How to Create a Unified Digital Destination for Your Nonprofit Donors

This blog was written by Mary Blasberg, a dedicated Senior Account Strategist at Mittun. Her primary focus areas are steering strategy, interpreting analytics and data, and harnessing the power of storytelling to glean insightful strategies that help inform today’s nonprofits. 

In today’s noisy online space, maintaining a consistent digital experience for donors is paramount in fostering trust and loyalty. It is vital for organizations to ensure their brand and story remain at the forefront of every supporter touchpoint.

By upholding a cohesive narrative across all channels, donors can easily familiarize themselves with your organization’s mission, values, and impact, ultimately encouraging continued engagement and strengthening their personal connection to your cause.

A well-structured digital experience begins with a user-friendly and visually appealing website that elevates your unique story and goals. The same visual and textual elements should then be carried through to your donation page and donation form to mirror your established brand identity.

Below, we cover how to achieve this cohesiveness, with a fundraising event campaign serving as our example. It’s crucial to apply this strategy across all campaign types, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, choose one to start with and allow this article to be your guide.

4 Benefits of Creating a Cohesive Digital Giving Experience

A cohesive digital experience allows your organization’s vision, mission, and values to carry through every touchpoint, facilitating supporter engagement and enhancing visibility of your impact. The following are some compelling benefits of investing in a cohesive digital destination for your nonprofit.

1. Strengthened Brand Authority

A cohesive and polished digital destination can bolster your organization’s brand authority by conveying professionalism and credibility.  Consistently showcasing your mission, vision, and values across all digital touchpoints helps create a strong brand identity that resonates with supporters, differentiates your organization from others, and ultimately enhances donor retention and loyalty.

2. Engaged and Committed Supporters

When your nonprofit’s digital destinations all clearly ladder back up to one central narrative, it invites deeper levels of interest.

Mobilize donors to learn more about your powerful story through interactive and immersive experiences to increase the likelihood they grow closer to your cause over time. This sense of community can facilitate active engagement among supporters, encouraging them to become long-term advocates for your organization.

3. Enhanced Transparency and Trust

A well-structured digital platform can showcase your organization’s work, accomplishments, and impact in real time, fostering trust and accountability among supporters. By providing updates on ongoing projects and initiatives, donors can see the direct results of their contributions, which inspires further support and increases overall visibility.

4. Aggregated Data for Improved Decision-Making

A cohesive digital destination not only captivates and retains more supporters, but also serves as a data goldmine. By offering a seamless and unified digital experience, you can increase the number of supporters who interact with your organization, thus generating more data regarding their behavior and preferences.

This rich pool of aggregated data empowers your organization to refine fundraising strategies, tailor outreach efforts, and optimize campaigns effectively. Consequently, this leads to more insightful decision-making and more efficient resource allocation, all underpinned by the cohesive nature of your digital presence.

3-Phase Approach to Optimizing Your Digital Destination

Successful fundraising hinges on an immersive experience that seamlessly integrates data, storytelling, and technology. Our comprehensive three-phase strategy is crafted to enhance the engagement and efficacy of your digital fundraising initiatives before, during, and after your event.

1. Before the Event: Build Anticipation With Cohesive Storytelling

To lay the foundation for a successful event, or any campaign, it’s essential to define your campaign story. This narrative will flow between your website, social media posts, email appeals, and donation website.

Data: Starting on the Right Foot

Analyze past data to identify which aspects of previous event campaigns have historically generated the most engagement with your digital channels. Use this information to guide your storytelling and design choices.

Don’t forget to also establish clear metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for this current campaign to ensure you’re collecting the insights you need to inform future improvements. In addition to your platform data, lean on industry insights to help shape your strategy.

For example, Classy’s Fundraising Event Experience Report offers a comprehensive overview of the current event landscape, providing insights into best practices, emerging technologies, and innovative strategies that can inform and enhance your own event approach.

Download Classy’s Event Experience Report

This analysis, combined with your in-house data, enables you to make well-informed decisions and tailor your campaign story to better resonate with your target audience, drive engagement, and increase the overall effectiveness of your fundraising efforts.

Storytelling: Crafting the Magic

Begin by developing a compelling narrative around your event, incorporating its goals, mission, impact, and activities into your cross-channel messaging. Focus on creating an emotional connection with your audience by highlighting personal stories, testimonials, or case studies that showcase the transformative power of your cause and how this event will further support those efforts.

Technology: Engaging Audiences Before the Big Day

Utilize various digital tools and features across your website and donation page to build excitement, such as countdown timers, videos, and interactive maps. Showcase event highlights, behind-the-scenes content, or teasers that pique curiosity and encourage sharing on social media.

Make essential information, like registration and fundraising preparation, easily accessible through intuitive navigation and clear calls to action.

