From Scroll to Support

Me watching people file in here.
Everybody, hi, everyone. Huge group today. Very excited about that.
Okay, we have some parts going, all right, so, good afternoon. Friendly group, yeah, yeah. Welcome to From scroll to support 10 Ways to drive more donors to your online giving page. Read More

Me watching people file in here.
Everybody, hi, everyone. Huge group today. Very excited about that.
Okay, we have some parts going, all right, so, good afternoon. Friendly group, yeah, yeah. Welcome to From scroll to support 10 Ways to drive more donors to your online giving page. Presenting for us today is Julia Campbell, named as a top thought leader and one to follow on Forbes and LinkedIn for nonprofits, and one of the 30 nonprofit it influencers to follow in 2026 Julia is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to designing social media and storytelling strategies that help nonprofits share their mission across the digital landscape, an international keynote speaker and host of the acclaimed nonprofit nation podcast. She’s written two books for nonprofits on social media and storytelling, and her online courses, webinars and talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking. So before we get started, just a few housekeeping items to cover. We will be recording the webinar. It’ll be sent to all registrants later this week. Just keep in mind that we did have a lot of registrants. So with this number of attendees, the chat is going to move pretty quickly. So you want to make sure, if you have a question that you want answered, put it into the Q and A section so that we do see it. We may not see it in the chat if you add it there. So and we’ll get to those questions at the end of the session. All right. So, Julia, you are all set.
Great. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here with you today. We have a huge, huge, huge group, and I love seeing all that action in the chat. So the thing is, if you do have a question, please put it in the Q and A. The Chat moves really, really fast, and I’m going to be focused on presenting and giving you all this great information. So we want to make sure that we do get your questions answered. But let’s just get started. So you know, my bio was read. I’m not going to rehash my bio. I am going to say that the two things I am most proudest of in my professional career, writing books. I’ve written storytelling for the digital age. I also wrote a book, Social Media in 90 days. Create a social media strategy in 90 days. And I have a podcast that goes live every Wednesday, nonprofit nation. Some of you might have listened to it. It’s where I interview nonprofit leaders, consultants, techno technology entrepreneurs, innovators. Really runs the gamut, but just really cool people, and I explore what they’re doing, and I try to get to actionable items for nonprofits that they can use in their everyday work. I created a companion worksheet for this webinar, and I’m using something called Text to full. I highly recommend text to full. So if you want the companion worksheet, I will probably put this up at the end as well. Take a screenshot of this. Just text the word giving, 233777, and then you’ll be prompted to enter your email. Enter your best email that’s not going to go to spam, and it’s going to get sent straight to your inbox. So really excited about the companion worksheet, and hope you’re going to get that also. You’ll get the recording, you’ll get the slides, you’ll get all of these things. Okay, on to our first question that I have for you. You want to join@sly.com and enter this particular code or get the QR code from your phone. You can do it on your desktop. You can do it on your phone. You can do it really anywhere that you want, that you that you can access the internet. So the question is, what’s the biggest challenge in getting donors to your online giving page? Not necessarily like getting them to give, but getting them to your online giving page, finding it buried on the website, promotion, opening the. Email older audiences, it’s hidden, finding it finding it easily. Oh my gosh, yeah, they have to be able to find it easily. Older people, see, I do think that older people don’t necessarily not like technology. I’m thinking of my mother in particular, who is 78 years old and pays all her bills online, loves YouTube, loves Instagram, loves her iPad. So I just I feel like we might not have given them an opportunity to participate online, finding it easily. Yes, social media algorithms slow down posts with links, so it’s easy to see that we’re all kind of in the same boat. I’m hearing the same thing over and over again. Donors prefer to mail a check. I mean, that’s great, too. I would never say, get rid of that. I would never say, get rid of direct mail. Create a hook. Spark interest. These are so interesting, competing with so many emails and going in their junk mail. Wow, that’s really cool. Oh, oh, please share the keyword again. The keyword is giving and you just text it to three, three, Wow. You guys are really cool, participating. 33777, the economy. Um, yeah. I mean, we can’t fight the economy, right? So all we can do is
