Salsa Scoop> tag: ”blog:fundraising“

Salsa Highlight: Now capturing more recurring donations data

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We've recently tweaked the database to capture more information when your donors submit recurring donations -- those all-important automated, ongoing donations.

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Salsa Highlight: Personalized Donation Histories

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week's feature is an oldie but a goodie, and one that many users aren't yet taking advantage of.

Personalize Emails with Dynamic Content

While a generic email message is fine to use for your online communications, email blasts that have personalized content directly relevant for the recipient often have more impact, result in more taken actions, and generate more page views.

The Salsa Email tool allows you to add several varieties of Dynamic Content from a picklist you'll find right under the HTML Content tab ...

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Salsa Weekly Highlight: Push for year-end donations

by Adam Rosenberg

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We at Salsa have processed hundreds of millions of dollars in online donations, and we can tell you that if the year's online fundraising is a pie with six slices:

  • The first three fiscal quarters are one slice apiece.
  • The fourth slice is October and November.
  • The fifth slice is December through approximately Christmas.
  • The last slice is the last week of the year - as valuable as months and months of fundraising in spring or summer.

Those critical last days of 2010 are here, and we wanted to dedicate this week's highlight to encouraging all Salsa users to help themselves to a nice, heaping slice of that pie.

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Salsa Weekly Highlight: Ready your donation pages for the holidays

by Adam Rosenberg

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

If you're like most organizations, December is the most important fundraising month of the year.

  • About one-third of all donations Salsa Labs processes take place in December.

  • Those December donations each yield about 50% more per gift than gifts from January to November.

So we thought we'd share a few tips you can use to make sure your donation pages are ready for the holiday rush.

Donation Page Checklist

Perhaps the best way to start checking up on a donation page is just to make a donation yourself. Is the link easy to find from your home page? Does the ask make sense? What happens after you give?

Like any other page on your site, donation pages can "age" into obsolescence as your site and strategy evolve. Better an ounce of prevention than a pound of lost donors.

Here are a few areas to give special attention to.

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Salsa Weekly Highlight: Keep Actions fresh by rotating content

by Leslie Hall

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

Congress reconvened this week, and I thought we'd take the opportunity to spotlight a few of the cool bells and whistles available with Salsa Actions.

This week: one neat little feature to keep your supporters' advocacy messages to decision-makers fresh.

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It's Dec. 31: Do You Know Where Your Fundraising Ask Is?

by Jason Z.

It's just hours to the end of a year that most will be pleased to put in the rear-view mirror.

If you're like me, your inbox has been filling up this week with nonprofit fundraising asks: the secret of asking during the last week of the year is clearly out. And that prompts an obvious question.

How indeed to be heard in the din?

There must be more tactics in heaven and earth for design and message and creativity than are dreamt of in my philosophy, but I can tell you timing: ask today. I've received dozens of fundraising appeals this week from various sources but so far only a handful on New Year's Eve.

That's an opportunity being missed, at least for any 501(c)3 or other organization whose gifts have tax implications for the donors. In fact, you might want to ask twice today.

Dec. 31 is nonprofit fundraising day. Over 15% of the online gifts that DemocracyInAction recorded for its nonprofit members in all of December 2008 came in the last 24 hours of the year:

Oh, and the average per gift late in the last few days of the year is higher, too.

Don't have an e-appeal queued up today? Do yourself a favor and set up [at least] one before midnight.

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Customizing a donation page with summed totals

by Jason Z.

This is a question we get a lot:  how can I customize a donation page to behave in a storefront-like fashion -- choosing multiple gift types that result in a single automatically calculated sum?

Mike Heavers of Maverick Digital came up with a nifty solution you can see in action on this donation page.

It's just a bit of script in the page's Custom Donation HTML field, and can easily be tweaked for your own page.

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
function getTotal() {
      document.donation_data.amount.value = parseInt(document.donation_data.memberdues.value) + parseInt(document.donation_data.regamount.value);

    document.donation_data.VARCHAR0.value = document.donation_data.RADIO0.value;
    document.donation_data.VARCHAR1.value = document.donation_data.memberdues.value;
    document.donation_data.VARCHAR2.value = document.donation_data.regamount.value;

}



//--></script>

<br/>

<div class="formRow">

<label for="fc4">Join or renew your membership here: </label>

<select id="fc4" class="blockInput" name="memberdues" onchange="getTotal()">
<option value="0">I do not need to renew my membership</option>
<option value="50">Voting & Assoc Members- Budget under $1m: $50 dues</option>
<option value="100">Voting & Assoc Members- Budget over $1m: $100 dues</option>
<option value="20">Individuals: $20 dues</option>
<option value="10">Students & Seniors: $10 dues</option>
</select>

</div>



<div class="formRow">
<label for="fc34">Registration Fee <span class="required">*</span>: </label>