With Classy’s innovative technology, nonprofits can effortlessly customize their campaigns, donation forms, and receipting to maintain brand consistency without sacrificing conversion rates. It’s a perfect blend of personalization and performance, enabling organizations to mirror their unique identity across all fundraising touchpoints.

By fostering familiarity and trust, Classy’s user-friendly interface helps nonprofits exceed their fundraising goals, ensuring your brand remains front and center throughout the donor journey.

2. During the Event: Maximize Excitement and Establish Deeper Donor Connections

Focus on providing a conversion-optimized online experience during your event that maintains brand consistency.

Data: Tailor Your Site to Mobilize Conversions

Use the data you’ve gathered from previous campaigns to optimize your day-of digital destination. Which digital elements do donors typically interact with on event day? This could be anything from live-streamed videos to a silent auction or a carousel of user-generated photos posted by event attendees.

Continuously collect information on engagement, user behavior, and overall performance to identify challenges, successes, and areas for improvement. Implement real-time adjustments and enhancements based on this data to ensure the event experience remains engaging and effective.

Storytelling: Manufacture Excitement and Provide Encouragement

Share real-time content from the event on your website and social channels, highlighting the impact supporters are making. Showcase participants’ achievements, the progress being made, and the positive change their contributions are driving.

Update the copy on your donation page to motivate and inspire immediate action while emphasizing the broader context of each contribution and the significance of the event’s goals.

Technology: Provide Ways to Engage and Personalize

During the event, it’s vital to sustain the momentum built at the beginning of the supporter’s journey. One way to do this is by leveraging engaging, tech-driven features that provide a sense of continuity and personalization for your supporters.

First and foremost, ensure your donation form’s branding and messaging align with the marketing materials your attendees received leading up to your event. Additionally, identify which online donation experience is best to offer your attendees.

At Classy, nonprofits can offer embedded donation forms to reduce friction points. In fact, Classy customers who enable embedded donation forms routinely see 2x industry-average conversion rates and an average 29% increase in revenue per site visitor. 

Facilitate friendly competition during the event by keeping leaderboards and fundraising thermometers visible and updated in real time. This keeps the sense of urgency and camaraderie alive.

In addition to highlighting the competition between others, celebrate individual achievements with digital trophies, badges, and social media recognition.  These not only extend your reach but also generate more buzz, mirroring the excitement of the pre-event stage.

3. After the Event: Maintaining Engagement

The event may have concluded, but the opportunity to build lasting relationships with your supporters through ongoing storytelling continues. Focus on cultivating a sense of community and deepening connections with your audience in order to foster long-term commitment.

Data: Get “Closure” on Your Campaign

While supporters are still engaged, gather feedback through post-event surveys and other data collection methods to inform future campaigns. Analyze the performance of different aspects of the event, like communication channels, activities, and fundraising strategies. Use this data to refine your future storytelling and design decisions and ensure future events are even more successful and engaging.

Storytelling: Cultivate Relationships and Community

Showcase the event’s impact and the tangible changes it has brought to your community. Share stories of how the funds raised have directly benefited your beneficiaries, and highlight any milestones or achievements that were reached. Reinforce the sense of camaraderie and shared accomplishment among participants, emphasizing the power of collective action and the importance of their ongoing support.

Technology: Encourage Their Continued Involvement

Share event statistics and highlights on your website to emphasize supporters’ role in achieving your goals and making a difference in the community.

Create a media hub to archive event content, including photos, videos, and stories, so you can leverage it next year or for future event promotions. Encourage ongoing involvement on your event landing page by suggesting the next steps, such as signing up for your nonprofit newsletter, volunteering, or attending future events.

Technology mobilizes your organization to uphold brand consistency, immerse donors in your experiences, and consistently enhance performance year after year. It is an essential tool that supports your unwavering commitment to your mission.

Beyond the Event: Snowballing Your Success

In the nonprofit sector, the application of technology can be a game-changer, especially when it comes to organizing fundraising events. Utilizing the strategy of “Reuse and Iterate,” you can optimize your digital initiatives without starting from scratch each time.

Build upon the digital framework you’ve established. This includes the structural blueprint aesthetic elements, and technological features that were successful in driving engagement and donations in the past.

The process of reusing isn’t about repetition, but rather about refinement. It encourages you to incorporate enhancements based on valuable feedback and performance metrics. This iterative approach allows you to craft more impactful and engaging experiences for your donors and supporters.

Exceed Donor Expectations With a Unified Giving Experience

By following these steps, you can create a cohesive digital experience for all supporters to ensure your mission, goals, and impact is always immediately clear. This will help support more successful fundraising campaigns, stronger brand authority, and an even greater impact on the community you serve.

Discover how Classy can help your organization customize its campaigns to keep your story front and center—the way it should be. Learn how our comprehensive donation website platform has helped the world’s top nonprofits 2x their revenue and 100x their impact.  Schedule some time to talk today.