Ep 60: 5 Ways to Rev Up Funding This Year End

EPISODE 60

Game-changing Approaches to Nonprofit Funding

 
 
 

Ready to boost your nonprofit's funding? Feeling a bit stuck?

“Instead of figuring out the exact perfect thing to say, I want you to book a call, book a coffee, book a something. And just ask great questions. Be a great listener and just get out of your own way.”
— Christina Edwards

Join us for a practical journey where we explore effective strategies to enhance your organization's growth. We'll dive into donor relationships, peer-to-peer fundraising, and leveraging virtual events in today's digital landscape. Gain valuable insights to personalize donor experiences, improve your online fundraising, and plan successful virtual gatherings.

You'll also hear about how to uncover the potential of Giving Tuesday and the impact of donor matching, helping you expand your campaign's reach.

And here's the kicker: Learn how to build a strong social support team, an affordable way to increase your mission's visibility and funding.

Get ready to transform your nonprofit's funding approach and turn your mission into a reality.

Think you’ve reached out to “everyone” in your network? Out of ideas to get noticed and get funded?  Generate leads for your nonprofit or social impact business: https://www.splendidcourses.com/prospect

Steal my Prospect List! Lead Gen just got a lot easier!

Resources mentioned:

 
 
 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here, ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go. Today, I want to talk about five ways to rev up funding this year end. Even if you feel like you're totally behind the e-poll, even if you feel like you're totally scrambling already, even if you're like listen, christina, I've got our strategy figured out, I want you to dig into today's podcast because these are five things that you probably haven't thought of. These are five things that work for organizations and missions of every single size. So let's dig into that list right now. Okay, the first thing I want you to do is look at your donors from the last 90 days. You can go further out if you need to, but look at those donors, those donations that have come in in the last 90 days. Those are your warmest prospects, particularly the new ones. So any donations that came in from new donors in the last 90 days are like the honeymoon period, so that's a sweet spot for potential leveling up for that potential next step. What have you done to guide them to the next step? Have you welcomed them beyond just the tax letter and maybe an initial thank you card. Have they been through an email welcome series? Have they been invited to take another step? Have they been invited to join your monthly giving program? What has their donor journey looked like? And if you're thinking crap, we haven't done any of that, that's totally okay. But now is the time. It's never too late. Even if you want to pull back to the last 120 days, that's totally fine. I want you to think about what can I do? What does that flow look like? That? I need to introduce them to. So a couple of resources for you. I have an entire email welcome series masterclass and I have done for you templates. If you want either of those, I will link to them in the notes. Go to splendidcoursescom forward slash welcome to grab that welcome series. It is awesome and it walks you through the entire workflow. So what I would love is for you eventually to have an automated welcome series, so when a new donor hops on and even makes a gift of $20, that they're not just kind of clunked in with the rest of your audience and they get communicated with whenever you can, but instead they're nurtured in that honeymoon period. The first 30 days are really, really important and they're guided to the next step. So if you haven't done that already, totally fine. But I want you to think about what do they not know that I want them to know about our organization? How can I reach out to them about that? Maybe it is a couple of individual emails, maybe it is a putting 20, 30, depending on how many people are on this series or in this bucket of people who have given in the last 90 days, putting them in a group and putting them on a weekly email drip. That introduces your organization Because, don't forget, they may have given a gift because a friend shared it on Facebook. They may have given a gift because they were prompted to by a family member, by some other, maybe they saw a Facebook ad, something like that, any other sort of outside driver, and we want to make sure that you're not coming from the perspective of. They are totally familiar with your cause. They're totally familiar with what it is you do. Instead, we're going to introduce them to your organization. We want to introduce them to what it is you do, what your programs and services are and the impact. Okay, so you can do that very, very simply. You can do it through an automation. You can do it through emails. You can't actually look at that and, honestly, if your list is like 10 people or 20 people, maybe it is about writing a couple of individual emails, maybe recording a couple of short videos to some of them, or even picking up the phone and making those calls. Okay, there is untapped revenue in your email list, full stop period. If you want to learn more about that, I do have a course that talks all about and teaches you an entire system to tap into that revenue. If you go to splendidcoursescom forward slash email, it will take you to a free training about that and you can learn more about the course. Okay, so that's your first step. Go back and look at those donors in the last 90 days. The second thing that I want you to think about to rev up your end revenue is launching a peer to peer fundraiser and launching it around something. So a social holiday, a birthday. So, for example, an organization I work with we are doing a fundraiser on the founder's birthday, because one of the things that I noticed last year was just a really simple social