control things that we can control. There’s a lot that we can’t control in this world, gas prices $4.50 I’m in Massachusetts, but there is a lot that we can control. So what we need to focus on, and what I want to talk about in this webinar are things that are in our control. So I want to start with the real problem. Oh, texting doesn’t work from Canada, that is a problem. If you just want to email me, I’ll put my email in at the end. I’m happy to send it to you. If you’re international. The real problem is that I don’t think you have an online giving page problem. You might, but I really believe that most nonprofits have a visibility and a pathway problem, and your supporters are not just like landing on your giving page out of nowhere, they’re taking a journey, and if you’re not guiding that journey intentionally, you’re losing donors along the way. So I promise you 10 Ways to drive donors to your online giving page. Some of that going to be incredibly tactical. The first one, though, is you’ve got to start with one clear goal. I see this all the time. I do social media audits. I do digital marketing and fundraising audits for my clients, and very often their appeals are mixed with awareness and engagement and all sorts of different things. But we need to have one clear goal per campaign. If everything is important, nothing is clear. And Brene Brown says clear is kind, as we know, so clear is kind, unclear is unkind. And if everything is important, nothing is clear. And if donors don’t know exactly what to do, this is not to say every post that you post has to be fundraising. A lot of it should be awareness, a lot of it should be engagement. But when you’re driving that donation, you’re asking for a donation. You’re not saying, learn more. You’re not saying, Get involved. You are driving a donation. Now look at what WBUR does to clearly, clearly tell their donors, like, this is what the problem is. This is what we’re solving. This is a statement that we all can get behind. Maybe you can’t get behind this, and that’s fine. I support WBUR, so they’re talking to me, defend what you value, keep your community informed and connected with journalism you trust from WBUR. Donate now and then. They put it on Facebook. They put it on Instagram. It’s this constant message of people like us do things like this. You know, are you with us? Great, and if you’re not with us, fine, like maybe you’ll be with us later. Maybe this is not for you, but the people that it’s going to attract, they’re clearly enticed by this message, because they believe in what’s going on. And it says, donate. Now, donate. Now, make a donation.
Now. Now Amira Incorporated. They they fight the commercial sex trade. I mean, talk about something that is incredibly difficult to talk about, also incredibly difficult to gather stories around and testimonials, and incredibly difficult to get support for, because people think it doesn’t happen in their backyard, or they think it’s something that’s just on TV, but they do a very, very good job with a specific ask. You know you can help us meet our goals Special thanks to a matching gift. If you do have a matching gift for your online fundraising campaign that is going to help drive donors. It’s just been statistically shown that donors are enticed by the matching gift, the main point with a matching gift and with a story, and with public media under threat, and all of those things. Why this and why now that is where a lot of us fail to entice our donors, with our emails, with our social media posts, because we can’t convey why this is important right now. And what would happen if we closed our doors tomorrow? What would be lost? What would society lose? What is the problem that we’re solving? And we really need to create that compelling case for support. What I see so often in email and social media, it’s like everything is great. Here’s a success story. Donate now. Okay. Well, if everything is great, then, why am I making a donation? We still have to say this is a success story, but we could do so much more. We could do so much more with your support. Email still drives the most donations. Email has the highest return on investment in terms of digital fundraising for nonprofits, I recommend at least three dedicated emails per campaign, two or three reminder emails. Now you’re going to segment your list, right? You’re not going to send me five reminder emails if I’ve already made a donation. One clear call to action button. And you know, instead of donate, now try some other language. You know, maybe give $25 to feed a family. Just see what. See what works. Streamlined fundraising emails. This is going to drive a lot of donations to your donate page, if you can tell a story, if you can give a quote, If you can ask a question. Want to bring joy to more kids in need. Give Now, I think bringing people in like this is a movement. This is a part of a group of people that are doing really, really amazing things, telling a story like this. My name is Eliana, telling a story about Miguelito. This is St Jude’s Research Hospital. There’s nothing to distract me in this email you might have you know your quarterly report and your events email, and your you know, volunteer newsletter, all of those things, but when you’re sending a fundraising email, when you’re sending people to your donate page, it needs to be streamlined. You have to strip out all of the potential distractions, like follow us on Facebook, read our blog, watch our video, and be very, very streamlined in what you’re doing. This is plumber youth promise, a very small organization where I live. It’s in Salem, Massachusetts. They are they write the best emails. This one is about becoming a monthly donor.
