There are several types of donations you will receive, broadly speaking they fall into the following categories:
Grants. These come from funding bodies, and it is likely you had to go through a process to receive them and were in competition with others, they will generally be in £x000’s
Fundraising Event. A one off event such as a table top sale or something your volunteers did to help raise some money. From £50-250.
Single donations. Largely coming from the public or from the commercial sector, from £1 to several £100.
Repeat donations. Generally from a person that knows what you do and wishes to support you on a regular basis. Often in the form of a standing order directly to your charity account, or through a 3rd party collecting on your behalf such as Virgin Money Giving.
While the latter group monthly contribution may be small, the fact that it is there each month is arguably of higher value to you than the single donations. The question is what can you do to encourage repeat donations to your cause, grow the volume of donations, and how can your website help in this regard.
Recruitment
One of the reasons I tell everyone to put some news up on their website is to ensure that anyone visiting for the first time, or perhaps has not visited for say 6 months, then they can see you are active and doing things that are in alignment with the charities objectives (I am generalising here because many of the people I am working with cover a very wide range of areas).
For example a charity that seeks volunteers, and provides a service to families should show news items say every two weeks with photos and short articles on what is going on. Whether that is application for grants, table top sales, success stories, a personal view from a recently recruited volunteer, a comment relating to something in the national news; the list is endless. It just requires someone to sit down and write something. It only needs a paragraph or two. Add a photo, particularly one containing smiling happy people!
Anyone arriving at your news page will see that you are making a difference. Now you need to encourage your website visitors to help you to make more of a difference. But the important point here is you are selling what you are doing through your site, through your news.
Over the next few days I am going to add several ideas to this site on what you can do next to start to get some funds in from regular supporters.
The point of this article was really to state the obvious, keep your site fresh, tell the world what you are doing, then ask the world to help you.
Social media will play an important role in this, as will using one of several methods I will expand on in the following articles.
- Friends of – Standing Orders
- Friends of – 200 Club
- The EasyFundRaising Campaign for Christmas
(When I have written the articles there will be hot links under the titles that will take you to the relevant entry).