Crowdfunding can be an extremely effective way for nonprofits to expand their reach and bring in more donations. But there are several key steps to follow when creating your own crowdfunding page if you want to be successful! In this article, we share how to design a crowdfunding page that uses tools like a goal meter, donor wall, social sharing buttons, and more to quickly meet your goals.
Crowdfunding is an affordable way for new and established nonprofits to raise more funds for their missions. There are many benefits to starting a crowdfunding campaign, including sharing your organization with a new audience and raising money quickly to meet your fundraising goals for an upcoming project.
This article delves deeper into how to design a crowdfunding page that boosts both fundraising and awareness for your nonprofit.
Before we discuss the steps, let’s see why crowdfunding is effective.
Crowdfunding is an excellent way to spread the word about your organization’s mission and bring in critical funds to support your programs. Here are just a few key reasons why your nonprofit should create a crowdfunding page –
Planning and executing a crowdfunding campaign is pretty straightforward, but the success of your campaign highly depends on your online crowdfunding page!
This step-by-step process shows you how to design a crowdfunding page that drives donations.
First things first, you must decide what success looks like to you. Do you want to raise money? Of course, but that’s probably not the only thing you hope to get out of your campaign. Before you do anything, think of all the ways an online crowdfunding campaign could help your organization.
Here are a few goals nonprofits usually aim to achieve through a crowdfunding campaign –
After deciding on your campaign goals, set a timeline. If this is your organization’s first experience with crowdfunding, it’s best to start with a short campaign – a month is usually a good place to start. If, however, you’ve already had success with crowdfunding campaigns, you may be able to run a campaign for six weeks or longer, depending on your goals.
You can’t create a crowdfunding page without a crowdfunding platform, making this the most essential step in the process. The right platform will help you build the best page in the most cost-effective way.
Donorbox Crowdfunding lets you get started in minutes, with no set-up fees or monthly contracts. You don’t need any coding knowledge – to begin, you simply need to add your campaign title, input a goal amount, add a description, and enable crowdfunding. That’s all! We’ll then walk you through how to set up a crowdfunding page that helps you reach your goals.
Watch this video tutorial to experience the ease and effectiveness of this great Donorbox feature –
Donorbox Crowdfunding comes with a plethora of powerful options to boost funds and reach more people online. Our Crowdfunding tools include a goal thermometer, social media sharing buttons, a virtual donor wall, an updates tab, a subscription button, an email-sending option, and more.
The Donorbox platform fee for this feature on our Standard Plan is 1.75%, but you can upgrade to our Pro or Premium Plan to access a 1.5% fee across most Donorbox products. You can also ask donors to cover this fee along with processing fees of Stripe and/or PayPal.
Now that you have decided on the amount of money you want to raise and the timeline of the campaign, add these details to your crowdfunding page. Your fundraising goal can be added to the page as a goal thermometer, as shown below. As the meter shows your progress towards meeting your goal, more donors will be inspired to give a little extra to help you get there, like they did for Tapestry in this example!
Start Crowdfunding With Donorbox
Be sure to also share the deadline for reaching your goal on your crowdfunding page, preferably in the first paragraph of your content so that it stands out. This adds to the transparency as well as the urgency of the campaign!
Your campaign title and tagline are a part of your campaign’s branding and help it stand out in the crowd. Keep the title as short as possible while still explaining exactly what your campaign aims to do, and use the tagline to expand upon it. If possible, use free SEO tools to find the best keywords to include!
Avoid technical terms and jargon; be clear and direct with your title as well as your ask and call to action. All content used to create your crowdfunding campaigns must be easy to understand and give people a reason to donate.
Unless you are a brand-new organization, your nonprofit already has a logo and brand identity. Use these to ensure your crowdfunding page is on-brand. Or, create a new logo and brand for the campaign to give it a new look and feel that helps distinguish it from your other outreach and fundraising efforts.
Here are a few items to focus on when building your brand identity:
This crowdfunding page follows the organization’s branding by making use of its logo and brand colors.
Impactful storytelling is often what makes the difference between a successful crowdfunding campaign and one that falls flat. Share your beneficiaries’ stories to show the real impact of your mission or feature the story behind starting your nonprofit. You can also tell the story of a major donor, letting them share why they choose to support your organization.
When adding your story to your crowdfunding page, make it skimmable by breaking the content into easy-to-read paragraphs and using colors, bolding, and italics to highlight important pieces of the story. You want your readers to be able to comprehend the most critical information on the page at first glance.
The images you use for your campaign are just as important as the content. Your pictures must be high-quality and share your story in the best light. If you work with children or animals, you’ll have dozens of stories and images to choose from that are bound to get people’s attention.
Videos are also powerful ways to tell a story and often see more engagement than written content. To craft a powerful fundraising video, first decide on the introduction, goals, story, and call to action. This way, you’ll have a process to follow and an easier time deciding what to film and edit.
Finally, when telling an individual’s story, ask them to share it themselves and mention specifics on how your organization made a difference in their life.
Here’s an example of a powerful crowdfunding campaign page that pairs a powerful story about the founding of the organization 10 years ago with an impactful video to encourage more donations – just look at how close they are to their goal!