Promise circle membership $25 a month, and it creates a really compelling case for support. Joining plumber promise circle for just $25 a month would help this young man see his brother four times a year now, they never share faces names. They change all the names. Of course, they deal with minors. They deal with people that are navigating the foster care system, but, and they’ve really, really small team, but they do such a great job. They really do such a fantastic job in terms of creating that compelling case. So that’s how you’re going to drive people with your email. Okay, number three, social media to drive donations. 32% of donors who give online report that social media is the channel that most inspires them to give. And. Um, you know, that’s how many nonprofits use platforms. I don’t think that’s very important. I think you need to be figuring out which platforms work best for you based on your audience, your goals and your capacity. A lot of people participate in peer to peer campaigns. We’ll talk a little bit about that, and we’ll talk about ads. 53% of nonprofits purchase ad space on social media platforms. So when you’re using Facebook and Instagram, specifically reels and short videos like literally holding your phone to your face and saying, telling a story, telling an anecdote, sharing a statistic, and saying, We really need your support today. Why this? Why now? Why this? Why now, that’s the drum beat I am. That’s the beat. I’m drumming the drum beat. Why this? Why now? Why this? Why now? Carousel posts, we’ve all seen those online that is like one graphic, maybe one question. It tells a story across slides. You can pin a post during a campaign, driving traffic, especially on Instagram. Link in bio. You can do several links on Instagram now you know link in bio to donate. You can do text to donate. There’s a lot of different ways that you can drive people to your donation page. You can use stories on Facebook and Instagram with the link sticker. So if I see your story on Facebook or Instagram, I can just click on that link sticker and go right to your donation page, your online giving page. So some campaigns, very simple. I like to share, you know, bigger organizations that I like to share smaller organizations as well. This post by Feeding America, I thought was just pretty much perfect. It has a story in the photo as well. I do worry about food. Sometimes I want my family to have food in their tummies. When you skip a meal, your stomach starts hurting. Iker nine years old, and then it has that statistic with one in seven kids struggling with hunger. Chances are that you know a child who’s missing meals, you can help, and then you can post the link to your donation page. Capan Animal Aid, they just created the ask in a graphic give hope to homeless animals this holiday season. And that goes right to their donation page. This is how you could sort of have this put the sticker in those stories. This is Rosie’s Place. So you, when you go to your story, you’re creating a story on Instagram or on Facebook. You know you’re going into you’re just clicking on all the other features, things that you can add. And there is a donation sticker. You do have to be signed up. Oh, no, you don’t have to actually do this. Okay, forget, forget what I said.
You can get donations through the donate button, but you can post a link. You don’t have to have meta charitable giving tools to do this. You can post a link to your online giving page in every single one of your stories, so that people can click out and go to your donation page and make a donation. The more specific that you can be. I mean, these are very specific items. This is created on the DonorPerfect platform, school supply, kits, art supplies. A lot of us can’t sort of quantify our organization like this, but the reality is, it’s just a best practice. Donors love this. Donors love this. If you can do this, do this. If you can’t do it, don’t worry about it. You can still make a compelling case to give but people do love specificity. Also don’t sleep on LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn members are 56% more likely to donate to nonprofits than the average internet user, so why not post your fundraising campaign on LinkedIn and kind of see what happens, right? And we’ll talk about tracking later. But why not post on LinkedIn? Why not use any of the platforms that are at your disposal? Of course, it depends on your capacity. It depends on your ability to maintain these things, but fundraising works well on LinkedIn, okay, we’re only at number four. I’m going to take a sip paid ads. This is what I always recommend if you’re going to run ads to your donate page on Facebook, start with five to $20 a day. Run two simple campaigns, traffic campaign that is just getting traffic to your donation page, and then retargeting campaign, those are people that have engaged with you on your website. Those are your highly engaged fans on Facebook and Instagram. Those are your people that are watching your videos, commenting, sharing, liking. You can also target website visitors, people that have visited your website. If you have the pixel set up on your website, you can target your email list. You’ll have to upload it, whether or not you’re comfortable doing that with meta. That’s up to you. And you can target your most engaged social followers. I do recommend using paid ads during a really big campaign, only because you can actually really track what happens. We spent $100 and you can see on the back end of your ads manager, what you actually brought in? So you can say we spent $100 we raised $500 or we spent $100 and we only raised $20 it’s instant. You get that instant data. Now these are great examples of calls to action. Of course, you do not have to use the donate button. This is not a webinar about using the donate button, about using meta charitable giving tools, but I love the calls to action help hungry kids avoid the summer slide. Summer is the hungriest time of the year for 13 million children in America. It’s why this. Why now it is why this. Why now, summer is the hungriest time of the year for 13 million children in America, and then the greater Boston Food Bank, where I live, feed a family for the holidays, your $20 gift provides a complete holiday meal for a family of five. No one should go hungry. I love that because I firmly believe that I actually want to put that on a shirt. No one should go hungry. I think that’s such a powerful statement. So these are very, very good. Why this? Why now kind of calls to action. The images, of course, are going to help stop the scroll. They’re going to grab attention. And then you could just put your link in, rather than the donate button, all right, number five using SMS or text if you have it. So, text, oh man, high conversion. High conversion from text messages. But you have to use it sparingly, right urgency moments. Last day of the campaign, if you get a matching gift, if your goal is almost reached, you know, we’re $2,000 away from our goal. Can you help? So here’s a couple of different examples.
