The digital fundraising space is evolving rapidly. To adapt to these changes organizations must continually adopt new and innovative techniques to attract new donors and fundraisers. In this new world driven heavily by social media, fundraisers become the spokespeople for your organization and its mission. It’s critical for your organization to empower these fundraisers to create excitement around donating to your charity, and translate the impact of your organization to an unfamiliar audience of potential donors.
It is incredibly important to meet these fundraisers and donors in the digital places where they are hanging out. When you look at the people who spend time on Twitch, and other livestreaming platforms, despite a culture of giving to one another, this group is less familiar with more traditional P2P fundraising strategies and techniques. The question is: how can charities take advantage of this culture and incentivize new donors in ways that are engaging and make sense for them?
In this blog, we’ll cover the value of using your impact points and why tailoring your message to the right audience matters for a successful fundraising campaign.
Your Impact Points Are Your Incentives
The numbers do not lie — using Tiltify’s incentives — including rewards, polls, milestones, and targets — increases the average total that a campaign raises during a fundraiser. There are plenty of rewards that have become staples in the Tiltify space: take a shot of hot sauce for every $50 donation, a handwritten thank you card for $25 donations, or putting a sticker on the fundraiser’s face for a $5 donation. Rewards are a great way to engage a community to become a donor while also making the experience of fundraising exciting and enjoyable for everyone involved. The biggest barrier is that many causes’ impact points are tailored for different audiences: $100, $500, $1000, or more are not the average donation occurring in these spaces. How far can $50 go in your organization? $30? $25? By meeting the online fundraising audience where they are and adapting impact points to realistic increments for them, incentives can contribute to a fundraising campaign’s overall success. Incentives are a way to engage donors in new ways while also making them feel that their donation, no matter the size, impacts your organization meaningfully.
On Tiltify, incentives — rewards, polls, milestones, and targets — can be integrated directly into the platform. Dependent on your tier, charities have access to Cause Rewards which can be utilized to provide a series of impact point incentives that fundraisers can seamlessly choose to include in their fundraising campaigns. Not only are you providing them with the vital information they need to act as ambassadors for your campaign, but this key messaging can be the difference between someone donating $20 or $50 if they know how far that extra donation amount will go.
Subscriptions, Meet Monthly Giving
Monthly giving, or monthly pledges, allows donors to commit to giving to an organization monthly through Tiltify at an amount they choose. Twitch audiences are already primed for these types of transactions, but for a charity to take advantage of this, it takes the initiative to put it into terms that will be better understood. How can $5 a month make an impact in your organization, or even a $5 commitment to 6 months of support? Livestreaming and Twitch audiences understand how their personal subscriptions support their online community, but how do certain donation amounts support your organization?
**Note** Twitch tools are not for fundraising, this is a comparison to inspire a call to action for constituents to consider monthly giving.
Preparation in the digital fundraising space is arguably just as much about how you prepare for your fundraising events as it is how you prepare your fundraisers. Any tools that your organization can provide are going to set your fundraisers up for success. This includes making sure your fundraisers understand your organization’s impact points, mission, and have information readily available for them to utilize in their fundraisers. Alas, while thinking through all this information — whether it’s your organization’s impact points or how you frame monthly giving — tailoring all messaging to the audience is key for adoption.
About the Author
Matthew Perks is a Charity Success Manager at Tiltify where he works to aid nonprofits in reaching their full potential on the platform. He is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada where his research focuses on online community management. He has previously worked at the Public Health Agency of Canada on Health Inequality reporting.