130. SPN: 22 Recommendations to Tune Up 2025’s Digital Fundraising Engine

Plus, is your internal view of the Donor Lifecycle fit for purpose?

Dec 09, 2024

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In this week’s SPN →

22 recommendations to tune up 2025’s digital fundraising engine
How brand and performance integrate to drive $$$
Why think in 12 months vs 3 month cycles
How to ensure your Org's internal view of the Donor Lifecycle fits the objective

and, plenty of jobs that took my fancy.

Let’s jump in!

Marketing Engine Tune-Up for 2025

When chatting website re-designs, it tickles me how many teams get distracted by prioritizing their deep desire to have moving imagery on their homepage.

What does the About Us page look like? What is our mission for the brand? Is the font-weight slightly off? The focus is on a bunch of things in the name of “We want to build a strong brand,” but in reality, without donors there is no brand. Or revenue.

You’re not a “brand” until people start advocating for you and donating to you and keep coming back such that they become brand merch wearing monthly pledge donors.

I love the concept of performance branding. It integrates go-to-market thinking, planning and teams. Technically, all ads drive brand awareness and help strengthen the halo for your Org. My favorite example of performance branding right now is enriched catalog ads on Meta. Yes, you could run basic DPA ads with a white background, or you could use technology to enrich them, add your Org colors, fonts, and logos, and get free brand lift from the paid spend.

This is what performance branding is to me. You’re building brand on the back of your existing spend. It’s more about optimizing your ads and the subtle tweaks you make to ensure the brand image stays top of mind while running all of your conversion campaigns. This mostly comes from the work you do to refine your ads, LPs, emails, etc. It’s all in the creative and design. (More on that next week).

Outside of our sector, many direct response brands leverage celebrity influencers and fall into a trap where everything has to be perfectly “on brand” for a video shoot or the way a product detail page (PDP) is laid out. They rely on organic traffic to come on its own and they forget the critical elements to really power the brand in a meaningful way.

Brand is critical. And we must use the right data and the right amount of it to inform builds, distribution and go-to-market campaigns.

So, here are 5 recommendations to tune up 2025’s marketing engine:

Site Optimization

Place badges and stickers on the PDP or donation page that engenders trust and encourage a higher quantity or amount be added to the donation cart.
Adopt Fundraise Up and update your website with their pre-built buttons, sliders, overlays… without hassling your already-stretched tech team. Donation experience is the lifeblood of any Org.
Add gamification to landing pages - test this - I’ve seen that giving the sense of “unlocking” impact or the feeling of being “rewarded” makes a big difference to the average gift size and CVR.
If you’re selling product, merchandise it smartly on the site — make a “Best Sellers” collection, make a “New? Start here” collection, and make bundles based on what you see people buying together or for different occasions that someone would use your product.
Make the site speed quicker! Compress and optimize your images, don’t choose cheap hosting options and reduce the number of re-directs you’ve got in your CMS.

Put Your Tech Stack to Work

Set up more aggressive review collection flows across email and SMS. Why not promote donor testimonials saying how seamless an experience it is to donate to your Org and have them sharing how much good you distribute? Social proof drives giving.
Syndicate any online reviews you have, especially with Google. You want these reviews to show up and build trust on organic and paid search.
Set up your post-donation surveys with another level of depth — instead of just collecting information that someone came from YouTube, also find out which influencer drove them. Ask and you shall receive…
Set up Google Tag Manager to track every click on your site and then trigger pop-ups or pixel events based on a web visitor activity, or just send better data back to ad platforms this way.
Go into your Monthly Pledge/Sustainer platform and set up a proper unsubscribe flow where if a donor cancels, you’re collecting enough data and have the right messaging setup post-churn.
Get into each part of your tech stack and figure out how to use the app 10% more than how you’re currently using it.

Creative Testing

Using your beautiful campaign video clips is great for the 4 seconds that people will care about it. In reality, what you really need is rapid creative testing to find the perfect mix of formats and hooks or angles to drive interest and intent.

Test different styles of videos (donor generated content, influencer, animation, slideshow, quick-cut production, etc).
Test different hooks in each video and study the engagement of the video to see where people spend more time watching — that should be the new hook.
Go through the most common donor service questions, pre-donation, and answer those in these videos.
Test different variations of static ads with different copy overlays.
Test new ad copy based on the audiences you’re targeting.

Forget Being “On Brand” All The Time

If you’re against testing something simply because it’s not on brand, you’re restricting yourself from shattering the glass ceiling above you. Better performance is likely right on the other side. The beauty of testing on channels like paid social is you can turn things on or off whenever you want to, so don’t be afraid to test something to a small audience.

