tothepoint : Online Fundraising Changes to Make Now

Step 1 is a no-brainer, but are you doing it?

1. CHANGE TO MAKE:

Get online if you aren't already

It's 2010, and I hope you're online. If you're with the times, you're collecting donations on your website with a well-crafted, compelling and consistently branded donation page. You are using an e-mail campaign tool, not Outlook, to communicate with your community of supporters. You have a social-media strategy and are committing the time you need to achieve your clearly articulated, measurable goals. You continually assess how all of these efforts are performing against your targets. Your online and offline outreach is seamlessly integrated.

You need to be doing all of these things. Now. Why? You need to be focused on individual gifts (because that's the source of a whopping three-quarters of all charitable giving). And in focusing on individual givers, you need to realize that more and more of those people are donating and taking action online.

2. CHANGE TO MAKE:

Rethink and restructure your donor relationships

The biggest thing that needs to change this year is how we think about our donors. We are in the midst of an enormous generational shift that has major implications for our work. The greatest generation of older, civic-minded Americans who write checks out of a sense of duty and expect little more than a tax receipt in return is passing the torch to a far more demanding series of successors.

Boomers expect a sense of impact, and younger donors expect engagement and involvement. They are anything but passive. Think of it this way: Just as in marketing we have left the broadcast era where consumers passively take in promotional messages, we have left the low-expectation donor era.

That means it's not enough to declare a need and send a thank-you. Today's supporters increasingly expect engagement that makes them feel seen, heard and involved. They are not walking wallets or ATM machines. They are partners who expect relationships with the organizations they support. They want to be talked to as individuals, thanked and updated.

This is especially true online. With most of what we do online — Facebook, Foursquare, gaming, etc. — being highly personal and extremely interactive, we have to provide a more intimate and involved experience for our supporters with our technological tools. Otherwise, we will alienate nearly everyone.

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