Amira Incorporated, you know, share this on Giving Tuesday about a matching gift. They do. They really, very rarely text message me. I’m a monthly donor to them, but they rarely text message me. But it’s usually like, Oh, we’re almost at our goal, or that we gotta match a gift, or something like that. The American Heart Association, it’s giving Tuesday. You know, do you want to show your support? Every act of giving counts. Will you join us today? So if you have text messaging, it’s a great way to drive people to your donation page. Another thing I will say, Don’t sleep on direct mail. Don’t sleep on direct mail. We you know, this is a online giving page webinar, but it’s been found that direct mail is a growing source for online gifts, which I think is so interesting. Arlene says, What software do you recommend for texting? I use text, text to full. That’s what I use. But I don’t actually text people. I usually you can text people with text to full, and I love it, but I usually just use it for collecting, you know, email addresses. So I’m kind of shy to use it for texting, but there’s so much software out there, and the key is just making sure you use it when you need it more than okay, okay, it says more than times as many donors say they gave online because of being prompted by a letter than by an email. So three times as many donors say they were prompted to give an online gift in response to a direct mail appeal, compared. To when they received an email appeal. So that is pretty cool, because I’m sure all of us do direct mail, So review your appeals. Clearly state the link for donors to make a gift online. Make it very easy to remember. You know your nonprofit.com backslash donate, and make sure that the URL goes directly to the form where they can put in their credit card information. So don’t sleep on direct mail, it is a great way to drive people to your online giving page as well.
Now number seven. I mean, we need to do this before we even drive people to our giving page. So this should probably be number one, but I put it at number seven. But if your website is not optimized for conversions, you’re going to lose donors. So add the donate button in to your top navigation. Use a pop up or a banner during your biggest campaigns, make sure the donation page loads in under three seconds. Make sure it’s has a mobile first design that people can use, and then make sure it has suggested giving amounts. These are best practices for optimizing your website. Now this is a great example from DonorPerfect. Make a difference. Your monthly gift helps kids achieve great futures. Give. Now you can see the donate button is right up there in the navigation, and I love this little banner. We’re counting on your support. Finish my $145 donation. No thanks. So having those little pop ups, having that AI kind of working in the background of your website, that is going to increase conversions. Think about like I was just on, I was just shopping for something at Nordstrom, right online, and I got distracted, or something happened, and I left my cart, and they emailed me. They’re like, Hey, did you forget something? Here’s your cart. And I was like, Yes, I actually did. And thank you for reminding me. So we can use these we can use this technology just as you know, our donors are consumers. At the end of the day, donors consumers. Donors are people. Donors are consumers. They’re not this in this bucket of just donors. And they see this technology every day in their life of shopping, in their life of paying bills and their life of just existing. So we can use this technology. This is an example of a donation page. When you click donate, you go right to the credit card form or the page where you’re going to say what your donation is. I love that hope is a four letter word, give to a cause that spreads hope and love to all the nations. This is what you know you you get. We’re $2,000 towards our $20,000 goal. And then, if you notice, there’s a lot of different ways to pay. So what I really like about DonorPerfect in particular, but what I like about a lot of the tech out there is the ability to donate via multiple ways, right? Google, pay, PayPal, Apple, pay. You can even have people donate their DAFs, you know their donor advised funds. So there’s a you have to give people a lot of different options in the way that they want to pay. Also make sure you have that monthly giving option. It doesn’t necessarily have to be checked off. And then I love upgrade your impact. So if people make a donation on your online giving page, and it’s just a one time donation, you can automatically go to another screen that says, upgrade your impact. Increase your impact as much as 12 times. Right? If I’m giving $200 maybe if I give $20 a month, it’s going to be upgraded, but also it might be a lesser lift on me. And then when people are clicking away, this is kind of the technology you can use. Are you sure you want to leave without making a difference? Finish my donation. Close. This works to convert people. It is backed by data. DonorPerfect has studied this. It’s worked, and it’s just kind of a best practice. So you don’t have to use this. But these are options available to you. I want you to repeat the ask. Ask more than feels comfortable. Okay, we are not sending one email. We are not posting on Facebook two times. Facebook’s organic reach in 2012 was 16% in 2025 it was one to 2% that means one to 2% of your Facebook fans and followers see what you post or Instagram, yeah, drop 12% LinkedIn saw 34% slide. Typical nonprofit email open rates 25% and 29% that means you’re leaving 70% of people like off the table,
