Take Advantage of the Giving Season
As we quickly approach the giving season, it’s time to consider how your sports organization will connect with any existing donors and effectively reach new donors.
A consistently successful year-end tactic is the Annual Appeal or an Annual Appeal Campaign. Typically, this effort takes place during the last couple months of the calendar year (including Giving Tuesday).
An Annual Appeal is an opportunity for the majority of your community to donate to your nonprofit. It is a mass outreach that will provide an update of the sport organization and ask for a donation as a way to make an impact and add to the mission of the organization. It will be sent to those who have not yet donated and to those who have donated small amounts. This means any donors who fit the major gift criteria will not receive an Annual Appeal, but instead will be approached in a more personal way (at Cogeo, that’s anyone who offers a donation equaling or exceeding .1% of your annual budget).
Your Annual Appeal should aim to reach community members in an exciting, creative, data-driven way that showcases the progress your organization has made over the past 12 months. It will have a strong call-to-action to bring in a large number of donations and give your team a chance to gather additional information about your donors and community.
Below are some helpful tips on how to successfully launch your own Annual Appeal, as well as examples and templates for inspiration.
Have the Right Tools in Place
To launch an Annual Appeal, there are certain systems and platforms that will play a major role in the process and will help determine the success of your campaign:
1. Digital or Direct Outreach Platform
Annual Appeals have proven to be most successful when using a delivery platform. Most sport nonprofits choose to deliver their Appeals digitally to cut down on costs and increase their reach, while some choose to do a mixture of digital and direct.
However you choose, there are systems available that will help deliver your message smoothly and successfully. Digital Systems such as Constant Contact are example platforms that offer discounts to nonprofits and help to deliver nicely designed emails and collect crucial data points for your nonprofit.
2. Donation Platform
Controlling your donor platform, rather than using Facebook’s for example, and having access to funds and data is key. This is also a good tool to have in place year-round to put on your website and attach to other touch points with your annual giving community. Cogeo highly recommends PayPal’s nonprofit donor platform.
3. Customer Relationship Manager
Most importantly, you’ll want to make sure you have a proper customer relationship manager (CRM) in place. If your organization does not already have a donor database, we highly recommend that you implement one. Having a clean, organized CRM will allow you to track donors and donations, set tasks, and provide strong analytics about donor trends.This also keeps sports nonprofits organized and efficient even when the season is in session.
The Annual Appeal is an opportunity to collect data about new or semi-regular donors in hopes of turning them into consistent donors and even major gifts donors. Without the correct data, you may fall short of this goal. Make sure that you have an organized system in place to collect and manage your donor data. Salesforce Nonprofit is a high-end CRM offered to sport nonprofits for free!
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Get Creative about Content & Delivery
This is your chance to add brand voice and style to the message and delivery of your Annual Appeal.
1. Messaging
After implementing the right tools, turn your focus to the content of the Annual Appeal. What kind of message do you want to send? Here are some tips:
Keep your message simple by focusing on a certain project or program that has had a significant impact over the last 12 months.
Make sure there is data to backup your message. Including metrics around how impactful the program or project has been will make your message clear and direct.
Tell a story. Keep your message creative and engaging by putting it into story-telling form. Package your 12-month success summary and metrics into a message that conveys sentiment and relates to your audience on a personal level. As an example, the Rose City Rollers put their Annual Appeal into a series where each week a member from their team would speak to how the organization impacted their life.
2. Pick Your Platforms
Consider how to best reach your audience. You can keep it simple with a series of mass emails. Or, you can add layers to your outreach and launch an Annual Appeal campaign.
If you choose to post on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), you create additional opportunities to engage with your community -- and potentially increase the number of donations. If you create a web presence or landing page for your Annual Appeal, you make it easy for community members to read your story, absorb your data, and donate to your organization. There are many ways in which you can bring awareness to an Annual Appeal, so get creative!
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Execute, Collect, & Determine
Capitalize! Launch your Annual Appeal or Annual Appeal campaign and make sure you’re collecting data along the way.
1. Send, Deliver, Post, Publish
Once you have your tools and systems in place, your platforms established, and your messaging finalized, it’s time to execute. Know your audience and pay attention to the timing that your message is delivered. If you choose to launch an Annual Appeal campaign, take note of the opens, clicks, likes, views, and donations that you receive after each execution. Adjust as you go to increase your success.
Then, watch the donations roll in!
2. Collect & Analyze Data
Using your donor platform, track your new donor information. Import this donor data into your database or CRM. Organize and analyze this data to determine which donors may be likely to or have the capacity to become a major gift donor and create tasks to follow up and steward them personally. With all other new donors, place them on a regularly scheduled update to keep them informed about where their money is going and when they’ll have the opportunity to donate again. This is a key tip to fundraising smarter, not harder.
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Examples
Your Annual Appeal will reach these community members in an exciting, creative, data-driven way that showcases the work that your organization has done over the past 12 months. It will have a strong call-to-action to bring in a large number of donations and give your team a chance to gather additional information about your donors and community.
Below are some helpful tips on how to successfully launch your own Annual Appeal, as well as examples and templates for inspiration.
ANNUAL APPEAL STRATEGY
Student Program for Academics & Athletic Transitioning
ANNUAL APPEAL LETTER
Empower ME Academy
