5 Types of Digital Fundraising + 7 must-reads

In my newest High-Five Nonprofit Marketing Ideas video (above), “Five types of digital fundraising,” I mentioned additional resources to jumpstart your digital fundraising. Some are mentioned in the video and some offer more awesome tips and advice. Check them out.

Fundraising on a Budget? Spend Less and Raise More with These Digital Fundraising Tips – This is from pandemic times, but I love the “spend less, raise more” angle, and all of the ideas still apply.

Eleven Online Fundraising Ideas: Raise Money in the Digital Age – From Double the Donation, more ideas on ways to digitally fundraise, but also seven helpful tools that you can look into, too!

Notable Mobile Fundraising – There is proof in the pudding! Here are five great examples of successful digital fundraising that will inspire you for your own.

Rounding Up for Charity and RoundUp App – Two of the tools I mention in the video that you can use for number four: “Round up to the next dollar.”

12 Ways to Use ChatGPT and Other AI Tools for Fundraising – The applications for AI are endless – they even include some prompts to help you along.

25 online fundraising ideas for nonprofits – A great roundup of more virtual fundraising ideas.

20 Ridiculously Simple Online Fundraising Ideas Your Nonprofit Needs to Try – This had me at “ridiculously simple.” Give me all the ideas!

Video Transcript:

Hi! Thanks for joining me for the latest High-Five Nonprofit Marketing Ideas. I’m Julia McDowell, marketing and advertising strategist with Five Ones, and today’s topic is Five Types of Digital Fundraising.

Remember the days of in-person fundraising events—you know, before every day became a ”mask-erade”? Before Lysol disinfecting wipes were used to scrub everything but donor data? And sometimes that, too—just to be on the safe side? Good times.

So – even if we had a choice! – there’s no time like the present to lean into digital fundraising. You just need to wrap your head around the fact that – compared to traditional, in-person fundraising – digital fundraising can mean… less. Less venue-scouting, volunteer-scheduling, committee-chairing, menu-tasting, permit-paying and press-checking. Therefore, less bank-breaking! And less boundaries. When you’re not up against geographic or physical constraints, you discover potential supporters beyond your local community.

Ready to find out about how digital fundraising’s “less” can mean more donations for your nonprofit? Here are my High-Five Types of Digital Fundraising.

Social Fundraising

With social fundraising, your nonprofit’s supporters turn the internet of things into the internet of cha-chings! Here are a few kinds of Social Fundraising.

Peer to peer fundraising is when your nonprofit creates an online fundraising campaign page and helps supporters create their own, branded fundraising pages that mirror it. For example, your charity may run a month-long campaign that has an overall fundraising goal of $25,000. Each supporter sets their own mini goal for their personalized page and shares it with friends, family and other do-gooders, asking them to make immediate donations on their page. All those donations roll up to benefit your nonprofit’s fundraiser.

Pledge fundraising is like peer to peer in that supporters create their own fundraising pages that look and feel like your nonprofit’s. But instead of their page collecting donations just because, donations are made after a supporter completes a particular activity or personal challenge—or your charity meets a challenge (like commitments for $25,000 in pledges). When your supporters or organization completes their challenge, all pledged donations turn in to actual gifts for your nonprofit.

Finally, there’s crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is when your nonprofit creates an online fundraising campaign page, and your supporters share that page with their networks of family, friends, coworkers, neighbors and other potential donors.  Your supporters’ network gives directly to your nonprofit’s campaign rather than via personalized giving pages as with peer to peer and pledge fundraisers. But your supporters are still the secret sauce to crowdfunding because it’s their sharing of your nonprofit’s fundraising page that leads to gifts.

Matching Gifts

Speaking of gifts … there’s no such thing as being “too matchy-matchy” when it comes to Matching Gifts! Matching gift programs are when employers offer to match their employees’ donations to eligible nonprofits. Tap into this enormous fundraising opportunity by incorporating “corporate matching gifts” in your online donation form. A matching gift goes down like this: a donor makes their individual gift to your nonprofit, then uses an embedded matching-gift database tool—Amply is just one—to check eligibility for their employer’s matching gift program. If so – SCORE! — they follow the steps to submit a request to their employer. After their employer confirms the donor’s individual gift to your nonprofit, the company sends you a gift in a matching amount. BOOM. In Double the Donations most recent research, more than 18 million people worked for companies that offer matching gift programs and up to three billion dollars is donated in matching gifts annually. But … up to seven billion dollars in matching gifts goes unclaimed every year! Don’t leave free money on the table, people! Help your donors meet their match.

Text to Give

Ninety six percent of Americans own cell phones, per the Pew Research Foundation’s latest numbers. With the right text messaging tools, you can fundraise through mobile by setting up a text-to-give or a text-to-donate campaign. Your nonprofit puts it in play by promoting a campaign keyword and a number for people to use to donate. In text-to-give campaigns, a fixed donation amount is gifted when a donor texts in your keyword.  In text-to-donate, when a supporter texts your keyword, they’re sent a customized link that redirects them to your donation page, where they can make a financial gift in any amount. The Red Cross’ 2010 Haiti Earthquake Relief Effort – “Text HAITI to 90999” – was one of the first and most impactful uses of text-to-give technology, raising almost half a billion dollars.

Rounding Up to the Next Dollar

Rounding up for charity turns painless gifts in to big gives. Just like grocery stores and mass merchandisers do, online retailers and digital service providers allow customers to donate their change to good causes. As technology and digital platforms make giving easier, the trend of rounding up for charity is likely to grow.

In addition to one-off round-ups via a specific retailer, digital applications can now help your nonprofit get a piece of All the Transactions! For example, the RoundUp App automatically rounds up each of a user’s credit or debit card transactions over the course of a month and donates the change to the nonprofit of the user’s choice at month’s-end. Think of the new stream of recurring monthly funds for your charity! RoundUp currently offers users more than one and a half million nonprofits to choose from and is taking suggestions for new ones to add. This means YOU. Check it out to see how users’ change can help you change the world!

Facebook Fundraising

As much as charities use social media to connect with followers, fundraising via social media is still uncharted water for many nonprofits. One easy way to dip a toe in it is Facebook Fundraising. If your organization’s page is listed as a nonprofit (which it should be!), add Facebook’s “Donate” button right onto your cover image at the top of the page. It will take donors to the online donation form on your charity’s website. Facebook also enables individuals active on the platform to engage in fundraising campaigns on your registered charity’s behalf—and sometimes even matches the funds they raise. So consider using Facebook’s popularity and pockets to digitally raise the funds needed to help your organization carry out its mission.

Thanks so much for joining me for today’s High-Five Nonprofit Marketing Ideas! If you have a digital fundraising trick of the trade to share, please leave it in the comments below or message me on LinkedIn or at julia@fiveones.com. See you again soon, nonprofit nation!