and this is hootsuite.com that gave these statistics. So I want you to repeat the ask more than feels comfortable. You need to post more you need to send more emails in order to get more donations. Now, we’re always very uncomfortable with this, right? We think we’re bothering people. We think we’re harassing people. Well, then we’re in the wrong line of work, like, if you’re a fundraiser and you think that you’re constantly harassing people, that is just a bad mindset to be in. You have to think about fundraising as an invitation. It’s an invitation to to someone to a party where they feel like they can be making a difference, right? So, you know, if you’re constantly, I don’t think any of us are doing this, but if you’re sending out spam, and if you’re just buying email lists and you’re just randomly bombarding complete strangers with your message, that’s different. But if you’re talking to your donors in a way they want to be talked to, and if you’re talking to your email list and giving them stories and giving them impact statements and giving them testimonials, then they’re going to invite your communication so Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors, he wrote a book called permission marketing. He wrote it back in like the 90s, before social media, and it’s all about how we want we only want to talk to people that want to be talked to, right? We do not care about unsubscribes. We bless and release them. It’s just not for them. We don’t want to talk to people that that don’t want to receive our message. We want to build up the list of people that do want to receive our message and that are excited to get our message, and that are interested in what we’re doing, and it’s a really hard mindset shift to move from. So, you know, with this, how often should you post on social media? 2026 I generally don’t like these kind of like one size fits all things, but this question I get all the time, I always refer to Hootsuite. They do fabulous reporting, tons of research, and they focus on the nonprofit sector a lot. But the point is, post more, email more. I think emailing fewer things more frequently is so much more impactful than sending one email a quarter with all of your stuff. If I delete that email, then I will not have heard from you for six months by the next time the email comes. Number nine, use people, not just platforms, right? So your reach is going to expand through humans and not algorithms. This is the best way to get reach for your online fundraising campaign and drive more people to your online giving page, board members, staff members, volunteers, donors, but you have to give them the information to do so, working with you know, quote, unquote influencers, people that are influencers in your community, people that have access to the audience that You want, they might only have a couple of 1000 1000 followers. I find that the influencers on Instagram that have a smaller following, sorry, they’re following tends to be more engaged. If you’ve got a Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift are like people with millions and millions of followers on Instagram, you’ll look at the comments and just be like, Oh, everyone’s just trying to get everyone else to follow their page. Or it’s a lot of spam comments, a bot comments. But people that have a smaller following tend their following tends to be. Very, very engaged. So thinking about who you could work with in your community. Could you do a collaborative post, collaborative posts on Instagram, work really well. Could you do that with a business that sponsors you, or a foundation that sponsors you, or a local organization that you really partner with and you really trust. Collaborative posts will go out to your audience and their audience. It’s going to help you build your audience. It’s going to help you expand your reach to new people. And if you’re thinking about fundraising,
this is your template. So you’re going to take this and this is going to be your template when you say to board members, well, it’s Homelessness Awareness Month post, and you know, post about our campaign, they don’t know what that means. Staff members don’t know what that means. No one knows what that means. So you’re going to say, hi everyone. Here’s a template that is really effective that you could use and make your own. We would love for you to post about our campaign. Here is the headline. Here is the first paragraph about our organization. Exactly the why this why? Now and then you know how much we’re raising. Why give to us? We have a great track record. Here are four data points. And then the last paragraph is personal to the person. So they could say, okay, you know, I’ve been on the board for five years, and something I’ve really seen that has really struck me and moved me is, you know, XYZ, or here’s my personal testimonial, and then they can link out to their fundraising page. So they can create their own fundraising page, or they can link to your online giving page, but you have to give them a template, and you have to give them examples. Otherwise, if you just say, share about our Giving Tuesday campaign, no one is going to know what you’re talking about or what you mean, and they might just share it, and that’s not as effective as if they make it their own and create their posts their own way. So here are some examples from DonorPerfect Pause and clause Samantha’s fundraiser is $200 towards the 500 Amanda’s fundraiser. So if you do want to set up these individual fundraisers, the software is there. Of course, you