Online marketing campaign to raise funds for a charity?

CamillaRhodes

Hi all, first time poster here in Mktg.

I'm trying to come up with an online marketing campaign to raise funds for a charity. The key is that the fundraising must be done entirely online (or 'digitally' - through new media etc.)

I've worked with PPC advertising before, but nothing else. The ideas I've had so far are:

- PPC advertising (AdWords)

- Banner ads (Has Google started doing these through AdWords?)

- Social Networking - Facebook / Twitter (But how can you attract fans / followers to your page???)

- Ads on Facebook (know nothing about this but guess it might help with the above!)

- SMS donations - i.e. send a text to a number and one euro will be donated, deducted from your credit / bill (I guess maybe using traditional advertising media to promote this?)

- Attempts at viral emails - maybe some sort of call to the public to generate images or videos in support of the charity, and to submit them to us to win a prize, get them published on the website and hope that people will forward the images / videos to their friends

- Improving the website's usability (Google Analytics to start with, but any other suggestions?)

- Using petitions to source email addresses for potential targeted emails (not sure about this one, runs the risk of spamming which I abhor)

This is all I've got for now. If any of you wise, gifted people have any comments or suggestions, or guidance as to where I might research more about online fundraising, I'd be very grateful!!! Thanks

padocon

I have worked with goolgle adwords and they do offer banner ads, various sizes. I have never used them but as far as I know they are a bit dearer. First do you have an adwords account?

Social networking sites take little time to set up and need to be updated regularly. In my opinion twitter is best as you can constantly remind people of you ect with tweets. The hard part is to get followers. How, well its hard but I guess you have to follow the WIIFM rule- "What's in it for me"

So get someone to sponcer T-shirts with the charity logo and give them to people on twitter who follow you. ie
"Follow us on twitter for the chance to win some cool 'charity name' t-shirts"
Then do a tweet "First 3 people to tweet after this message will win a free t-shirt" In the mean time you can tweet, tweet, tweet about anything to get people to make a donation.

I don't do facebook, thought it was just so annoying. As far as I know you have to pay for the ads on it, but I am not sure.


Bebo is another one, its more Irish, takes more effort than twitter.

Shaneod21

Whatever you do, do not market a fundraising campaign on Bebo.
The crowd on bebo you are marketing to, are a younger crowd so you would be wasting your time as it is not as widely used anymore.

The problem you have is that with your PPC campaigns, not many people are going to be searching for terms related to giving someone fundraising money, so how targeted the traffic you get will largely determine the keywords you select. Ideally what you would need is an email capture, by using something like aweber or you can use a free autoresponder.

People will not simply click on a ppc ad and hand over money for fundraising they will want more information so in my opinion an autoresponder is paramount. However, your best bet would be to set up a properly optimised website and have it ranking to get organic traffic in google.

PPC would be a waste of money unless you have an autoresponder and can then collect emails and provide more information.

Aweber is excellent because it requires a double opt in meaning people have to confirm that they placed their email in your capture form.

By far the best way online is to use social networking sites like twitter. Twitter has a feature that allows you to search through by what people are talking about. You could then tweet your message across to them.

You could also create a youtube video and link it to your fundraising campaign.


You really need to know exactly what you are doing when it comes to online otherwise you could end up spending a lot of money and time with a low ROI.

SMS donations is something you would need to work out with the network providers and I am sure there is a lot of paper work. Its a great idea however and would be interesting to look into.

By improving the websites usability I am not really sure by what you are trying to achieve, if you could just expand a bit more I could advise you?!

Google analytics tracks the number of people coming to your website, where they came from, what they typed in to get to your website etc
It is definitely something every website should have. Make sure you submit your sitemap to google webmaster tools also.

Online fundraising is difficult unless you had some sort of media backing like getting into the metro and having a url at the end of their article.

