Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Rob Wu. Rob is a Founder at CauseVox, an innovative online fundraising platform that empowers non-profits to easily design their own fundraising sites for campaigns and personal/team fundraising. Most recently, Rob co-created SXSWCares, a campaign that raised over $120,000 in 10 days. His work has been recognized by the Mayor of Austin and featured in the NYTimes, CNN, Forbes, and NPR. Rob spends his free time helping NGOs abroad solve social problems more effectively.
Follow Rob (@robjwu) or check out the CauseVox blog.
Q1 I was excited to see that CauseVox was created specifically to serve the needs of small to medium sized non-profits. What do you see as the greatest fundraising challenge for the small nonprofit?
That’s a hard one — there are so many fundraising challenges! The two biggest ones I’ve seen are developing a fundraising strategy and integrating technology into that strategy.
Developing a fundraising strategy takes a certain experience and expertise. Many nonprofits are overwhelmed with running their programs and just don’t have the time to sit down and plan out their fundraising strategy. They are left trying a variety of tactics with no real plan, and as a result, no systematic way to measure and learn from what they’ve tried.
On there other end, there is the technology that helps support the execution of the strategy. A lot of times for small nonprofits, fundraising platforms stand between nonprofit and their donors. Nonprofits had to send their donors to someone else’s site. I believe that donors should be brought back to the nonprofit’s own site. Because their story is unlike any others, their fundraising site should be unique too. That’s one of the reasons why we started CauseVox.
Q 2 In the 7 Habits of Effective Personal Fundraising you point to the need for appreciation. Do you have some ideas for how the small nonprofit can thank their donors more often?
The most important piece of thanking donors is focusing on the quality of the “thank you”. The best “thanks yous” are the ones that are sincere, personalized, and timely.
A few ideas that come to mind to help small nonprofits thank donors (and supporters):
1. Implement a system to keep track of which donors and supporters have been thanked, who thanked them, and when they were last thanked. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or more rigorous like a CRM.
2. Segment your donors and supporters by the size of their gift (if you can do relative size, even better). For example, for a donor that donated $10,000, you’ll want to thank them in person. For one that donated $10, you’ll want to use email or letters. If nonprofits are able to reflect the donation data against the donor’s income level or previous giving habits, then that insight is another valuable way to determine how you thank them too.
3. Delegate your thank you activities to your Board and senior staff. This helps build a culture of valuing donors and supporters, but it also helps spread the workload.
4. Find a remarkable way to thank donors and supporters, especially when they don’t expect it. A phone call or email is always good, but why not record a video or write a blog post about how much you appreciate your donor or supporter?
Q 3 Using multiple ways to raise awareness is the second habit from 7 Habits and says that most successful fundraisers always use email to individuals. How can nonprofits do email better?
For nonprofits, doing email better involves two things. The first one is leveraging technology. Nonprofits should use an email newsletter service that gives the nonprofit ability to incorporate well designed email newsletters while tracking opens and click-through rates. Common providers are Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and iContact. There’s a learning curve to get something set up, but once you do, it’ll save you a lot time and provide a wealth of insight.
The second is writing compelling copy. This is the more important factor. A lot of nonprofits write in a way that doesn’t express the nonprofit’s culture or personality. In addition, the copy isnt relevant to the reader.
In writing better emails, nonprofits should think about what they want the reader to do. In other words, every email that is written should have a purpose and goal defined. The content then should be written around that purpose and goal with a defined call to action.
If the nonprofit is using an email newsletter service, they can test their copy, subject lines, send times, and much more to optimize results.
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I can’t wait to meet with you personally.
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