can always send people to your online giving page, but it does tend to be more effective when individuals set their own goals and they tell their own story. And I was just looking at my giving from last year, I would say 50% was to peer to peer campaigns. So my friend Bonnie was running a marathon for the National brain tumor association because her father died of a brain tumor, and she told this whole story she was raising money. My friend Tim was raising money for an arts organization that really helped his girls. Those stories always get me. The personal stories get me. But if Tim had just sent me a link and said, donate to the local arts organization, it would not have been nearly as compelling. So we do need to give people the tools to be raising the money to drive people to our page. Track what actually matters. This is the least sexy thing, but is probably the most impactful thing. What’s actually working? Do we know? Do you know what drives people to your online donation page? Because you can look it up. There’s data. I mean, if it’s a digital property, there is data as to where they’re coming from and did they click on an email? Did they click on social media? So you can see what actually drives traffic to your online giving page, link clicks, donation page visits, conversion rates, referral traffic. I’m going to talk about UTM links. So this is just a regular URL with extra tags added so you can track exactly where your traffic is coming from. So an example of a UTM link, your normal link would be your nonprofit.org/donate, but a UTM link would say
it came from Facebook. It came from social media. It came to our spring appeal that is very, very specific, and the best part of it is just so trackable. It’s so easy to create. You can. Create them in Google’s campaign URL builder. So the best UTM links, where it came from, the type of traffic and the campaign name. Now you can just track in the back end on Google Analytics, the social referrals to your website. But UTMs kind of step up the game a little bit. This is really going to help you figure out where to place your dollars, where to place your time, where to place your limited resources. You can use Google’s campaign URL builder, and you fill it all in, and it generates the link instantly. So it’s, you know, it’s so easy to do. These tools are so available to us, and they’re all free, and that’s what’s amazing. So when you’re looking at the reports and Google Analytics reports, acquisition, traffic, acquisition, you will see which platform drove traffic? Did Facebook drive traffic? Which campaign worked best, what actually led to someone make a donation? This is so important because, say, you have a campaign, you’re spending money on ads, you’re putting it on social, you’re sending emails. You’re doing all the things with your board members. You’re doing all the things, but maybe there’s something wrong on your website, or maybe there’s something wrong on your online giving page. So if you send 5000 people to the online giving page, ready to make a donation, right? They’re ready. They’re primed. They came. They they got the Donate link, they got the compelling case statement. But five people donated, that’s a red flag. So then you have to look at what happened in between them, clicking on the link to the online giving page, and when they got there, right, your online giving page needs to be your credit card form. It can’t be 50,000 stories and five videos and 20,000 ways to get involved. When I click on an email and it says, donate. I I’m probably on my phone, and I needed to go to a credit card form or G, you know, I’ll use Apple, pay, Apple, pay, whatever. And I just needed to be like immediate, I don’t want to wade through your entire website, so you can really get into the weeds here and look at, where are people landing What are what’s tripping people up? Where are people getting stuck? And you can answer, did email or social drive more donors? Which platforms are worth your time, right? And where should you invest as next time? These are all questions that you can answer when you are doing this kind of reporting. All right, I have another slide do for you. What is one action item you are doing? I meant to say going, sorry for the typo. What is one action item you are going to take this week to improve traffic and drive donations to your online giving page, I would love to hear from you. Oh yes, the link sounds so social media. Call social media follows your donate, look at our website. Yeah, optimize our website. Share stories, clear, donate now. Page, research, UTM, sending more requests. Social media, forgive big 2026 use
UTM links going to look into Google Analytics. Review the donation page. I love this post, an email more. Yeah, you gotta do it. Distill our goal to something actionable. I love to see that. Tell my boss they need to use more social media platforms. They might need not to use more, but they might need to use the ones they are using more strategically, right? So less is not I mean more is not always more. In in social media land, create more clear donation emails. Use Lincoln for campaign three to four emails for upcoming campaign instead of two. Yay. Thank you for that. Stats. Love it. Try out paid ads. Oh my gosh. Oops. Amazing. Okay, so. So this is fantastic. I love seeing what everyone’s doing. I love seeing the action items that they’re going to take. And I just love hopefully making this actionable for all of you. So if you do want the companion, I didn’t put it on this slide, I will put it in the chat again for the companion worksheet. So I’m going to get to questions companion make sure you’re putting them in the Q and A email. I’ll give you my email if you are international and you can’t text me, okay, so if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I would love to connect with you. That’s my website where I have my blog and then my podcast. You know, I always love to subscribe and a follow and a good comment. So happy to do that. All right, let’s get to questions. We have a lot of questions. I love seeing that. