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and keep the donations coming all year long.
Get your
year-end campaign
into action early
CONTENTS 01 Introduction
02 Strategy/Planning
03 Email
04 Social Media
05 Paid Search
06 Creative Consideration/Messaging
07 Other Digital Tactics
08 Opportunistic Giving
09 Backend Monitoring
10 Summary
01 The early bird
gets the donation
It’s never too early to start thinking about
your year-end push for donations.
Why?
Aside from it being a perfect reason to connect with
donors, the holiday season gives you an opportunity
to flex your digital, social and mobile skills.
Introduction
Giving habits are changing.
Donors are supporting online and across every screen.
Digital is now a major player.
In the past five years alone, digital gifts have steadily
increased as a percent of total gifts and revenue.
Competition is growing.
Do you know how to rise above the noise?
We do. And in a minute, so will you.
Social pressure rules!
It’s changing everything, but we have a plan.
Because the truth is:
Source: Google Trends
Here are some helpful tips to get
ahead of your year-end campaign.
02 Strategy/Planning
Before you dive in, review what worked and what didn’t from your 2014
holiday season:
Overall: How did your creative and messaging perform? What calls-to-action and
giving incentives worked?
Paid Search: Best keywords, landers, call-to-actions and bidding strategies.
Also consider if you saw any quality score issues
Email: Review subscribes/unsubscribes, open rates, clicks, clicks-to-conversions.
What email had the highest engagement?
Display: How did your creative and offers perform?
Social: Top performing content, offers and targeting
First things first.
8
Talk to your agency partners and
get the ball rolling.
Plan out holiday schedules for messaging and
appeals, and line up matching grants, if possible,
to incentivize giving. Don’t forget to strategize
bidding budgets for SEM.
Start right now.
9
Your supporter base expects
consistency in your messaging
and appeals; they don’t care
about your internal silos.
So give ‘em what they want this holiday:
Align email, paid SEM, SEO, social & display
initiatives — and don’t forget offline efforts
like direct mail and broadcast.
Get it together.
10
Use your end-of-year campaign as a launching pad for
big spring events.
When you start building your organization’s awareness during the holiday
season, you can hit the ground running with your spring campaign at the
start of the year and ramp up quicker as you begin to solicit participants
and fundraisers.
Spring forward.
11
03 Email
Nonprofit list churn goes up 41% in December, thanks to
the high volume of emails sent.
Don’t boost your unsubscribes by emailing too frequently and with less-than-
compelling content. Carefully segment your email audience. Consider cadence.
Make sure your subject lines, pre-headers and offers are relevant and engaging.
View your emails critically, and test audience, timing, messaging and offers to
discover best performers.
Be relevant.
13
More than 50% of email opens
are occurring on a mobile phone
or tablet.
In 2014, 9.5% of online donations were made on
a mobile device and 16.6% of donors gave from
an email on a phone or tablet. If you have not
yet made sure your emails and web properties
are mobile-optimized, now’s the time!
Become mobile-friendly.
14
04 Social Media
A whopping 70% of individuals take one or more actions
in response to a friend posting a story on social media
about making a charitable donation.
Include sharing links in emails and landing pages, and make sure content
is engaging in order to build relationships with your audience. Photos,
online videos, personal stories and donations are all great examples of
shareable content.
Help donors share the love.
16
Engage donors early on with
strong social content:
71% of those active on social networks have
donated to a charity in the past 12 months.
Of those, 6 in 10 have donated online.
Let’s get engaged.
17
You may run into an unhappy donor.
So be ready to respond to complaints and questions
quickly in social media. Add extra staff so you can be
as fast and relevant as possible, with fewer machine-
driven answers. Donors know the difference.
Stay nimble.
18
Paid social yields 25% more conversions than organic
posts and only 2% of your Facebook fans and followers
will see organic posts.
Plus, paid allows for more ad types, targeting, relevance and testing.
Paid social is critical.
19
05 Paid Search
You might be surprised to learn that 58% of nonprofits
invest in paid search.
If you’re part of the other 42%, consider investing in this medium. Google
Grant’s max bid restriction means you’re missing out on valuable traffic from
searchers who are interested in your cause and mission. Set up brand and
non-brand campaigns in both Google and Bing. Google Grant might be doing
the heavy lifting on brand terms, but non-brand — and even some brand —
searchers are likely slipping through the cracks.
