How to increase your charity’s fundraising success without increasing your marketing

As financial controller for your charity organisation, you are probably constantly on the look-out for ways to increase the charitable donations that your organisation. How to increase your charity’s fundraising success without increasing your marketing: Ezidebit receives from the general public. In this article, we step out how three very simple cost-neutral strategies can help you to increase the funds you have available to execute your organisation’s charitable programs by up to 47 per cent, including:

• Reducing your internal administration time
• Using the modern technologies you have available
• Switching from snail mail to email.

The non-profit marketing conundrum

Most non-profit and charity organisations invest a good deal of money, time and resources into finding and recruiting new donors through marketing. But the truth is, there are more efficient ways for your organisation to increase the amount of money you are raising from your fundraising efforts – and they don’t involve any marketing at all. The marketing teams in charity organisations across the country spend lots of time researching and identifying potential market segments of new donors for their cause. Next, they start work on developing and executing marketing campaigns to persuade these people to start donating cash. For most charity organisations, the ultimate objective of all of this marketing activity is to increase the funds on hand to deliver charitable programs and make a greater positive impact for their cause. Unfortunately however, marketing can come at a high cost – and working out your exact return on your marketing investment can be tricky and time-consuming work. There is a better way to increase the amount of cash your organisation has in the bank – and it all comes down to reducing the cost of collecting donations and reducing the cost of doing business.

Fundraising tip one: Reduce your internal administration time

You may not realise that your internal administration processes have a big role to play in increasing the funds you have available to execute your organisation’s charitable programs. Our research tells us that up to 47 per cent of money donated to nonprofits and charities is spent on internal administration, staffing costs and marketing expenses – and not the charitable programs that these organisations are striving to deliver. We also know that the right financial management software can help most organisations to reduce their financial administration and reporting time by as much as 95 per cent. When these two statistics are combined, the benefit of reducing the amount of manual administration happening inside your organisation is obvious. Consider how systems and software could help your team to reduce their manual administration time – therefore leaving more cash in the kitty for your charitable programs rather than staffing and marketing costs.

Fundraising tip two: Use the modern technologies you have available

The most successful charities are experts at using modern technologies to achieve two outcomes:

1. To tell compelling stories about their organisation and its beneficiaries
2. To make it easy for people to make donations online.

These days, attracting donations from a finite pool of donors is seriously competitive business – and you need to compete on your modern donors’ terms. Before making a donation, people today want to know how their donation will make a difference to your organisation, your beneficiaries and the world. In today’s digital communications landscape, charities that regularly communicate their compelling stories with the general public via online channels are far more likely to strike a chord with their audience and in turn invoke donations – which are also preferably done quickly and easily online.

Fundraising tip three: Switch from snail mail to email

You can create new and exciting opportunities to communicate with people more often and in more compelling ways by asking for their email address when they’re making an online donation to your organisation. Communicating with your donors via email means you can decrease the cost of keeping in touch (when compared to snail mail), distribute heart-warming videos, create opportunities for online sharing via social media, quickly conduct donor surveys and more – the ultimate objective being to motivate your existing donors to spread your message and donate more money, more often.

We can help you put together an actionable plan

The next step to increasing the impact of your organisation’s fundraising efforts – without needing to spend up on expensive marketing campaigns – is to put together an actionable plan to decrease your internal administration time and implement some modern technologies to help you increase donations from your existing donors. To get started, talk to one of our friendly payments consultants today.