My advice is to not waste your money on google ppc or banners. The best way to approach this is by approaching irish websites that could have relevance to what your fundraising campaign is for. Ask them could you write a guest post on their blog or maybe even their website. The other option would be to get banner space on their website, more than likely you could get this for a highly discounted price as it's for a charity.


However, fundraising solely online is not something I can see working effectively without some sort of offline effort.

If you do not have a website a good way to raise money is through the below:

http://www.mycharity.ie


Use offline efforts to drive traffic to the website that you have for online fundraising.


Creating excellent content for your website is really important and you should create content daily. Make sure people know information about the charity. The benefits and a breakdown of what they give will be put towards what.

For example, Something Trocaire have have used effectively is something like €20 will feed a family for X amount of time etc.

You could write articles in directories like ezinearticles, you could also submit press releases. Have a link in your signature on the forum.

The above are not an exhaustive list. I have never tried fundraising online, I am just using my experience of working online.

Hope ths helps!

CamillaRhodes

WOW guys, many thanks for your excellent, detailed replies!

I perhaps should have been a little clearer - this is an online marketing proposal for a well-established charity, which is well-known (I don't want to mention the name for confidentiality reasons). They do offline fundraising as well, but want to expand their online fundraising activities, and that's where I come in. They have a website but, in my opinion, it's not brilliant - it's ok, but looks a bit amateurish. I guess when I say wanting to improve its usability, I mean partly making it very, very easy for potential donors both to find out what they want to find out (i.e. what programmes the charity is involved with, where the money goes etc) and also very easy to make a donation / purchase an item in the online shop, etc. But I think there's huge potential to expand their website, to make it a bit (apologies for using such a vile term, but) more Web 2.0, i.e. more interactivity, regularly updated 'blog' style entries, maybe some video content, that sorta thing. Basically tricks to try to get people interested in the site, spending more time in the site, sending their friends there, etc.

I've been doing a lot of reading about this field today and find it very exciting! All your comments I have taken on board. Any other suggestions or ideas would be gratefully received! Cheers

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

Camilla Whats the charity?

I do some similar work and the best approach in my opinion is to educate people (in a non aggressive way) about what the charity is about and why it's so important in your opinion to combat the problem or to offer benefit in some way or another.

For example for the Simon Community (Via Christmas FM) we can share peoples story of the unfortunate circumstances under which they ended up in the awful situation of being homeless. People may be able to relate to how this could happen to them, see themselves in their shoes and desire to help out.

You have to remember that so many people are bombarded with requests for their attention that it's natural for them to filter out any intruding demands on their time, so you need to give them a reason to want to give your charity their attention and then hopefully later their money.

mikeg1850

Camilla, if the charity you mention is quite a big one then one very qucik fix to generate new regular monthly donations would be to find a way of offering something of genuine tangible value that donors would actually WANT (most charities spend very little time thinking this through properly!)

Given that the lion share of charity donations come from the business world (small business owners) it is sensible to offer up something which is useful and valuable to this sector (and commands repeat monthly donations).

Something you might find very interersting is a site called www.meetthegiants.com Members sign up and pay an average of £34 per month to listen into exclusive interviews with the top entrepreneurs and business experts in the world. The information is very high quality.

It is possible for charities to co-brand with Meet The Giants and offer their donors/website visitors a great product in return for a monthly donation (which continues month after month). The charity gets to keep a massive 80% of the revenues.

So as an example, if 1000 people signed up for the Meet The Giants program the charity would get a monthly payment of approx £27,000. Depending on the size of their current database this could be achieved overnight (and if they are a really big charity figures greatly in excess of this).

In the name of full disclosure, I run the Meet The Giants business but I also do a lot of charity work and know the difficulties that charities have in terms of finding effective fundraising tools. Because Meet The Giants is a digitally delivered product and an established brand it means that there is no need for stock holding or logistical constraints from the charity's perpesctive.

If you want to discuss let me know how to contact you.

Hope this has been helpful!

Mike

Entreprenr Show

Google Adwords can give charities a free 1,000 euro Adwords voucher! Yeah for Adwords!