a great website. Generally, the work breaks down into these categories, several of which require staff involvement:

• Planning: What is going to be on the site? What do you want the site to do? For example, if you want to be able to embed videos, you will go to greater expense than if you don’t. You will also need to decide on a webhost at this stage.
• User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI): includes sitemap and wireframes as well as visual design: what background colors, what typeface, will it be friendly and easy to navigate?
• Programming and Content Support: how things move across the page, what content management system you use.
• Training: for staff on how to change things on the site, how to troubleshoot minor problems.
• Testing and Launch

(To get more detailed explanations of each of these steps, go online!)

Your website must have a prominent “Donate” icon on the home page and preferably on every page. The “donate ” button takes users to a secure site where they can make a gift by credit card, PayPal, or the like. One way to be able to accept credit cards is through a service such as Network for Good, FirstGiving, Click & Pledge, or other charity portals, which enable nonprofits to collect donations via credit card payments and even pledges. Your bank may also be able to serve as a portal for accepting online donations. (There will be a charge for this service, and some services will also charge the donor a small fee.) If you anticipate a high enough volume or you sell products and services on your site as well as accept donations, you may want to explore having your own merchant system. Doing the research to pick your merchant system will take time and require thinking through what you need your portal to do.

Your website’s “look” must be the same as everything else you publish. A simple example, but surprisingly often not observed, is that the logo on your website should match the logo you use on anything else. The content of your annual report should also appear on your site. Collect names of visitors with an e-mail sign up.

The best way to learn about websites is to visit the sites of organizations with missions that are similar to yours, even if they are larger organizations than yours, and to visit the sites of organizations you know do well with online fundraising. Ask who designs their sites and contact those designers to see how much they would charge you. Many fine and talented online fundraising firms, which work with very large institutions, will work with much smaller organizations for little or nothing from time to time, as will online marketing firms. They enjoy the challenge of promoting an organization that is not well known, or perhaps your organization may better reflect their politics than the larger organizations that pay them better. You will never know until you ask.

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 is on everything you publish—your business cards, your e-mail signature, your letterhead, your printed or online newsletter (in several places, often as a footer on the bottom of each page)—and that it is part of your voice mail message and on any information you give out about your organization.

Register with all the key search engines: Yahoo, Google, and the like (find a list of current search engines at www.searchenginewatch.com). 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 your website. For example, if I type 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. Ditto if I type 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 printed or 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.

E-mail is one of the best ways to get people to visit your site. When a person becomes a donor, ask for his or her e-mail address and send an e-mail newsletter or e-mail alert monthly or quarterly. 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.

As with all fundraising strategies, never promise on the front end what you can’t deliver on the back end. If you say your e-newsletter is quarterly, it has to come out quarterly and not twice a year! I have signed up for more than a dozen e- newsletters and never received any of them. On the other hand, I am on lists of e-newsletters that I never signed up for. 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.

E-MAIL

Building an e-list is the most important aspect of online fundraising. Make sure you have sign-up sheets at any meeting or event your organization sponsors, and always include a line for an e-mail address in any reply device or correspondence with donors and prospects. You can use your e-mail list in a number of ways—from sending action alerts and invitations to events to reposting press you have received—but most organizations will do well to use it for fundraising in the following two ways.