post that was acknowledging the founder's birthday got a ton of traffic and I said to the ED. I said we got to do you guys got to do a fundraiser that is really stretched out and we'll do like a week long or a couple of days that is really dedicated towards kicking off and acknowledging and getting excitement right around this founder's birthday. And why not engage some of those really long time online supporters and donors who are really familiar with the organization in a peer to peer fundraiser to do just that, where they are fundraising and leveraging their own audience on behalf of your organization? Like, I like to have something like this tied to something specific. So, whether it's a holiday that makes sense, that has something to do with your organization, whether it is a social holiday so, for example, if it was Autism Awareness Month, you could tie it around that or a specific social holiday. In that sense, you get to decide what you tie it around, right, but so that we can mobilize supporters around a specific start and stop date, that's we're really, really effective. If you are going to do this, if you are going to do that, make sure you're using an online fundraising tool that is like optimized and perfect and reducing friction for the entire peer to peer process. I have one. Let's see two favorites and if you reach out to me or if you go to the tools page on my website, all of my favorite resources are right there SplendidATLcom, forward slash tools. I have a couple of favorites for this, because what I like to see on a peer to peer page is a really well laid out story that is not just blocks and blocks of text. That is easy for my eye to jump through and understand what it is we're doing. And then, of course, a really easy experience for a Person to become a fundraiser, but also for a donor to make a gift. So make sure you're using a platform that is very, very easy and not clunky for that process. Okay, third way that you can rev up your end. So we know giving Tuesdays coming up right at the end of November this year, and one of the mistakes that a lot of organizations make is they participate in giving Tuesday, but they participate it only on giving Tuesday. Okay, so what does that mean? That means that that one day of giving is very, very noisy online and it means that it's very hard for them to stand out in inboxes. So the way that I teach it, the way that my clients and students have the most success in it Is when we stretch out their act there. They're giving Tuesday campaign, so we can stretch it out by a few days. I would actually recommend you stretch it out by a week or more. This is what I'm working with many of my clients and students on right now, and you get to decide whether or not the runway is earlier or after. Right, it is just the the. Does giving Tuesday kick off on giving Tuesday or do you use it as what I would call a momentum booster mid campaign? So you get to decide that make sure that you're stretching out your giving Tuesday and Write this down that you're securing a donor match for giving Tuesday, because that's a great way to just get everybody on board and like, okay, all hands on deck, we've got a match for it. It's also really wonderful excuse. If you've been kind of waiting to make a call to a potential funder or to a Current funder this year, go invite them or invite several people to be part of a giving Tuesday donor match. That's what a fun way and what a great excuse to make that call Okay. Fourth piece you may have been hearing me lately talk about a social street team, a digital ambassador program. This is my favorite way to show up online and get your mission Noticed and funded, without spending money on ads, without spending lots and lots of time creating content and then having 3% of your followers see your content. So creating a social street team is something that I teach inside of my course. Amplify social impact. If you can kickstart a social street team in 30 days which, by the way, you can we have an entire module, decay or lesson, dedicated to kick starting a street team in 30 days, simply by identifying who are the warmest prospects, that would be a yes for your street team and creating a campaign Specific for them. By the way, that campaign may be a fundraiser that already exists and you're just adapting it to fit your street teamers and giving them exactly what they need in a do digital form, a little digital toolkit of swipe swipe copy Graphics, a link to a fundraising page. That could literally be the difference between you making or breaking your goal. The ROI of influencer marketing is 5x for every dollar spent. So you put in five, you put in a dollar, you get 5x back, and I think it's not an accident that my students regularly see 5x of a return on their investment year over year. So what do I mean Me meaning? A goal, a fundraiser where they maybe, historically, only raised a couple thousand dollars. They go in, they implement this method. They 5x their fundraising goal. Okay. So don't wait on that. Don't spend a bunch of time creating content for Giving Tuesday, creating content for an upcoming fundraiser, just spending a lot of time air quotes, doing marketing content creation. Instead, get into the DMs, get into the places where your ideal Thought leader is hanging out. Start cultivating those relationships now so that you have them on your side. This is different than peer-to-peer fundraising because instead of them creating their own fundraisers To fund raise for your organization, they are you're. You are simply asking them to leverage their audiences To share your fundraiser. So it is different in that way and it is just the best way. It's just one of the the most profitable, high-impact ways you can stand out your end. It makes such a difference. If you've ever been called to buy a product to go to a restaurant because a friend recommended me, think about that. You're on instagram friends at a restaurant. There is a prove in restaurant that my friend posted about maybe a month