Top Tips for Fundraising: Social Change Anytime Everywhere
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jan 28, 2014 07:01 AM CST

This article was written by guest author Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

In the first article in this series, I shared three tips for successful multichannel advocacy campaigns. To continue sharing from our recent book, Social Change Anytime Everywhere: How to Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and Engage Your Community, today I'm focusing on tips you can use to support your next fundraising effort.

1. Think of your ask as a series
You have undoubtedly read many books and blog posts telling you that you need to boil your fundraising campaign “ask” down to one very clear and direct call to action. While you do need a a good ask (think “donate $20 to provide basic school supplies for this 2nd grade class” and not “donate $20 to this school”) you should think about how you make the ask as a multipart series.

When you launch your campaign, you have many stories, data, and information to share with your supporters. Instead of overwhelming the donor with everything at once, break down all of the content you have that supports your ask and create a series. An example series could be: a message that introduces supporters to the issue and then makes the initial ask; next, a message that shares more information and stories about those being served (and the ask again!); and then one to provide an update on how the campaign is doing and the support that is still necessary.

2. Segment!
Whether you have 10 or 10,000 people on your email list, it is inevitable that they aren’t all interested in the same aspects of your work, respond to the same kind of content, or even engage online in the same way or frequency. You should provide clear communication preferences to your subscribers so they can choose the kinds of messages they are most interested in, and you can avoid sending them messages that will prompt them to leave your list. Beyond that, even within a specific campaign, you need to segment!

Before you launch your campaign, as you start to plan out the various emails and messages in your series, you should also identify segments to include on a message-by-message level. Your first message may go to one big group, but the follow up message should, for example, be segmented so those who did not open or donate yet receive a different message than those who already took action. Segmenting like this helps you better communicate with your supporters –- you can thank those who already donated and ask them to share the campaign with their friends and family while providing a different angle on the issue and another ask to those who did not yet take action.

3. A/B testing
You’ve got a series of messages planned, and you're segmenting your list to send appropriate messages to the right people. But are they the best messages they can be? That’s where A/B testing comes in! A/B testing can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be, and is something you can start doing today.

Here’s how simply it can work: If you have a message going to 1,000 people, for example, pull 100 of them out and send a message to the first half with one version of your subject line and then a different subject line to the other 50. Give it an hour and see which email had more opens and clickthroughts. Send the other 900 people that message!

Do you have any fundraising tips to add? Share them in the comment section!