54 degrees

If you're short on time, make sure you're getting the online fundraising basics right before diving in to social media. The results will pay off.

When I was asked to give a presentation to some of Ireland’s leading Fundraisers at a Fundraising Ireland seminar, I was initially asked to talk about the hot topic “social media fundraising”.

Knowing that social media spaces like Facebook & Twitter can perform an invaluable role in donor outreach, I also knew that their track record at the time in actually raising money was quite poor.

I felt that there was little I could share that would have a real impact on the daily working lives of most of the people who would be attending the seminar. So what should I present?

There are so many really great organisations out there that fail to tell their story effectively, have a less than great web presence and really could do so much better if they focused on doing the basics well online, before they invested valuable resources in social media outreach.

I focused my presentation on optimising your website for online giving, simple & clear guidelines on how to design your website to better serve your donors. I showed how testing your online donation pages and making some small (often common sense) changes to it could increase your online income by up to 40%. I also provided some very quick tips on getting the most out of your peer to peer fundraising pages ...... & then I ran out of time.

The presentation is available on slideshare and I’m pleased with its popularity with over 1900 views and plenty of downloads. It’s hardly a phenomenon but I’m pleased others are benefiting from it long after … I ran out of time