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, I don’t really see any questions. Oh, okay. Our marketing manager says we can’t have links on social media posts. How do I convince them otherwise? Well, they’re right. This is the problem. Okay, so we were sold a bill of goods when Facebook pages came out. Remember, in I don’t even know what year, 2015, that could be late. Oh, Facebook pages, they’re going to replace websites, they’re going to replace email, they’re going to replace everything. And then what happened was Facebook realized, oh, and all the social media platforms, maybe with the exception of x, but all the social media platforms realized, we don’t want people clicking away. We don’t want people clicking away from our site. We want to keep them on the site. So yes, posts with links are never going to do as well as posts without links. But what can we do? So we have to make our posts with links very compelling. That’s why we have to do video. We have to have great visuals. We have to have a very compelling call to action. We have to try extra hard when we’re posting a link to get it through that algorithm. Now I have been reading that potentially you could put the link in the comment, the first comment,
I don’t think that. I think the science is still out on that whether or not that works, but what we have to remember, what I really want to impart to all of you is that these platforms, like any external platform that you’re using, that you’re not paying for, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever they have. They do not have your best interest at heart. Okay, they want to keep people on the platform. They don’t want to send people to your donate page. In fact, this is why Mark Zuckerberg created the donate button, and he created meta, meta charitable giving tools, because with the Ice Bucket Challenge. If we all remember that, with the Ice Bucket Challenge, people were doing the Ice Bucket Challenge, and then they were going to the ALS website to donate. And he didn’t like that. He was like, No, I want that data. Um, I want to keep people on my site. So then he created charitable giving tools. They just don’t have our best interests at heart. That’s why you have to pay or you have to, like, invest in something like a DonorPerfect, something like a constant contact or a MailChimp. But social media, it’s the Wild West, so I would say, as long as, like, 80 90% of what you’re doing doesn’t have a link, then you’re probably fine, but your fundraising obviously will have to have a link on it. That’s a good question, though. When everyone okay, when everyone is putting similar calls to action, donors become desensitized. So there’s a myth. I don’t believe in donor fatigue. I believe there are billions and billions of dollars out there. I think that donors are fatigued with bad messaging, and they’re fatigued with manipulation. Yeah, so the Sarah McLachlan AD, the ASPCA, you know, arms of the angels. I love Sarah McLachlan, by the way, and I love the ASPCA, but the abused animals in cages, you know, people are turning it turning off from that, the old Suzanne summers ads with the kids in Africa, with the flies all around we’re not doing that anymore. We’re not manipulating people. Donors are desensitized to that, but I don’t think donors are desensitized to the problems of the world, like they know what the problems of the world. They have causes that are close to their heart. You know? They have their ethics, they have their values. So I think it’s on us to give them the information, to be very truthful and to shed light on what we’re doing through authentic storytelling, through statistics, really, really inviting them in and saying, Hey, this is a real problem, and this is what we’re doing to solve it. I read just somewhere the other day that 50% of school children in Mississippi can’t read. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s stuck with me. That statistic was like mind blowing to me, and I never even thought about that. So the more that we can tell people, Hey, these are real problems. This is what’s going on, and really wake people up. I don’t think people are desensitized, though. Okay, Colleen says to clarify the messaging for donations, state the problem. State how we solve it. Connect with donor values, request, donation. Um, I think let’s see. I don’t know if you need to say how you solve it necessarily. It’s sort of like food insecurity affects one in seven children. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m making that up. I’m just gonna take the Mississippi statistic. 50% of school children in Mississippi can’t read. Our program provides free literacy services to all school children, regardless of need. We would love your support and join us in the movement to get all kids reading so framing it around a movement getting people together, that tends to work really, really well, but I would experiment with a lot of different like storytelling and statistics, I think there’s ways to experiment with it. Okay, I see a lot of questions about the texting, hoping it’s working for people.
