Online Fundraising Isn’t a Field of Dreams
06/01/2005
A relentless focus on growing the size of your email database
is the key to online fundraising success
By Brent Blackaby and Larry Huynh, Blackrock Associates, LLC
With all due respect to Kevin Costner, online fundraising isn’t a Field of Dreams. While “if you build it, they will come” may apply to baseball diamonds constructed in Iowa cornfields, it usually doesn’t work the same way for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns trying to raise money online.
Unless you’re eBay, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, or among a handful of other high-traffic websites, you can’t just rely on your brand name to attract visitors to your online front door. You’ve got to drive people to your website. You’ve got to tell them what’s new and why they should come back—to learn more about your latest accomplishments, to participate in your new advocacy campaign, and hopefully to lend financial support to your cause.
In short, you need to make email an integral part of your online marketing repertoire.
Successful email marketing boils down to optimizing a series of simple arithmetic equations. Online marketers continuously analyze open rates, click-through rates, and contribution conversion rates from campaign to campaign to make sure they’re doing as much as they can to maximize fundraising returns. All of these elements are important.
But there’s another huge lever to think about: the size of your email list itself.
Online marketers have to be relentless, asking themselves, “What else can I be doing, today, to grow the size of my email database?” Online fundraising returns are directly proportional to the size of your list—double your list size, and you’ll likely double your fundraising.
So what are some of the best ways for growing this valuable asset, your email database? Here are a few of the things we’ve identified while working with our political and nonprofit clients over the past few years:
- Use effective online advocacy campaigns to your advantage
People love to sign petitions and email their legislators about issues that are important to them and to your organization—which is critical to getting your message out to key policy influencers. But if you can “corner the market” on a hot-button issue, your advocacy campaign can spread like wildfire and spur email list growth as well.
Try to identify an issue that your organization is uniquely positioned to take action on. Capitalize on current events and stories that are being covered in the press. Then push your advocacy campaign out as far and wide as you can, especially with multiple emails to your own list, and encourage your supporters to tell their friends about it. Many of our clients have added tens of thousands of emails to their lists in just a week or two by identifying the right issue and acting quickly to “own” it. - Look internally
More than likely, your email list represents just a small percentage of your overall supporter universe. The challenge is moving more and more of your supporters online, so you can send them more timely messages to increase the frequency and amount of their giving and reduce overall fundraising costs.
You can start by ensuring that your organization is collecting email addresses for supporters at every traditional marketing touchpoint, including phone and direct mail. Make sure you have sign-up sheets at every event, and offer incentives like contests or gifts to encourage people to provide their email address.
To acquire email addresses for a significant portion of your offline supporter database even more quickly, consider performing an email append with one or more large consumer data vendors. They’ll match the name and physical mail address of your supporters with people in their database, and sell you just the new email addresses that match. Append projects are a good way to acquire emails from people who already support your organization at a low cost. - Don’t forget your partners
Reach out to organizations and individuals that you frequently partner with, and ask them to send an email to their own list on your behalf—especially if you can promote a new advocacy campaign from your organization that is particularly well-suited to their audience, inspiring higher conversion rates than standard opt-in or fundraising messages. If your partners want something in return, offer a similar opt-in message to your own email list. You’d be amazed at the different universes you can tap into by reaching out into your partners’ networks. - Fire up the search engines
At a minimum, make sure people can find your website when they look for your organization on Google or Yahoo! by submitting your site for inclusion in search results. But you should take things a step further, too.
When you launch a new online advocacy effort, consider purchasing pay-per-click advertising in search results for keywords related to your campaign. For example, when we managed an online advocacy campaign for Senator Barbara Boxer’s PAC during Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings, targeted pay-per-click advertising on keywords including “Condoleezza Rice,” “Secretary of State,” and “confirmation hearings” drove thousands of additional signers to Senator Boxer’s petition and significantly grew her email list. - Reach out to the blog community
Millions of Americans actively read and participate on weblogs across a wide variety of subjects—political blogs are just the tip of the iceberg! Identify the biggest and most influential blogs related to your organization’s work, and post frequently there. You’ll be reaching into a community of very active, savvy online activists who can help you spread your message and achieve your advocacy and fundraising goals.
These are but a few of many things you can consider to build the size of your email list—but be creative! There are probably many other ideas you’ll come up with if you just spend some time brainstorming.
The bottom line: By focusing on the growth of your email database as a key performance metric, with the same intensity that you monitor your online fundraising totals, you will set your organization up for long-term online success.
About Blackrock Associates
Blackrock Associates is an online marketing consulting firm focused on serving progressive political and nonprofit organizations. Clients include General Wesley Clark, Senator Barbara Boxer, Senator Blanche Lincoln, Nick Lampson (running for Congress against Tom DeLay in Texas), and Los Angeles Mayor-Elect Antonio Villaraigosa.
Blackrock's two principals, Brent Blackaby and Larry Huynh, co-directed the online fundraising and new supporter acquisition programs for the Clark for President campaign. Over a five-month period, they were responsible for raising more than $7 million in contributions from more than 50,000 individual donors over the internet (representing approximately 40% of the campaign’s overall fundraising), leading initiatives to grow the size of the Clark campaign’s online supporter database to more than 250,000 names.