Earlier this year a friend of SPN kept getting pushback from the Brand Marketing team that everything she wanted to test was off-brand. In reality, it was just optimized for conversion, so it didn’t have all the elements that were perceived to be “on brand”. Their acquisition cost was about $185, and they could barely get twenty donations a day.

But once they got cover from internal teams to do a fair amount of testing, within 2 weeks they were down to a $60 CPA and scaling without the CPA increasing. Cheers to cross functional collaboration. Fund raising is everyone’s responsibility.

Bonus: how did she get air cover? Aligned (shared) goals, co-created, tested versions with appropriate goals/performance, framed tests around “hypotheses”, demonstrated performance, built ongoing feedback loop, shared results widely.

Testing New Acquisition Tactics

Double-clicking into a performance marketing DNA, do more than just the basics of what everyone tells you to do around Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. Here are some examples of new tests to run:

Run advertorials and sponsored editorial content with publishers.
Run top of funnel (TOF) traffic to quizzes to collect emails and numbers, and build a 2-part funnel.
Build your own version of an Impact Trend Report to drive net-new eyeballs.
Run some comparison-style landing pages (LPs) from non-branded search traffic.
If you have products, test new bundle formats to run on Amazon alongside the stand-alone products.

Bonus: Dig into Donor Experience Analytics & Insights

Once you have all these dialed in, then it’s time to dig into the insights properly. The insights aren’t just coming from your fundraising dashboard, they’re also being pulled from organic social media, paid media, donor service team, your donors reviews, etc. Your insights should help you unlock efficiencies across the business: fundraising, marketing, donor services, programs, partnerships.

The Punchline

Any Org must have a rigorous approach to marketing and its delivery, especially online. PR, influencers, people tagging you, etc., is important, but they’ll never be an always-on solution.

Build your always-on machine through lots of testing, learning, understanding, iterating, and scaling. No matter how big your Org or New Year celebrity endorsement is, 2025 is the year to focus on building a stable, scaleable foundation from which fundraising becomes repeatable and predictable.

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

Bethany Christian Services: Philanthropy Director ($98,000 - $105,000)

UNICEF: Social Media Consultant

Run for Something: VP, Development ($162,100)

Came to Believe, Inc: Director of Fundraising & Special Events

DigDeep: Director of Annual Giving ($100,000 – $120,000)

Friends of the Earth: Executive Director (4 day week, 30 hours a week £97,905)

USA for UNHCR: Manager, Corporate Partnerships ($109,474 -$119,427)

Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity: Fundraising Compliance Manager (£38,200 - £39,700)

Cancer Research UK (CRUK): Head of Digital £85,000 - £90,000

American Heart Association: Direct Response Fundraising Content Manager ($80,000 - $90,000)

UNICEF: Adviser, Supporter Engagement Strategy (P-5)

ETF - Education & Training Foundation: Head of Data & Insight (£60,300)

→ More jobs updated daily to SPN’s sister website: www.pledgr.com

Explore: Build Your Tech Stack (link)

Searching for new tools or trying to trim down your tech stack? Play around in this infographic. I add to it most weeks.

The Donor Lifecycle: More than 3 Touches

I hear Orgs depict their Donor Lifecycle as the following process - from a person not knowing the Org at all to becoming a loyal supporter as fast as 3 months later:

A black line with a cross

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In reality, I don’t see it. Rather this simple, linear lifecycle represents the hey day when Direct Mail response rates were in the high 20%’s, and Paid Search had a RoAS of 7:1.

“Today’s” donors are obviously overloaded by hundreds of for- and not-for-profit brands fighting for their dollars on literally every platform they glimpse at. They actively tune your Org’s communications out – I shared 7 actionable tactics to deal with that in SPN #129.

For digital fundraising teams, underestimating the time, cost, and number of touches it takes to convert a person into an Org’s supporter leads to setting or committing to unattainable goals.

Lots of Orgs faced it this year since global emergencies (that they’d budgeted for) weren’t plentiful. Org’s wanting to increase their digital revenue in 2025 must break this pattern and ensure their internal view of the Donor Lifecycle fits the objective.

3 rules I’ve successfully used are:

Extend the horizon from immediate to 12-month return.
Make donor lifecycle omni-channel.
Make every channel omni-present.

Extend the horizon from immediate to a 12-month return. Most Orgs I know either set goals as an immediate CPA / RoAS for all their digital activity or as a 3-Yr lifetime value return that they rarely measure due to extreme attribution complexity and because knowing the actual performance of a marketing campaign only 3 years after it started usually proves to be utterly useless.

