Crowdfunding is an affordable way for new and established nonprofits to raise hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There are many benefits to starting a crowdfunding campaign, including sharing your organization with a new audience and quickly raising money. This article delves deeper into how to design a crowdfunding page to ensure your campaign’s success.
Crowdfunding is an affordable way for new as well as established nonprofits to raise hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There are many benefits to starting a crowdfunding campaign, including sharing your organization with a new audience and quickly raising money to meet your fundraising goals for an upcoming project.
This article delves deeper into how to develop your crowdfunding page to ensure your campaign’s success. Here are the 12 steps:
Before we discuss the steps, let’s see why designing a good crowdfunding page should matter to nonprofits.
Crowdfunding is an excellent way to get your feet wet and spread the word about your organization’s mission without spending extra money or time. But the success highly depends on your crowdfunding campaign page.
Here are a few reasons why your nonprofit needs to create a crowdfunding page –
Crowdfunding campaigns are straightforward, but you must have a strategy in place to design your crowdfunding page in the most efficient way.
We’ve included a step-by-step process to help you create a successful crowdfunding page.
You can’t reach success without knowing what it means 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 want to achieve through a crowdfunding campaign:
After deciding on campaign goals, you must set a timeline. If this is your first crowdfunding campaign, it’s best to start with a short campaign, about a month. If you’ve found success in the past with crowdfunding campaigns, you may be able to lengthen that to 6 weeks or longer, depending on your goals.
This is the most essential step of the process. Obviously because how will you create the crowdfunding page? The right platform will help you create the best page in the most cost-effective way.
Donorbox Crowdfunding lets you get started in minutes. You can sign up for free and there will be no monthly contracts. The page is easy to set up and very simple to use. All it takes is toggling a few switches and checking a couple of checkboxes (and zero coding knowledge!). To start with, you need to just put your campaign title and the goal amount, add a description, and enable crowdfunding. That’s all!
Here’s a tutorial video to quickly help you understand 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. For examples, 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 is nominal at 1.75% but you can upgrade to our Pro plan or Premium plans to reduce this further down to a flat rate of 1.5%. You can also ask donors to cover this fee along with processing fees of Stripe/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 line moves through to the end of the thermometer, more donors will be inspired to give extra to help you meet your goal.
Start Crowdfunding With Donorbox
You can add your timeline in the description of the campaign. Make sure it stands out. You should put it somewhere in the first paragraph of the campaign content. This adds to the transparency as well as the urgency of the campaign.
Your campaign needs a title and tagline before you can add any other information. Titles and taglines are a part of your campaign’s branding and will help it stand out in the crowd.
You’ll want to keep the title and tagline simple. There are free online SEO tools you can use to find the best keywords. As you continue to add content, don’t use too many technical terms; be clear and direct with your ask and call to action. Content used for these campaigns must be easy to understand and give people a reason to join your campaign.
Your nonprofit already has a logo and mission. You can use these to ensure your crowdfunding page is on-brand. Or, you can create a different logo and mission for the campaign to help distinguish it from the rest.
Here are a few items to focus on when building a brand:
This crowdfunding page is branded to the organization with a logo and appropriate colors.
Crowdfunding brings you the most success through storytelling. You can tell your beneficiaries’ stories or your own story behind starting the nonprofit or this campaign. Use different colors and break the content into paragraphs to highlight different parts of the story.
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.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.”
Videos can raise four times more than others. Decide on the introduction, goals, story, and call to action before starting your video. 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 crowdfunding campaign page that includes eye-catching images and a video to attract more people to their campaign.
Your crowdfunding page is incomplete without a donation form. While choosing your crowdfunding platform, you must check if it provides you with a customizable, on-brand, recurring donation form. Recurring forms help you convert one-time donors into recurring donors.
Donorbox comes with a recurring donation form that includes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals. You can choose the ones that suit your needs. Nonprofits can also add suggested donation amounts to the donation form to help donors decide which amounts would be most helpful. Our donation form is also conversion-optimized. It collects donors’ information and stores that in the donor management system. You can use this system to segment donors and personalize your communication to each type. There are multiple payment options including bank transfer, direct debit, PayPal, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more.
Since your crowdfunding campaign is entirely online, you’ll want to share your story wherever possible to get the best results. You’ll want donors to share your campaign on all their social media accounts. On your campaign page, include social media sharing buttons to ensure donors and visitors are capable of doing that.
Donorbox Crowdfunding automatically adds Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter buttons to your crowdfunding page. These buttons are easy to locate and encourage donors to share that they gave to this campaign and that others in their networks can, too. When donors click the buttons, the campaign name and URL are prefilled to minimize efforts and maximize the impact. Here’s an example.
As many donors will be sharing your campaign online, a lot of new people will be visiting your page. So, how do you ensure that these people are converted into donors? The best way to do it is to earn their trust and keep them engaged with updates on the campaign’s progress.
Donorbox adds a subscription option to your crowdfunding page. Your visitors or potential donors can fill in their names and email addresses to subscribe (shown below) to get updates from the campaign. All your donors get automatically added to this list. Later on, as the campaign makes progress, you can send email updates to all these people.
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.
Your crowdfunding page should have an updates section. It ensures that updates to the campaign are smooth and donors are abreast of how their donations are being used.
Donorbox adds an updates tab to your page. You can easily post updates under this tab, along with images, videos, descriptions, etc. You can choose which updates will go to subscribers via email messages. Your donors get all updates automatically through emails.
Check out this example to see how the Donorbox updates tab works.
When people see that a lot of other people have made donations to your campaign, they’ll be more inclined to donate. It adds to their trust in your organization. To achieve that, you can add a virtual donor comment wall to your crowdfunding page.
For example, here on this crowdfunding page, the Grand View Blvd Elementary School has enabled its donors to add a comment to the donation form and choose if they’d like that to be added to the donor wall. Their comments and the donation amounts are then added to the donor wall tab automatically. When visitors see so many different people donating to the campaign, the donation amount, and their comments, they feel an urge to donate as well.
The proven way to ensure the success of an online crowdfunding campaign is to turn it into a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. You get to encourage your supporters including donors, volunteers, board members, etc. to fundraise for you. As a result, you get to reach a lot of new people and your donations will be multiplied.
Donorbox lets you toggle a switch on your crowdfunding campaign to enable peer-to-peer. You can then select if you’d let visitors choose to fundraise by clicking a button added to your campaign page or if you’d invite them from the tool. This campaign here has a button added to its page, that people can click to start fundraising for the campaign.
Donorbox lets you approve selected fundraisers or automatically approve all. 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.
Crowdfunding is an affordable way for new and established nonprofits to raise hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There are many benefits to starting a crowdfunding campaign, including sharing your organization with a new audience and quickly raising money. This article delves deeper into how to design a crowdfunding page to ensure your campaign’s success.
We share 6 pro tips from super successful crowdfunding campaigns to further help you create a stellar crowdfunding page that will surely bring in more donations and attention from the public.
Crowdfunding campaigns are more affordable and less work than others, but that does not mean you can sit by and let it run itself. The steps we’ve shared will help you design a crowdfunding page with maximum shareability potential and one that will help you entice more donors to give. By sharing compelling stories and images, sending updates, and being transparent, you’ll have a better chance to find success with your next crowdfunding campaign.
With Donorbox, 50,000+ 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, etc.
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.
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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.
Kristine Ensor