Trends Digital Fundraising
By Justin McCord
The velocity of change has increased for everyone in the last 22 months since the pandemic began. In the wake of that velocity are some accelerated trends in digital marketing and fundraising—which should change the way we think, plan and execute moving into the new year. Before we get to the trends, it’s worth calling out that I don’t like genericized trends. Yes, they are great for driving marketers to our website to read blog posts just like this one. But that doesn’t help in a practical sense. And more so—the challenge with genericized trends is that there is a massive range of resources and capabilities across nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada. Before you think ahead to what’s possible and popular in 2022, I recommend you think long and hard about your own nonprofit’s digital marketing maturity. Take our digital maturity quiz here Disclaimers aside, here are three major areas of interest to propel your digital fundraising forward in 2022: Every marketing channel is now digital, even direct mail and face-to-face. We have new ways to integrate experiences on the front end for users—from QR codes to USPS Informed Delivery—and new ways to unify data on the back end—through the proper integrations of previously disparate data sets. We can collect untold amounts of metadata. And all of this data should empower us to create even better experiences for donors. The digitization of everything means we acknowledge that we have more data than ever, actively put resources toward unifying data, and make data central to our strategies and decisions. To best accomplish deeper digitization, nonprofits should evaluate their tech stack and consider what data they have and where it should live. Savvy nonprofits have begun looking to third-party data providers for warehousing and management solutions that equip them with infrastructure to enable data-oriented decisions in marketing campaigns. Even savvier nonprofits are connecting that data in order to personalize dynamic content across devices. Those organizations are prioritizing data and integrations that enhance donor experiences. They understand not all data is meant to reside in their CRM. Additional data management solutions are needed. Recommendations: As opposed to just increasing your budget on separate channels, look for ways to tie your campaign (and spend) together to create more solidified journeys for your audiences. Now, more than ever, you need to spend time mapping your donor communication, then optimizing it. Recommendations: Digital communications can easily become fractured—even if you’re mastering data strategy and integrated thinking. The proliferation of content across email, web, mobile and social should force you to pause and really think about how to tell your nonprofit’s story in a compelling way. In this case, compelling doesn’t mean analog. Marketers are often caught in the tension of wanting to create content that is 1:1 while scaling to execute 1:many. This is where you must balance your content strategy with your data and technology teams and external partners. It sounds like a lot of coordination. We never promised integration would be easy. Your content strategy should reflect your authority in your area of expertise, whether that’s ending hunger in your community, helping the impoverished, providing care for animals or creating a new healthcare vertical. The key to your success here is that the authority must strike a smart balance of the problem you’re trying to solve and the way in which the donor helps you solve it. Don’t lose sight of that. The earlier trends mentioned in this article can help your content strategy deliver with efficiency, but it can’t be effective unless you work hard on expressing your needs and differentiations. Recommendations: It’s far too easy to get distracted by what’s new. Our take: don’t do that. Think of these trends less as shiny objects and more as waves or currents that each nonprofit needs to jump on in a place that makes sense for them. In doing so, we think you’ll have a prosperous and more digitally enhanced year to come.Digitization of data
Experiences, not campaigns
Nonprofits spent more on advertising than ever in the last year, and spend is projected to grow by another 100% before 2024. And digital ads are incredibly reliant on data to automatically optimize—yet the changing landscape of privacy regulations (like Apple’s iOS 14.5 update and cookie-less activations) are forcing marketers to rethink how we stay proactive in a season of impactful changes.Content strategy
