Connect with Your Givers: Givelify’s Donor Engagement Tools

As nonprofits and places of worship continue to depend on financial gifts from individuals, they will need to invest their time and energy into creating authentic relationships with their supporters, using many methods of donor engagement.

In a recent study by NonProfitPRO, 2021 Nonprofit Leadership Impact Study, author Nhu Te reports that people give not only because they care about the organization’s mission but also because they feel a genuine connection and have had a meaningful experience with them. 

However, according to the same study, 55% of nonprofits still need to outline a donor engagement strategy at the start of each fiscal year. People are looking for organizations that have a powerful message, appreciate their gift, and acknowledge the significant impact they are having via their donation.

It is critical to ask what motivates them to give, how they prefer to donate, their communication preferences, and how often they donate. Armed with that information, you can treat your donors in a way they feel known and appreciated.  

Givelify’s Analytics Studio makes connecting with and engaging your givers easier by integrating tools from the existing dashboard and numerous enhancements.  

Faster, Easier Engagement  

Tools to engage donors are essential, and we’re continually developing and delivering those. AND information about donors and their giving (both at an individual and an organizational level) makes engagement more informed, effective, and meaningful. Let’s walk through some of the benefits of Givelify’s Analytics Studio. 

1. Faster access to donor messages (previously called Memos). Donations with messages now display as a part of your donation activity. You can filter by replies and un-replied messages to quickly determine which messages need a response. This way, you can efficiently answer messages, showing that you value each donor. 

2. Easy-to-use quick reply options. Givelify’s Analytics Studio has quick reply options such as “Thank you!” and “We appreciate your generous gift!” that help you to reply to donor messages faster. This can be helpful when organizations have a lot of donor messages to catch up on or when time doesn’t permit custom responses to donor messages. 

3. Additional enhancements relating to speed or ease of engagement. Engagement with donors happens in all facets of life. Givelify helps you better understand donor behavior so you can engage,e in a more informed, personal manner. In addition, Givelify helps you to understand each donor’s giving style: consistent, occasional, new, or decreasing. 

Understanding a donor’s giving style, in turn, identifies when donors change their giving habits and enable you to strategize your engagement approach. Also, you may want to engage with new donors in a different way than people who give to your organization occasionally. 

You can quickly see when a donor last gave, along with a history of their giving and a history of their messages. This gives you a unique snapshot of each donor’s giving behavior related to supporting your organization. 

And, coming later this year, donors will receive in-app notifications in Givelify when you send them a message. This is another way to give attention to donors and increase the donor’s likelihood of re-engaging with you and giving again. 

4. Responding to trends. In addition to donor-specific insights, we also show macro-giving trends. Quick visibility into giving for each envelope and how that giving changes over time helps you engage donors more broadly by emphasizing different causes that are most important or that need attention. 

Here are some examples:  

• Track the giving to your tithe envelopes over time and identify any changes. If giving drops, you can take action to inspire your members around the purpose and impact of tithing. 
• Identify your new donors and reach out to them to plug them into other parts of your organization. 
• Keep an eye on your number of consistent donors to ensure that number grows over time. Proactively engage with consistent donors to provide you retain as many as possible. 
• Identify donors who are decreasing their giving activity and determine a campaign that gets them re-engaged. 

Improved Engagement Tools  

The new Givelify Analytics Studio enables supporters to share their social giving link directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube with a single click. For example, after clicking “Share to Facebook,” a post is autogenerated with the social giving link on the organization’s Facebook page. 

We’ve also made Social Giving easier to access among the ever-growing number of fundraising tools. 

Here are some other improvements that you can start implementing today: 

• Online Giving. Online Giving is your unique giving link to send donors straight to your donation page from emails, social media, websites, and more. Every communication you have with a donor or potential donor is also an invitation to give. Online giving is also easier for churches and organizations to access in the fundraising tools section. 

You can get the online giving link code to create your giving button or use one of the three styles we’ve created for you. Just copy the button code and paste it into your website’s code. This makes a Givelify giving button that sends donors to your profile. And there’s also an option to email the code directly to your website developers. Just put in their email address, and our system will send them the required code. 

• Share on Your Social Media Platforms. Givelify Analytics Studio allows you to share your social giving link on Facebook when you do a Facebook live or post a recording of a service. Like Facebook, you can add your social giving link directly to Twitter through Givelify Analytics Studio while updating your Tweet’s content. 

• Include your online giving link in your church’s email newsletter, on your website, in emails sent to new church members, so they know how to give online, and in the video’s description on YouTube live and YouTube posts. Don’t miss an opportunity to encourage people to join your ministry or nonprofit. 

Targeted Messaging  

Let your donors know how much you appreciate them. Did you know that organizations that consistently reply to messages from donors typically see an increase in overall giving of about 30%? When you send a targeted thank you, it creates deeper resonance with the causes donors contribute to when you include information about the gift’s impact. 

On the other hand, a message from a donor indicates they’re adding additional meaning to their gift and are engaging at a deeper emotional level. Responding to that donor is an investment of time and emotion that can have a real, meaningful impact on that donor’s life and emotional well-being.  

If you haven’t already, establish a scheduled time to respond to donor messages. Socialize this task as an investment with your church staff…maybe even recruit a new volunteer to help with this aspect of member engagement. 

Here’s more great news! In late 2021, you can send other messages directly to donors—individually or as a group—from Analytics Studio. We are exploring multiple message channels: email, SMS/text, and in-app messages to give organizations even more engagement capabilities to foster generosity in their donors. 

Summary of Benefits 

Let’s examine the unique advantages of using Givelify and Givelify Analytics Studio.  

First, you can increase donor engagement with minimal effort. Donor engagement is a task similar to “watering the seed.” It mainly takes intentionality and regular discipline, not much time or effort. 

But with that small, intentional, disciplined effort will come the fruit of increased generosity for donors, deeper resonance with your causes, and a more woven community at your organization. 

Next, you can engage specific donors with custom messages. People are unique within reasons for generosity. Any message from a donor creates a unique opportunity for you to respond and inspire them. Even if it’s brief, writing a custom message can make the difference between a casual supporter and a consistent champion of your cause. 

Finally, send broadcast messages to thank donors or remind them about important events. For example, send a general thank you message to all your donors to let them know you appreciate their support. This can be done every month. You can also select a group of donors that gave to a specific envelope and thank them at once. 

You can drive awareness of important fundraising events and help remind your donors of the goal and timing related to longer fundraising efforts. And target donors with specific giving styles and send a tailored message to all those givers. You’d like your requests and responses to be as personal as possible.

Donor Engagement & More; Get Started Today 

By signing up for Givelify, you have automatic access to everything in Givelify Analytics Studio. So, today, you can start replying to donors, setting a schedule for responding to donor messages, sharing your social giving links on all your social media accounts, and adding a Givelify online giving button to their website.  

Please contact Givelify support or explore our help center for tutorials and related articles if you have questions about using the donor engagement features. 

Sources 

NonProfitPRO, 2021 Nonprofit Leadership Impact Study 

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