Anonymous attendee says, How do we get the email addresses? How do you get people’s email addresses? Well, you have to ask them. You could send a direct mail appeal asking them. You could put a sign up box on your website. You could put a sign up link on your social media posts. There’s a lot of ways to get emails, but you know, there’s not like a perfect way to do it, but it needs to be concerted and constant, and it also needs to be permission based, making sure you’re getting emails from people that want to hear from you. When you send a fundraising email and a donor clicks the call to action, do you take them to a page that lists all the ways to give or an online donation form, donation form, donation form, donation form, we have the, you know, get involved all of that. Send them to the online donation form. Maybe at the very, very bottom, have a link that’s like, don’t see the way you want to give here, click here, but no. Fewer clicks, fewer steps, increase conversions. Okay. Colleen says regarding using link in Facebook stories, if you’re putting together your real or post them in a business suite, should you make your story separately so you can include the link. Or should you use the shared a story toggle when you’re about to share your post? I think you could do both. You could share your posts with the link. You could create a story. I think the best way to do it, though, is to create a separate story with the link in it that’s going to get you the most reach. All right, how do we effectively engage our several 1000 social media followers when they include both potential clients and donors? That’s a really good question. I think that we under. Estimate, like how much clients and donors have in common they want to solve a problem. They’re interested in what you’re doing. They’re interested in your mission. So there’s never going to be one post that’s going to perfectly speak to every single audience that you have. Right? I used to work in domestic violence, and when we first did our Facebook page, we balanced it between like impact stories and like, Hey, here’s five ways that you can talk to a friend that you think is an abusive relationship. Donors love that. Donors love to see that. So don’t think if you’re creating content that’s for clients, or if you’re creating content to get people to call a hotline, or if you’re creating content to get people to go to your food bank, donors like to see that because they like to see the work in action. So I don’t think those people are mutually exclusive at all. All right, should you use donate stickers on all Instagram posts, including ones for awareness campaigns, no, if it’s an awareness campaign, no, if it’s a fundraising campaign, yes. This might be a question for DonorPerfect. What form type from DonorPerfect is highlighted on the slide that lists the specific dollar amounts with images. That is a DonorPerfect question, so I will highlight that and send it to them. But Liv I encourage you to just email them directly about that information, because I don’t, I don’t know the specific form type. Okay, we have three minutes left. Um, okay. Alex Garvey, you shared the example of using a call to action help this young man see his brother four times a year. This is a big promise, and we cannot promise our donors that their specific donation will go to helping a young man see his brother. For example, how do you navigate this? Well, they say, help. You know, help this young man like it’s not we guarantee this young man is going to see his brother four times a year. It’s help this young man see his brother four times a year. It could be if you want to change it up, like help this young man and others like him connect with their siblings. If you want to be more broad about it, you could do that if you don’t want to be as specific. But yeah, I think that’s a big promise, they always fulfill it. I mean, this organization is incredible, but help this young man and others like him connect with his family,
then that’s much more broad. In regards to Facebook ads. Can you only see what you made via donations if you have the pixel on the website. Um, you do need the pixel on the website if you’re running Facebook ads? I mean, I don’t think so. Actually, I think you create a Facebook ad and just target a random group via Facebook. I don’t think you need the pixel. The pixel helps because it helps Facebook understand the kinds of people that are going to your website and going to your donate page. So it just helps them understand people that might be interested in what you are doing. But that’s it’s just giving them more information that could help you and help you more specifically, do what you’re doing. Okay, it is 259 I just want to make sure that we have all the housekeeping wrapped up. These are fantastic questions, amazing interaction. And yeah, I’d love to connect with you all on LinkedIn, on email, let me know what you’re working on and what you’re struggling with.
Yes, I do want to point out that I know that there were a few questions people were asking about the forms, and I want to say that there were a few screenshots of one of our other products called give cloud that we do own. And if you have any questions, you can either reach out to me or your account manager, and I think you did have a screenshot or two of our drag and drop. Yeah. So they are. A lot of them were pointing out, hey, that’s gift cloud. Great. So they, and they, a lot of them, were answering that question. I think it was asked in more than one place, but Okay, all right. Well, Julia, thank you so much for spending time with us today. This was great. And thank all of you. Carving out time to attend the webinar. We know how busy you are and just taking an hour, it can seem like a lot sometimes, so we do appreciate you joining us. We hope you’re walking away with a few practical ideas to better guide your supporters from engagement to giving. It sounded like people were following along in the chat and just kind of resonating with everything that you were saying, and especially with all the questions you know that they were engaged when all of those questions were coming in, they want to do this better.
So true. You’ve got this, guys, you’ve got this.
Yep, you do. You do, all right. Well, thank you so much again for attending. We hope to see you in some future webinars and our conference coming up in June. Yes, all right, thanks so much. Thanks, Julia, bye. You.