Online donations have become crucial over the last few years. People don't carry cash or checks anymore, and they expect you to have quick and easy online giving tools at your location or fundraising events. But how do you ensure more online donations in 2024? We have five essential tips and nine proven steps to help your organization get more online donations this year and beyond!
Your organization may have already gotten comfortable accepting donations online. But are you taking all the essential measures to boost your online donations?
The situation has shifted – all generations have now become used to virtual or hybrid events. They’re also more confident about online payment methods like card payments, bank transfers, digital wallets, and more. Now, it’s your responsibility to offer them all these ways to easily increase your online donations!
This article will discuss the pro tips to collect donations online and the nine essential steps to raise more.
Before you can boost online donations, you need a system set up to make the process easier. Here are four key steps to keep in mind as you look into raising more donations online.
First things first – setting yourself up for success means choosing the right fundraising platform for your organization. You’ll want to choose one with a solid donation form, easy-to-build donation pages, and the tools you need to scale your fundraising.
Donorbox has all of that, plus resources and support that has helped more than 80,000 raise a collective $2 billion – and counting. Plus, you can sign up for free with no contracts or monthly fees involved! You can then create unlimited fundraising campaigns including donation pages and forms. These forms are embeddable on your website – you can even add them as popups to your website or host them on Donorbox!
Moreover, giving through Donorbox is completely donor friendly. They can use credit or debit cards and bank transfers, as well as digital wallets like Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay to complete their donation. Plus, our Pro and Premium users can enable crypto and stock giving to bring in even more!
Donorbox UltraSwift™ Pay ensures that donors don’t have to enter their information during giving, leading to a 4x faster checkout process. And it’s easy for donors to repeat their gifts in just a couple clicks with QuickDonate™.
Accepting donations online is just the beginning. Your online donation tool must include a donor and donation management system. This is essential for strengthening relationships with donors, tracking the success of your campaigns, and raising more funds.
Donorbox’s donor management system securely collects and stores your donor and donation data in your Donorbox account. You can access them easily, add offline donors/donations, update any details, segment data, create and pull donor reports, and more. Plus, having access to all of your donor data makes segmenting your donors for targeted outreach easy and effective.
In addition to storing your donor data and letting you manage it, Donorbox also seamlessly integrates with leading CRM tools like Salesforce, Blackbaud Re NXT, HubSpot, and 2000+ other apps via Zapier. These integrations ensure that you face absolutely no limitations when it comes to utilizing the data for significant tasks.
A nonprofit fundraiser’s time is limited, and they must spend it efficiently. Online donation tools that automate donation and tax receipts are a good use of money for an organization.
Your donors should automatically and instantly receive their donation receipts right after they’ve given. By sending these receipts, you’ll also be helping them easily file their donation tax forms.
On Donorbox, you can customize your donation receipts for each fundraising campaign. Donorbox also lets you test your receipt emails to help the customization process. Here’s how simple this process is –
Send Automated Donation Receipts!
You can also easily customize your year-end tax receipts on Donorbox. These receipts come attached with a PDF file that includes the total giving of the donor. After customizing, you can send these receipts to selected or all donors through the click of a button. Read this step-by-step guide to learn more.
After choosing an online donation platform and having all tools in place, it is vital to promote the options to donate online to your donors.
Your online fundraising platform should let you accept online donations in more ways than one. For example, with Donorbox, you can use crowdfunding, peer-to-peer fundraising, text-to-give, recurring donations, event ticketing, and more to boost online donations.
Use email marketing, social media, fundraising calls, and more to promote your online campaigns to supporters. Be sure to educate them on any new initiaives and include inspiring stories of impact – which will both encourage more donations!
After choosing an online donation system that provides ways to collect donations, store donor and donation information, and create different campaigns online, it is time to start accepting online donations. Here are the 9 proven steps to do that in an effective way!
Your donation form is the central hub of any successful fundraising campaign – so it’s crucial to get it right!
Donorbox’s multi-step donation forms drive more donations by breaking up the process for your donors. Plus, customize your form’s colors and overall feel to match your organization’s branding and boost donor trust. Add any additional questions, ask donors to opt-in to your newsletter list, and more.
Then choose to embed your form on your website or host on Donorbox. Learn more in this step-by-step guide.
Create a Customized Donation Form on Donorbox
Crowdfunding helps you harness the power of the crowd to do more good! Typically, many donors come together to give a little bit and raise more collectively. The most compelling crowdfunding campaigns
Donorbox Crowdfunding pages have tons of tools to boost donations. Build social proof with a donor wall, keep the momentum going with updates, and spread your campaign with easy social sharing buttons.
Check out how Black Girls Code used Donorbox Crowdfunding to raise over $483,000.
As a nonprofit, there are few things better than a recurring donor. In fact, recurring donors give 42% more annually on average than one-time donors.
The convenience of automatically collecting these donations gives donors and nonprofits peace of mind. Donors do not have to waste their time visiting your website each month to donate, and your organization can count on these donations and add them to its budget each year.