ago and I was like that looks amazing. Sure enough, the next time I had a date night I was like this is where I want to go. That's influencer marketing, right? My friend didn't have hundreds of thousands of followers online, but she was somebody. She's my friend so I know like it. Trust her. This is a street team, so we see it a lot in the food world. We see it a lot in the for profit you know even e-commerce, even brick and order store world but we don't see it a lot for nonprofits. Just because we don't see it a lot doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing it. You should have done it yesterday, right? So go ahead and get started on that. If you want help to kick start that program, go to. I have a free class. I just Put it up. Go to splendid courses dot com forward slash funded for that class. It will walk you through the entire process and tell you more about my course. If you're interested in joining, okay, the fifth and maybe Scariest, I don't know or most important, or both way that you can rev up your funding between now and your end is going up stream. What do I mean by going upstream? Going upstream looks like, instead of triaging and bandating a lot of the problems, is going upstream and taking a big chunk out of your budget by booking funder meetings. Not only booking the funder meetings, but going to the funder meetings and asking for the big, scary number and going all in on that big, scary number and having the pitch to support it and having your own back to to say the pitch and say the words and going into that meeting with courageous action and doing it and letting it be hard and letting it be uncomfortable and not waiting for it to feel like perfect or right or fully fleshed out. Working with many of my private coaching clients on this, right now, what we do is we identified some of their Historic donors which you have, who you're aware have a higher giving capacity, but you haven't made that like. Give a bridge that gap, usually have a fridge, that gap to taking them from a to b because the conversation feels wobbly what to say, when to say it, how to say it? Okay, instead of figuring out the exact perfect thing to say, instead of doing that, what I want you to do is book a call book, a coffee book, a something, a lunch with them and just ask great questions, just be a great listener and just get out of your own way and out of your own head and just talk about your mission, just talk about what you've been working on. One of the best hacks to go through any of these hard prospect meetings, any of these hard donor meetings to ask questions and listen. You actually don't want to treat it. I don't want to be in a Like a presentation right, if somebody is actually wanting to ask me to make a gift, I don't want to be like feel like I'm being lectured or pitched to. Okay, actually would rather you just talk to me like a real human being and, by the way, if you're nervous, you can say you're nervous, can totally say that in the meeting. And this process works. If you let it work and if you let it be imperfect and you activate courage and don't wait to feel 100% confident. I promise you you will hear yeses. I promise you you will get higher funding, a higher ROI on those major gift asks than you have ever before. I like to go into it prepared. Yes, I like to go into it saying what is the alignment, what are the stories that this perspective donor will want to hear, what are some of the questions that I'm gonna ask? So you still want to prepare for it in that way. But the nuance of the differences is that you're not creating this sort of canned pitch that you're delivering to a dozen different donors over the course of a month. Instead, you're just gone To touch base with them and ask questions and tell stories. I want to give you this go ahead of time and decide how much money you're going to ask for and make sure you can articulate the why behind that. Okay, do make sure you do that and don't go for like a notch higher than last year, like go big or go home. Go big or go home. Make it feel it's okay. If it feels wobbly, it's okay if it does it feels like whole boy. It's okay if it's expansive and push it, because how will you ever raise more if it's not expansive and push it okay. So that's what I've got for you today. Those are five very simple, low. I promise, like low lift ways that you can absolutely skyrocket your revenue between now and your end. Go, start, appear to appear fundraiser. Go to those people who are those superstar volunteers. Go ask them to be a part of it. Identify that giving day or a giving day. Be a part of it. Identify that giving day or giving week or giving month that you want to be. You want to be activating those folks to be a part of it. Okay, create a long lead time for giving Tuesday. Go, make sure that you're starting to pitch partners to become a part of your street team. That is my most favorite way. Look at your email list. You're not it if you're emailing monthly, if you're emailing quarterly, that is not enough. You need to turn up the frequency. Most people are not reading every single one of your emails. Do not bury your calls to action. Do not bury your appeals for people to make a donation. Go, email more and go look at that sweet spot of the people who just hopped into your world for the first time. Go, nurture those leads and, last but not least, book the meetings. Don't ask for the notch higher than last year. Go beg or go home. You can do this. If you have questions, come hang out with me on Instagram. Let me know what questions you have at splendid consulting and I will see. Next time, like what you're hearing and want to take this to the next level, I want to invite you to go to purpose and profit dot club to watch my free class in there. I will tell you the number one thing, that's, keeping your nonprofit or social impact business stock, and what to do instead. Go to purpose and profit dot club.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impact, mindset, productivityComment