How Nonprofits Can Increase Donations Through Marketing Automation

How Nonprofits Can Increase Donations Through Marketing Automation

Nonprofits exist to fulfill their organization’s mission and values – and the world is a better place because of it! But to do that, they’re faced with the continuous cycle of fundraising. If you’re a nonprofit marketer or tasked with the job, you know reaching your donors with the right message is crucial.

We hate to break it to you, but it’s 2020. You’re going to have to do a little more than send a generic, friendly email here or there. Thankfully, with a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, you increase donations and keep them coming!

Here are specific examples of how marketing automation helps.

No matter what, you’re going to need to send emails to your audiences. Some of those can be automated through HubSpot workflows, like welcome campaigns or thank you messages, putting more time back into your teams’ days.

HubSpot allows you to build active lists that automatically update their members based on criteria – and the possibilities are boundless. You can create lists based on contact, company, activities, line item, or deal properties to build segmented audiences that you can later market to appropriately. For example, you could make an entire list of people who’ve visited your donation page multiple times in the last month. Or, you could create a list of previous donors who haven’t donated recently.

With HubSpot’s tools, such as lead scoring, you can determine which of your donors will most likely give soon and which won’t. Use that knowledge to build lead nurturing campaigns that convince your users to donate. After a new lead signs up for your newsletter, send a thank you email (and automate it!). If they open, you send another email with relevant content. Then, another, and another, with each building upon the other. Just be sure to space them out.

Tokens in HubSpot are used to personalize email content, as long as you have that contact information. You can instantly make an email more engaging by including someone’s first name. Similarly, you can use smart content to make your site and landing pages display different versions of your content to various users. That could be anything from changing the copy to a user’s preferred language, switching up a subject line, or changing CTA content to fit their stage of the buyers’ journey.

Increasing donations also means bringing in new donors. One of the most common ways someone will find your organization is through an internet search. HubSpot’s SEO tools allow you to optimize your page by adding in metadata and more.

SMS marketing is growing in popularity due to its high open and response rates. You can engage with your donors and potential donors through SMS by using SMSZap – a platform built natively for HubSpot. SMSZap’s features let you textwinning SMS campaigns to your users at the right time, with opportunities for personalization and easy opt-out. For instance, based on HubSpot’s data, you could text a quick message about how a past donation has helped someone in need – and that their help could impact others.

If you keep sending the same campaigns repeatedly and don’t see results, what do you do? Without HubSpot, you may not know. However, the marketing automation platform packs a punch in terms of reporting. You can see which exact campaigns or content brought in a donation to replicate it with attribution reporting. You can also see what didn’t work and remove it from your strategy.

For nonprofits utilizing the fundraising software Classy, integrating the system with HubSpot can turbocharge your donation efforts. A Classy HubSpot integration is a bi-directional cloud-based integration solution. It syncs Classy members, supporters, transactions, and recurring donation plans to related fields in HubSpot. It also syncs recently updated HubSpot contacts to existing Classy donations. An integration like this lets you further tap into your donor information by allowing you to launch deeply-personalized fundraising straight from HubSpot – with all that data going back to Classy.

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