With Donorbox, you can easily customize your donation form to add recurring intervals. You’ll be able to add up to four different intervals from the following options – one-time, daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
With that said, finding and maintaining recurring donors can be a difficult task. You must know what it takes to turn a one-time donor into a recurring donor and how to retain them year after year. Watch this video for the seven pro tips on how to turn your one-time donors into recurring givers.
Create Recurring Donation Forms on Donorbox!
Your online fundraising campaigns can be boosted for outreach, engagement, and donations with a peer-to-peer fundraising option. The idea is simple – you invite your best supporters including donors, volunteers, board members, family, and friends to fundraise for your campaign. They create their own online fundraising pages and reach out to their networks to raise money for your cause.
With Donorbox, you can enable peer-to-peer for a campaign by simply toggling a switch. You get to invite supporters right from the tool with names and email addresses. You can also choose to let anyone sign up to fundraise on your behalf. The invitees will be guided on the tool to create and customize their fundraising campaigns.
Your peer-to-peer campaign on Donorbox also lists the top fundraisers, thus acknowledging their efforts and acting as social proof.
With such powerful features, peer-to-peer helps fundraisers boost their online donations. For example, The Brighton Jones Richer Life Foundation has raised a whopping $580,532 with dedicated peer-to-peer fundraisers.
We have a list of more successful peer-to-peer campaign examples to inspire your online fundraising – give it a read here.
Pro tip: Reward your fundraisers every time. You can call out their names at an event, give them gifts, highlight their story on your social media pages, and also mention their names in your monthly newsletters.
Corporate giving is on the rise.
This means with company donation matching, you can double and even triple your online donations. All you have to do is enable donors to find out if their employers will match their donations to your nonprofit. How do you do it? By adding a search widget to your donation form!
Donorbox has partnered with Double the Donation to make this a breeze for you! This allows you to add a donation matching search option right on your donation form so your donors can easily see if their company matches. They’ll then receive information on how to complete their matching gift.
Check out how easy it is on this donation page by TAFS –
Fundraise Like a Pro - Sign Up!
A great way to add a sense of urgency to your online campaigns is to include a goal meter on the landing page and any communication piece you send to donors. Goal meters, or fundraising thermometers, are a visual way to track how a campaign is doing. These goal meters should be added to all types of campaigns including crowdfunding and peer-to-peer campaigns. This is the easiest way to tell your visitors or donors that they can help push your nonprofit to the fundraising goal by making a donation or giving more.
For example, this online campaign below has successfully raised way more than they set out to raise initially!
You might think the only way you get to raise money with an event is through ticket sales. But that doesn’t have to be the case. There are many ways you can increase event conversion and accept more online donations – the first being text-to-give!
While speaking about your mission, let attendees know how they can make a donation quickly through their smartphones. Donorbox Text-to-Give allows donors to text a unique ID or keyword – depending on your plan – and receive a link to your donation form. Then they can easily repeat their donation with one text, making it easy for them to give throughout your event!
No matter how many different campaigns and events you run, if your online giving process isn’t simple and fast, you will end up losing donors and online donations. Your donation process needs to have fewer steps and multiple payment methods.
Offer them what they want – convenience and speed! Let your donors choose from multiple payment methods including digital wallets, card payments, and bank transfers. Use a superfast payment feature like Donorbox UltraSwift™ Pay to remove the step for inputting personal information. Donorbox anyway picks up these details from their chosen digital wallets.
Pro tip: Thinking about your donors is the first step to ensuring more online donations. You can even run a survey with your supporters to find out which giving methods make them feel more comfortable, what might be missing at your end, and how they want to see you improve.
Just because your nonprofit is collecting donations online does not mean all your solicitations should be online. Many nonprofits have a large number of donors who are older and more comfortable with mailed solicitation letters. By reaching out to them the way they are comfortable, you have already started to build trust.
Fundraising letters can encourage online donations by simply mentioning the option and including a link in the letter or email. You can also add a QR code to the letter so all your donors have to do is scan using their smartphones for quick access to your online campaign. A free QR code is automatically generated with every Donorbox campaign.
Fundraising letters can be a powerful tool to collect more donations online and offline. While you prepare your letters, remember to personalize them and add details that hold the donors’ attention. Have your team make a follow-up call to understand if they have further concerns and to guide them if they’re interested in making an online donation.
Online giving is nothing new – these days, it’s expected. The trick is to make your online giving as easy as possible, with powerful, safe tools that drive your fundraising.
Donorbox is there to help you with its powerful yet simple online fundraising features! We’ve helped 80,000+ organizations raise over $2 billion in donations. You can also start your journey in just four simple steps – sign up now!
For more fundraising tips, ideas, and best practices, visit our Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a curated list of our best resources directly in your inbox every month!
Kristine Ensor is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience working with local and international nonprofits. As a nonprofit professional she has specialized in fundraising, marketing, event planning, volunteer management, and board development.
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Kristine Ensor