<select id="fc34" class="blockInput" name="regamount" onchange="getTotal()">
<option selected="">SELECT ONE:</option>
<option value="150">MEMBER-Early Bird Registration Package Only (before 4/17): $150</option>
<option value="225">MEMBER-Early Bird Registration Package w / Gala Ticket (before 4/17): $225</option>
<option value="250">MEMBER-Regular Convention Registration Package Only: $250</option>
<option value="325">MEMBER-Regular Convention Registration Package w/Gala Ticket: $325</option>
<option value="250">NONMEMBER – Early Bird Registration Package ONLY (before 4/17): $250</option>
<option value="450">NONMEMBER – Early Bird Registration Package w/Gala Ticket (before 4/17): $450</option>
<option value="350">NONMEMBER – Regular Convention Registration Package ONLY: $350</option>
<option value="550">NONMEMBER – Regular Convention Registration Package w/Gala Ticket: $550</option>
<option value="200">Gala Only Ticket - $200</option>
</select>
</div>
<br/>

<div class="formRow">
<label for="amount">Total Amount: </label>
<input type="text" name="amount" readonly="readonly">
</div>



<input type="hidden" name="VARCHAR0" >
<input type="hidden" name="VARCHAR1" >
<input type="hidden" name="VARCHAR2" >

<input type="hidden" value="Email,RADIO0,First_Name,Last_Name,Street,City,State,Zip,regamount,amount" name="required"/>

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Spotlight on CIVIC's perseverance through wintry economic times

by Jason Z.

The Washington Times ran an illuminating piece today on CIVIC, the Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict and one of our favorite Salsa users.  It's not only a heart-gladdening story to see CIVIC keep on keeping on, but underscores the perilous situation many small nonprofits are or soon may be facing.

CIVIC had nothing to do with crooked financier Bernard Madoff, but the relief organization was supported by the JEHT Foundation, a strongly progressive funder whose donor unfortunately fell prey to the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

That blow ultimately fell on CIVIC (and scores of other progressive nonprofits), and "illustrates how devastating the Madoff case has been for smaller charities" and has already resulted in one layoff on its four-person staff and the closure of its office.

CIVIC relies totally on grants from foundations and private donations, and that $50,000 grant [from the JEHT Foundation] was the only guaranteed money it had coming in for 2009. ...

The organization has a $350,000 budget. Compounding the problems is that donations are down about 40 percent, according to [Executive Director Sarah] Holewinski. She said CIVIC still needs about $200,000. Until a supporter in Europe gave a large donation last month, Ms. Holewinski said there was a real prospect that the organization would have to close entirely.

What a relief that CIVIC didn't close.

In this case, the Madoff-to-layoff chain is visibly apparent.  But the systematic pressure of depressed donations, an implacable statistical inevitability fed by a thousand minute tributaries -- that's the thing to watch out for.

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Not too late to make a holiday ask

by Jason Z.

By this point, it's becoming more general knowledge that the last week of the year is a real sweet spot for holiday fundraising.  But just to underscore the point -- be sure to get out at least one fundraising appeal today or tomorrow, terrible economy be damned.  In fact, it's not only not too late to make a holiday ask, these next two days are probably the absolute best time all year to make that ask.  Given the bleak fundraising scene that likely awaits come January and February and beyond, it'd be crazy not to put out that pitch e-mail in some form in the next 24 hours or so.  Heck, how about one today and two tomorrow?  Come February, are you more likely to wish that you'd asked more often or less often back when the getting was good?

Actually, for anyone with an online component in the job description, this holiday season could be the leading edge of an important structural shift in nonprofit fundraising.

While all charitable giving of every description figures to suffer in the years ahead, some scattered data points from retail suggest that online purchases more or less held their own during this past (and otherwise disastrous) holiday season.  Some of that undoubtedly reflects purchases that would otherwise have been made at brick-and-mortar locations being shifted online, and while not all the parameters of nonprofit development are the same, it's a trend one could easily imagine spilling over.  As with selling sneakers, nonprofit giving opportunities online cut out many expenses (notably mailing) and present a lower threshold for gift completion.

If a pullback in the overall revenue picture of many organizations is in the works, it's a pretty good time to remind H.R. managers how valuable the online piece is to the organization.

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Download Holiday Fundraising Webinar

by Jnet

Remember last year when the holiday fundraising season suddenly appeared! Perhaps the phrase "if I only had time" was muttered? October is a great month to start your online holiday fundraising plan. You'll need time to 1) use the month of November to remind your supporters how great you are, 2) integrate your online and offline fundraising and 3) map out your online communication plan, to name a few.

HOLIDAY FUNDRAISING WEBINAR - Listen and watch this (unedited) webinar I gave about online holiday fundraising

This 1 hour workshop covered the following:

- What should my online donation page include?
- What are they key elements in an online holiday fundraising email appeal? When to send?
- Ideas of how to use November as the "month of thanks"
- How to integrate your online approach with offline fundraising

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