Image by willian_2000 from Pixabay
If you run a charity, you’re probably always thinking about how you can encourage larger donations. What do you do to make donors feel more generous towards you and get the funding you need to carry out projects? Here are some of the strategies that have been proven to work.
Use anchoring
One of the best approaches to increase gift amounts is to use anchoring techniques. These set expectations in your customers’ minds for how much they should be donating to you. For example, let’s say that your original donation options were $25, $50, and $100. You could change this to say: $75, $150, $250, and $500.
By increasing the baseline, you change donors’ expectations. You also keep low donation options so that you don’t alienate existing donors who are used to paying you a specific amount. If you can personalize what you ask donors for based on their giving history, then this can also be a highly effective strategy.
For example, if it is a repeat donor, you can ask for between 10% and 50% more than their last gift. This is something that has been proven to increase gifting amounts by up to 29% over time.
Make in-person gifting easy
Another thing you might want to try is making in-person gifting easy with smart POS devices. If customers simply need to tap their phone or their credit or debit card, then this completely simplifies the process for them and prevents them from having to rummage around in their pockets for change. It can also increase the amount that you receive. You can suggest how much, how large a donation customers should make using the anchoring technique described above.
Use gift matching challenges
One of the strongest levers for generating larger gifts is to use a matching program. Interestingly, a one-to-one matching program is often as effective as higher ratios like two to one or three to one; however, it can dramatically increase gift size and participation. Donors will often want to maximize their impact, so they’re willing to give more. All you need is a large donor that’s able to match the contributions made by other donors to increase overall funding up to a certain limit.
If that doesn’t work, you could try to create urgency with time-limited matches. This is a technique used in marketing quite often to double impact and make gifting more memorable. If that doesn’t work, you could try a challenge gift. These are where a donor pledges a large sum if others reach a collective goal. If you know somebody with a lot of money, you can get them to pledge $100,000 if other donors reach the target of $75,000, for example.
Tell stories about impact and individuals
Finally, you can increase the amount that people are willing to donate by telling more stories and highlighting the impact that their money has on individuals. Most donors don’t respond strongly to statistics, but they will respond strongly if you can provide them with a compelling narrative about where their money is going.
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