Neither time horizon allows digital fundraisers to scale advertising campaigns or new channels. Immediate positive RoAS is nearly impossible for most new channels, and a 3-year return gets misused by agencies shamelessly 36-x’ing every monthly transaction attributed to their impressions, claiming there will be no donor churn.

Orgs should change their Donor Lifecycle to a 12-month length.

In the first month, every acquired donor must “recoup” 30% of the cost of acquiring them. In other words, the immediate RoAS of campaigns driving net new donors must be at least 0.3:1.
In four months, every acquired donor must break even. Every campaign’s four-month RoAS needs to be at least 1:1.
In twelve months, accounting for churn, every acquired donor should drive a 2:1 RoAS. Every campaign's twelve-month RoAS needs to be at least 2:1.

It’s hard to acquire net new donors to the file – the above KPIs account for it while helping you make sure the finance team stays happy with the performance. If you have GA4 and any modern CRM, here is what you need to do to pull the above numbers for any of your already active campaigns for January 2024 as an example:

Work with your IT and Web teams to ensure the Transaction ID in GA4 matches the one in the CRM so you can map the donors in two systems.
To measure immediate return, use GA4 as a source of truth. Stick to the same attribution model you use now – whether last click or data-driven. Pull the revenue for a campaign (or entire channel) of choice in January and add the Transaction ID as a second dimension. Export the report and cross-reference the Transaction IDs against the CRM data. Exclude every existing donor and 2^nd+ donation – you can use Excel for it.
To calculate a four-month return, pull all revenue from the same donors for January – April from the CRM and include every transaction. Divide that revenue by January spend only.
To calculate a twelve-month return, extend the revenue horizon for an entire year.

The above shows an example of a campaign with close to 12 months of revenue. To make quicker decisions for campaigns running right now, use the following “monthly return targets” table:

Month 1 – 0.3:1
Month 2 – 0.5:1
Month 3 – 0.75:1
Month 4 – 1:1
Month 5 – 1.1:1
Month 6 – 1.3:1
Month 7 – 1.5:1
Month 8 – 1.6:1
Month 9 – 1.7:1
Month 10 – 1.8:1
Month 11 – 1.9:1
Month 12 – 2:1

If the campaign - or the entire channel - fails below the above KPIs at any point, decrease the budget accordingly to let it become positive and stop it a month later if it doesn’t help.

Make the donor lifecycle omni-channel. Most Orgs run Paid Search, Paid Social (Meta), Email, and likely at least some little Display. Very few extend beyond it into Native, Podcasts, other social platforms, and other channels. Donors interact with many more channels –YouTube, TikTok, Reddit...

Saying “be present in every channel” is great but extremely impractical and will burn the budget of every team and organization. The rule of thumb I developed is not to chase overall returns higher than what I outlined above. Stick to the RoAS targets, and instead of going after 3:1 or 4:1 RoAS across the entire campaign, add more channels to expand the reach, increase the frequency of impressions for existing donors, and decrease churn.

The “formula” for how many channels to include in the mix is based on how many new users every new channel can drive. Every channel should drive donations from at least 40%, and no more than 60%, of “new” users– while hitting the RoAS targets from the previous bullet. No less than 40% because every new channel should add incremental donors to the file (besides Email and SMS), and no more than 60% because every channel should also target existing donors on file and help increase their value.

Use GA4 to report on this metric and keep testing new channels every four months (once the previously added one breaks even). At some point, the share of new users for a channel you add will not hit 40%. Once it does, the channel you just added is only touching your “existing” universe of donors. Stop the test and either try another channel or drastically change targeting to go after new audiences.

Make every channel omni-present. The final part is switching away from “channels” and looking at the “donor” through the key steps in the Lifecycle that I outlined in earlier episodes of SPN:

First impression
First click
First website visit
First one-time donation
First recurring donation

Every channel

Email should be used to retarget at least some donors after the first click – those leaving their email address on the lead form – and for one-time and recurring donors.
Non-Brand Paid Search should be used as a first impression, click, and website visit.
Brand Paid Search should be used as the first website visit, and first donation source, and for every “donation” search query of existing recurring donors.
… and so on.

Establishing the rule of three helps prevent any channel from being “just retargeting” or “just prospecting.” If a particular channel can’t hit the KPIs from the first bullet while being present in at least three donor states, it isn’t incremental to the donor lifecycle and should be dropped from the mix altogether.