8 Fundraising Platform Features That Attract More Supporters
Online fundraising platforms should help you attract more supporters and make online donations to your organization easy and convenient.
But, a great platform will also help make your online campaigns more readily accessible to a larger audience, more attractive and manageable for you and your team, and more engaging for you and your supporters!
8 Fundraising Features to Look For:
1. Customizable Campaigns
Your online fundraising platform should allow you to share a compelling story for each of your campaigns that allow for customization with images and video.
Having a simple way to create one designated page for each campaign that includes your brand, your custom campaign logo, and an easy way for visitors to make donations is optimal.
Humans are visual creatures, so the first step to attracting more supporters is to show off those tail feathers!
Use images from your events or daily operations to showcase the incredible work you’re doing. Make sure to add a video if you have one as well. Here is a great example of a customized fundraising campaign from the organization, Primitive Pursuits:
2. Simple Donation Forms
Think of how many people – yourself included – who abandon their shopping carts when there’s a crazy long line at a store or get frustrated with a faulty cash register and decide to cancel their purchase. Similarly, with online transactions, if you’re asked too many questions before check-out or if a donation form is overly complex, are you tempted to just quit the process altogether?
Your donation forms need to request as little information as possible by only collecting what you need to know in order to reach out to that person in the future. Learn more about how to avoid sacrificing your donation form in this article.
3. Mobile-Friendly Design
You’ll want your fundraising campaigns to be accessible from any device, so having a mobile-friendly design is a must for an effective donation page.
In fact, for our younger generations of givers, a mobile-friendly interface is pretty much a requirement if you expect any of them to engage with your organization.
And if you’re thinking those younger generations don’t matter, keep in mind that an increasing number of older generations are also acquiring an affinity for mobile! A worldwide study on donations trends for the year 2015 found that 18% of all givers prefer to make donations with their mobile device.
4. Social Sharing Tools
The option to share your campaign on your supporters’ preferred social media channels should be in plain sight on your campaign page so that it’s literally a click away! Below is an example of the social share feature found on all GiveGab campaigns:
Social sharing amongst your supporters widens your outreach without any additional effort from you, so make sure they have a seamless way to share directly from your campaign.
5. Personal Fundraising Pages
If only there was a way for your supporters to easily become fundraisers for your organization through your platform…oh wait, there is a way! Certain fundraising platforms have peer-to-peer and team fundraising built right in.
Choose a platform that allows you to turn existing supporters into fundraisers with a simple request, which then gives them full access to creating personal or peer-to-peer fundraising pages.
6. Supporter Engagement Tools
You should be able to communicate with your donors and volunteers through the same platform that you’re doing your online fundraising. This way you can set up automated thank you emails and donation receipts that immediately follow an online gift.
Being able to organize your supporters from the same platform is even more ideal, as segmenting supporters helps with engagement.
7. Event Registration
Just like the guidelines for your online donation form, registering for events should also be a seamless process for your supporters and an included feature via your platform.
Fundraising events should be easy to create, launch, and share through your platform as event campaigns that people can register for and donate to.
8. Capped Donation Fees
If your online donation fees are capped after a certain dollar amount is reached, then there’s nothing to keep your larger donors from making that big donation online.
There are actually very few online fundraising platforms that have capped fees, so be sure to read the fine print if pricing isn’t completely transparent.
