Making the Most of Your Online Donation Campaigns with WordPress

Making the Most of Your Online Donation Campaigns with WordPress

Have you wondered how you can leverage WordPress for your online donations?

We were proud to be one of the sponsors of WordPress Day for the Nonprofit Technology Conference held in San Jose, March, 22, 2016.

Matt’s presentation discussed the ways you can use all of the features of a WordPress-powered web property to build community, be a thought leader, and, of course, increase donations.

WordPress, as a platform, allows you to leverage your content to make collecting donations online easy. When it comes to online donations for WordPress, you can optimize the traffic or funnel to land at your donation page.

The central question Matt asked throughout his presentation was “How can you use what WordPress is really good at to benefit your online donation campaigns?”

He broke it up into 4 main points:

  1. Thought Leadership
  2. Community Development
  3. Donation Landing Pages
  4. Donor Communications

Thought Leadership

WordPress is really good at content generation.

WordPress is not going to make you a thought leader; you already are. Within the nonprofit space you already are a thought leader, attending conferences like this and communicating your passions through writing.

WordPress is really good at sharing content. It started as a content generation tool.

Your WordPress blog allows you to communicate your passions and create trust for your organization. People are not going to donate to your organization unless they believe in your organization. Blogging about your passions and ideas gives your donor base the chance to get to know you, hear your opinions and starts to build trust and loyalty in what you are doing around your cause.

It’s true. Developing your voice in blogging takes time, practice, and tools. Some of the tools Matt recommends are: CoSchedule, 750Words.com, and Moz SEO.

Another way to encourage your thought leadership is attending conferences. Conferences like NTEN are good for building connections, getting ideas, and continuing to develop your skills.

Community Development

WordPress is really good at managing users.

Out of the box, the user roles are robust but you can also add custom user roles. You have a donor base, a group of people who support you. Managing them like the community they are is a great way to encourage them to continue to build with you.

Forums are a great way to help your community to communicate with each other. For example, let’s say your organization is about ending homelessness in downtown San Diego. If your website hosted an online forum about homelessness in your downtown, your organization would be a medium for a public conversation around that topic. You could foster ideas on ending homelessness in a more powerful way. This helps to organically build your community.

WordPress has some really powerful plugins for fostering community on your website. Matt recommended bbPress, BuddyPress, and Peepso.

Donation Landing Pages

WordPress is really good at being extensible.

Of course, we recommend Give for online donations. Give is the easiest, best practices-focused plugin available for creating gorgeous and responsive online donation forms.

But the purpose of a donation landing page powered by Give is to make that final step of donating as easy and intuitive as possible. Your thought leadership, your community organizing, your story telling and championing is the reason why people will donate. No donation plugin can promise to make people donate — you have to the work.

The good news is that after you’ve done all that hard work, people do start coming to your site and clicking the donate button. You want the donation process to be the easiest part of their relationship with you — not the hardest. That’s what Give is for.

Several attendees had good and important questions about Give and how it works. Matt answered questions on SSL certificates, PCI compliance, mobile-friendliness, payment gateway fees, and many more topics.

Our documentation and blog are rapidly growing to provide you with more and more resources to be able to tackle these topics more effectively.

Donor Communications

WordPress is really good at being accessible.

Lastly, WordPress is very accessible, both in terms of online accessibility and also in terms of the data being available and extensible for third-party applications.

WordPress is accessible to communication tools like Mailchimp and Zapier via their APIs. But WordPress itself is working on its own REST API. As that is further developed, you’ll be able to integrate more and more tools with WordPress seamlessly.

Give also has its own API which allows you to connect to virtually anything via our Zapier Add-on.

Holistic Campaign Examples

Any campaign should have clear goals no matter how big or small, a clear story and need for funds. They should also have strong communication that makes giving easy. In other words, your online donation campaign should be.

Matt shared three small examples of successful campaigns that took a holistic approach to online giving.

Harbor Orphan Care is an example of a holistic campaign: they had a WordPress-powered web property, a large annual event, social media campaigns, lots of “boots on the ground” volunteering for the event, and an easy way to donate online. The result is that they doubled their donation from last year.

Jesse Petersen’s “Surprise Adoption” story is another holistic approach. Jesse had a large potential donor-base, effective social media skills, a very compelling story with a very clear and urgent goal, and donations were made easy with Give. The result was that Jesse was able to raise over $10,000 in less than one week.

Matt also cited the Bowling Green Curling Club as a holistic approach. They had a clear target, focused on donors who could donate large sums, got local press coverage, and told a fun and compelling story with a simple, intuitive donation form (yes, Give!). They’ve raised over $100,000 to make their new curling field and facility a reality.

You can read all of our Give Stories here.

WordPress and Nonprofits Belong Together

Stories are the vehicle for emotionally connecting your cause with your champions. This is why WordPress is the perfect match for nonprofits.

Check out Matt’s Slides:

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