Online Fundraising: The future is now. Are you ready?
February 13, 2011
Posted by chcablogadmin in : Innovation, Philanthropy, Web 2.0 & Social Media
Most of your organizations are experimenting with social media and its unique applications for children’s hospitals, including how it can extend your reach and give voice to your most passionate advocates. Jesse Stremcha from Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota shares strategy on utilizing social media for fundraising and their tremendous results. – JR
By Jesse Stremcha, e-Philanthropy Specialist, The Foundation of Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota
At some point before I started fundraising at Children’s, our hospital leadership made a decision: ‘If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.’
Jesse Stremcha
From a philanthropic standpoint, continuing to do what we had always done wasn’t going to help us become the hospital we intend to be in the future. They decided online fundraising was one important way we could bend the curve upward.
I’m fortunate at Children’s of Minnesota to have leaders all the way up the organizational chart who understand the importance of online tools to the future of fundraising. They’ve committed to providing the resources and autonomy necessary to test and experiment in the online space.
I, in turn, hold this trust sacred. I’m very careful with the Children’s brand, and I focus like an eagle on activities that help us increase online giving. The result has been a 200% increase in giving online from $165,000 in 2008 (the year before I started) to more than $500,000 in 2010. On top of those results, we also raised more than $500,000 in gifts and pledges, via online peer-to-peer fundraising for our Fill a Room with Care capital effort in 2009.
Here is some of what we’ve done:
Dedicated resources to online marketing and fundraising
Over the course of the last two years, I worked with a colleague in our marketing department to put together a team to lead our online ambitions. We also partnered externally with a digital marketing agency to support our fundraising and marketing efforts. On the fundraising side, we added software to manage web content, particularly related to transactions like event registrations, team (peer-to-peer) fundraising, and donations.
Integrated all channels
Our work isn’t done just online. We work to understand marketing and fundraising activity in the hospitals, on TV, in print and through the mail. Then, we make sure our social media, email, web content and mobile technology complement these other channels. This work means that ultimately social media isn’t working in a silo: it’s enhancing existing content to fit specific tools. We also work to make sure the content we use is set up to capitalize on the uniqueness of the online space. Web-based content needs to be more flexible, so it’s easier to customize and syndicate through all our marketing channels.
Shared good content and engaged our audience with social media
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They’re all just tools. At Children’s, we have great stories to tell. They happen within our walls everyday. We use the social media tools that exist to tell these important, human-interest stories, often through the use of photos and video. Just as importantly, we work to engage our online communities by responding to their questions, affirming their comments and being helpful in any way we can.
Made it easy to take action
Once the infrastructure, in terms of human resources and online ecosystems are in place, it’s important to make it easy for people to take action – to make a gift, to register for an event or to get information. People can be ridiculously lazy online: if it takes 1 too many clicks – gone. Confusing copy? Gone. We work hard to make information easy to find and forms easy to fill out.
We are off to a good start. But it’s clear that the pace of technological change – both software and hardware – will continue to cause disruptive change in 2011 and beyond.
So what are we doing?
Monitoring trends
I spend at least 10% of my time monitoring innovation to know what’s coming next, what it means for healthcare marketing and fundraising, and how we can harness new technology for our benefit.
Trying to do everything we did last year–again, better
We need to continue challenging ourselves: How do we engage more people more meaningfully? How do we make everything easier? How do we empower our audience to share and fundraise with us?
Partnering with start-up companies who have good ideas for raising money
Will all of these ideas work? No. But, we’re learning along the way and are in a position to take advantage of innovating thinking that does work.
Thinking about mobile
Smart phones and tablet computers (iPads, etc.) will be ubiquitous. Predictions are that more people will access the internet from phones than computers by 2014. I’m not sure it’ll take that long. What does that mean for the patient experience? How can we embed philanthropy, giving, and generosity in a way that allows everyone to connect with use through their devices at any time?
Additional Resources:
Here’s a link to our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/childrensminnesota Click on our wall and check-out the great testimonials from our patients and the way we interact with our ‘fans.’
Here’s an example of our most successful Fill a Room with Care page. This family used our technology to raise $100,000 in less than 6 months: http://giving.childrensmn.org/emersonriter
This is a microsite we built to support our year-end giving campaign: http://www.tearstotriumph.org/ The design of the site mirrored our year-end email, direct mail, TV, print and main site.
I’m constantly looking for new and interesting technology. Here’s a link to online articles I’ve bookmarked: http://www.diigo.com/user/jessestremcha In the left navigation, you can explore sub-categories of articles by clicking on one of the ‘tags.’
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