Want to know how to design a crowdfunding page that takes your fundraising to the next level? Be sure to include a customized recurring donation form. Recurring donation forms help you convert one-time donors into recurring donors so that you can bring in reliable income and create sustainable growth for your organization.
Donorbox offers a customizable, mobile-optimized donation form that includes daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly recurring donation interval options. You can choose up to four intervals to feature on your form along with adjustable ask amounts. Donors can choose from multiple payment options, including bank transfer, direct debit, PayPal, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more, plus their checkout experience can be up to 4x faster with UltraSwift™ Pay. Our platform also securely stores all donor data in our donor management system, enabling you to better segment donors for future communications, keep track of ongoing relationships, and more.
Because your crowdfunding campaign is entirely online, you’ll want to share your story wherever possible to get the best results. You’ll also want donors to share your campaign on all their social media accounts to help spread the word to new networks. Make it easy to do so by including social media sharing buttons on your crowdfunding page!
Donorbox Crowdfunding automatically adds Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter buttons to your crowdfunding page. These buttons are easy to locate and encourage donors to share your campaign with their networks. When a person clicks one of the buttons, your campaign name and URL are prefilled in a customizable post to minimize effort and maximize impact.
Here’s an example of a successful crowdfunding campaign that puts social sharing buttons to work.
Because many donors will (hopefully) be sharing your campaign online, there will be a lot of new people will be visiting your fundraising page. So, how do you ensure that these people are converted into donors? The best way to do so is to earn their trust and keep them engaged with updates on the campaign’s progress.
To keep your donors up-to-date on your campaign, add a subscription option to your Donorbox Crowdfunding page. Your visitors and potential donors can fill in their names and email addresses to subscribe (shown below) to get updates from the campaign – even if they haven’t donated yet. All donors to your campaign are automatically added to this list. Then, you can use the Donorbox platform to send customizable email updates directly to these contacts.
As your potential donors receive updates and see that you’re putting your donations to use and creating an impact, they’ll be more likely to visit again and make a donation.
One of the best ways to build donor trust and confidence in your organization is by being transparent about everything that is happening at your nonprofit and with the campaign.
To empower you to keep your donors informed, Donorbox Crowdfunding features an on-page Updates tab. You can easily post updates under this tab, along with images, videos, descriptions, and more. You can also choose to send certain updates directly to your campaign subscribers via email! Donors to your campaign will automatically receive all updates in their inboxes, ensuring they see the impact their gifts are having on your mission.
Check out this example to see how the Updates tab works.
When people see that several others have made donations to your campaign, they’ll be more inclined to donate. It’s called social proof and it adds to their trust in your organization! To achieve this all-important social proof, you can add a virtual donor comment wall to your crowdfunding page.
For example, Grand View Blvd Elementary School enables donors to add a comment to their donation form and choose if they’d like it to be added to the donor wall. Their comments and the donation amounts are then automatically added to the Donor Wall tab on their crowdfunding page. When visitors see so many different people donating to the campaign, as well as the donation amount and their comments, they may feel an urge to give as well!
One proven way to ensure the success of an online crowdfunding campaign is to turn it into a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. With peer-to-peer, you encourage your supporters – including donors, volunteers, board members, etc. – to fundraise for you. As a result, your campaign will reach several new people and your donations will be multiplied.
Donorbox lets you simply toggle a switch on your crowdfunding campaign to enable peer-to-peer fundraising. You can then select if you’d like to let visitors choose to fundraise by clicking a button added to your campaign page, or if you wish to invite them yourself within the platform. Steppingstone’s Day of Giving campaign includes this button – so far, their fundraisers have raised more than $34,000 towards their crowdfunding campaign.
Donorbox lets you approve selected fundraisers or automatically approve all who wish to fundraise for you. Funds from all your fundraisers’ campaigns will go to your original campaign account.
This peer-to-peer fundraising option can significantly increase the outreach and donations of your crowdfunding campaign. Plus, you don’t have to worry if you’ll have enough fundraisers willing to help. You already have a team of supporters such as your volunteers and board members who believe in your mission and are highly motivated to help you!
In this video, we share six pro tips from super successful crowdfunding campaigns to help you create a stellar crowdfunding page that will surely bring in more donations and attention from the public.
Running a crowdfunding campaign can be an affordable yet highly effective solution to raising more funds for your nonprofit organization. The steps we’ve shared in this article show you how to design a crowdfunding page with maximum shareability potential that will entice more donors to give. By sharing compelling stories and images, sending updates, and being transparent, you’ll have an even better chance of finding success with your next crowdfunding campaign.
With Donorbox, 80,000+ nonprofits have boosted their donations and engaged donors with the help of simple-to-use and powerful features. Some of Donorbox’s best features include recurring donations, customizable fundraising pages, Memberships, Events, Peer-to-Peer, Text-to-Give, QuickDonate, Donor Management, and more.
Fundraising experts and high-powered add-ons can drive your crowdfunding campaign in the correct direction. Check out Donorbox Premium and get personalized pricing for your nonprofit, along with endless fundraising benefits!
Read other Crowdfunding-related blogs by Donorbox here and explore more fundraising tips, ideas, and nonprofit management resources on the Donorbox Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a list of our best articles, webinars, podcasts, and other important resources 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