Paid search vs. Google Grant.
21
Be aware if the season is negatively
impacting your business.
If your SEM campaigns are wasting dollars
on non-qualified matches, adjust your negative
matches accordingly. Is your unqualified traffic
at an all-time high? Set display retargeting
campaigns to require more than one page view.
Sensitivity and SEM.
22
06 Creative Considerations/Messaging
Use incentives to boost donations and average gift amounts.
Even if you can’t offer a premium for givers, consider other ways to incentivize
giving. Work ahead of time to secure a matching grant for the holiday time
period. Share tangible levels of services or resources each ask amount can
deliver to urge donors up to the next rung on the ask ladder.
Reasons to donate.
24
The holidays are the most generous
time of year.
On average, donors give 80% larger gifts in December.
Take advantage of this opportunity to develop a unique
message, story and/or appeal that will create a deep
connection with the reader and emotionally tie your
mission with the holiday spirit. If your mission doesn’t
have an outright connection to the holidays, consider
reminding someone they can make a gift in honor of
a loved one.
Messaging and your mission.
25
April 15th is just around the corner.
As the fiscal year comes to an end, donors are far more likely to be persuaded
to give to a charitable organization for a tax credit. It will be useful to include
tax savings language into your appeals, especially for those touch points going
out after Christmas. This angle might just be what convinces your donor to take
the plunge.
Use tax deduction language.
26
End-of-year campaigns are a
good time to use urgency to
drive donations.
As the year is winding down, holiday giving, tax
deductions and urgent-needs messaging are ways
to incorporate urgency into a campaign. The use
of a countdown clock on a donation landing page
to show days/hours/minutes left until January 1 is
a great visual to encourage action.
Push the urgency.
27
07 Other Digital Tactics
It takes both good creative and smart targeting to break
through the holiday marketing clutter.
Integrate email lists for targeting in paid social and display. Use your current
lists to reach supporters through Twitter, Facebook and display — and create
lookalike audiences to attract new ones.
Creativity + targeting = SUCCESS!
29
Remarketing should be part of any
robust media plan.
But if an individual doesn’t contribute or engage
on a campaign landing page, consider tweaking
the offer and CTA to elevate the urgency and
bring them back.
Remarket wisely.
30
08 Opportunistic Giving
As potential donors are purchasing gifts on Black Friday
and Cyber Monday, stress the importance of giving back
during the holiday season.
Capitalize on this national day of giving as part of an end-of-year campaign,
or highlight a specific cause for which all #GivingTuesday donations will go
to (i.e., Saving the Arctic, support for families with babies in the NICU during
the holidays, etc.). Online donations on #GivingTuesday 2014 were up 36%
over 2013, so be sure your campaigns are making the most of the growing
awareness around this “holiday.”
#GivingTuesday
32
Twelve percent of 2014 giving happened in the last three
days of the year, so it’s important to see your campaigns
through December 31st.
One of BKV’s clients extended a Christmas campaign through the end of the
year and generated 25% of their total revenue during that last week! Make sure
to have planned appeals during this time, and don’t forget to follow up with
donors by thanking them for their support.
Be open.
33
09 Backend Monitoring
You don’t want days to pass before you
discover you’re hitting caps.
Don’t be so busy that you don’t check your budgets
and end up leaving donations on the table.
Establish budgets and check daily.
35
December 31st is too late to find out if something’s broken!
So, check for broken links, incorrect ad copy, proper tagging, etc. Mark your
calendar for re-audits.
Audit and re-audit holiday campaigns.
36
10 Summary
Well, there you have it:
The keys to success for your end-of-year giving digital campaign.
Remember to track performance across every single channel.
You’ll find out which tactics were a hit, which need work —
and which you can apply beyond Q4 to raise profits year-round
(not to mention lay the foundation for a smash-hit holiday 2016).
So take these tips and talk to your team or agency about how
you can use them to get your audience's attention and drive
donations this year.
If you’re ready to put a particular plan in action and get the kind
of creative work, strategy and media expertise that brings the
heat all year round, contact the experts at BKV today!
