Are you ready to build your nonprofit’s online audience in the new year? Consider these three innovative strategies to connect with new supporters in 2022.

By Cassie Losquadro, Solutions Executive at GoodUnited

There are many strategies for discovering new donors for your nonprofit. Perhaps you rely on word of mouth and encourage existing supporters to share their stories and bring their peers into the fold. Or, perhaps you use direct mail to send information about upcoming events in your local area.

These strategies aren’t bad, by any means. However, there is power in embracing entrepreneurship and taking a risk on innovative strategies to find new supporters online.

For example, your nonprofit likely has an entire audience of potential supporters online that you haven’t encountered or attempted to engage with before. By embracing the third wave of giving, social fundraising, you can not only find those online supporters but also retain them for the long term.

This guide will focus on three social fundraising-driven strategies for finding new supporters online, including:

• Virtual-First Fundraising
• Thank-You Notes
• Conversational Messaging

The GoodUnited team specializes in helping nonprofits elevate their social giving practices, so we’ve seen firsthand the power that these strategies can have when discovering new supporters online. With that in mind, all three of the following strategies are related to social giving— whether it’s virtual-first fundraising experiences, thanking existing supporters, or stewarding social supporters for long-term relationships.

Let’s dive in.

Virtual-First Fundraising

Virtual-first or virtual-native fundraising experiences describe fundraisers that are created to take place entirely online through social networking sites. Rather than planning a traditional, in-person fundraiser and formulating ways to incorporate online engagement into it, virtual-native fundraisers are conceptualized with the internet in mind from step one.

This is part of what we call the third shift in fundraising, a new frontier for nonprofit efforts. First, nonprofits were fundraising through direct mail and using mailing addresses to send and receive gifts. Later, the second shift occurred as nonprofits embraced online fundraising through email and websites. Now, the third shift— fully in-channel fundraising and engagement through virtual-first fundraising— is here.

Virtual-native fundraising is so powerful because research has shown that it’s an additive fundraising method.

With more traditional fundraising efforts, your nonprofit likely carefully builds a fundraising calendar in which campaigns don’t overlap (or if they do, they target different audiences). This is because you don’t want to target the same donors over and over again in a short time period. Soliciting donations soon after a supporter has given to your organization can lead to donor burnout.

However, the additive nature of virtual-native fundraisers alleviates this concern. “Additive” essentially means that the fundraisers build on top of your existing campaigns, rather than drawing support away from them in the form of donors giving to the virtual campaign over another one. This is possible because virtual-first fundraisers connect with an entirely new audience — an online audience that is likely to be interested in your nonprofit but hasn’t engaged with it before.

This is noticeable in the Challenges on Facebook hosted by Susan G. Komen in 2021. The nonprofit connected with 13,000 new supporters, 90% of whom were new to Komen. 

To make the most of virtual-native fundraising in 2022, consider following Komen’s lead and incorporating Challenges on Facebook into your strategy. A Challenge is a time-bound peer-to-peer fundraising effort. During the Challenge, participants complete a task (such as running, walking, or calisthenics) while raising funds for your nonprofit using a Facebook fundraiser. Participants are added to a Facebook group to connect with one another and experience a digital community.

Here are the basic steps of hosting a Challenge on Facebook:

1. Choose a Challenge task.
2. Create the corresponding Challenge group on Facebook.
3. Use Facebook ads to spread the word about the fundraiser.
4. Once participants sign up and the Challenge begins, engage with the group by sharing discussion topics, fundraising tips, and more.

To maximize the audience-discovery potential of these fundraisers, target your ad campaigns to groups that are outside of your normal audience— such as lookalike audiences that haven’t engaged with your nonprofit before. Additionally, hold multiple events throughout the year. By layering Challenges on Facebook into your fundraising strategy, you’ll have a diverse, multichannel fundraising calendar that maximizes revenue.

Thank-You Notes

Online fundraising has evolved— now, with social fundraising tools, your supporters can start fundraisers on behalf of your nonprofit and drive those fundraisers across the finish line before you’re even aware of them. This is a major benefit of online fundraising, as donations can come in without any additional work from your nonprofit. However, it’s also a challenge as you may have existing online supporters that you’re simply unaware of!

The best way to capture one-time social supporters— for example, individuals who conduct a birthday fundraiser for your nonprofit on Facebook but haven’t engaged with you otherwise— as long-term champions is by thanking them for their efforts.

One example of expressing appreciation virtually is posting thank-you comments on all fundraisers started for your nonprofit on Facebook.

While Facebook won’t notify you when users create a fundraiser on your behalf, you can discover newly-created fundraisers using the Sort & Filter tool. Essentially, you’ll navigate to the “Fundraisers” section of your nonprofit’s profile and use the tool to:

• Sort to show recently-created fundraisers first.
• Filter out any fundraisers on which you’ve already posted a thank-you note.

This tool is crucial as the default “Fundraisers” view will first show campaigns that are closest to their goals or that are almost at their end date. This means you could be overlooking newer campaigns, especially if those campaigns take longer to raise a significant amount.

Once you’ve sorted and filtered your campaigns, go through and post thank-you notes on each individual campaign. Admittedly, this can be a time-intensive process, especially for nonprofits that have a significant amount of social support. Consider working with a social fundraising services provider, which can automate much of this process for you.

Discovering new supporters online isn’t always finding entirely new people to connect with— sometimes, it’s making the most of the support you already have, but that you’re unaware of.

Bonus! This section focuses on how to thank individuals who start fundraisers on your behalf. But what about the supporters who donate to those fundraisers? GoodUnited has a full guide to thanking donors on Facebook to help you get started.

Conversational Messaging

Discovering individuals online who are interested in your nonprofit and willing to fundraise on your behalf is only part of the challenge. The second part is engaging with those individuals, building a relationship between them and your nonprofit, and retaining them for years to come.

One of the best ways to do this online is through conversational messaging, or one-on-one conversations between a representative from your nonprofit and an online supporter held via a social media chat functionality. For example, in the thank-you notes from the previous section, you can invite supporters to start a chat with your nonprofit using Messenger. In Messenger, you can share:

• Gratitude: Thank the supporter for their work on behalf of your nonprofit and discuss the impact that the funds they raised will have. The more specific you can get, the better!
• Educational Information: From the donation payout process to whether Facebook fundraising has fees— it doesn’t— your supporters will likely have many questions about how social fundraising works.
• Opportunities: You can share upcoming fundraisers and volunteer campaigns that the individual can participate in. Or, you can share information about matching gift programs so the supporter can speak with their employer about beginning the gift match process!
• Questions and Surveys: This could be as straightforward as asking the supporter about what types of opportunities and communications they’d like to receive in the future, or more complex such as sharing a link to an external survey where they can provide additional information.
• Additional Contact Data: One of the biggest controversies with social fundraising is that Facebook retains most donor and participant data, which can make it challenging for nonprofits to connect with supporters off of the platform down the line. In your messaging sequence, ask them to share additional contact information such as their mailing and email addresses. This way, you can connect with that supporter in your multichannel efforts as well!

Conversational messaging is so powerful because it can be customized to each of your individual supporters’ interests and needs. Rather than sending out information en masse, which is how social media has been used previously, you can tailor your communications to build a relationship with each individual.

And, if you’re worried about holding conversations with hundreds or even thousands of social supporters, there are social fundraising services providers that can assist with that task as well. They can create custom automated messaging sequences that are tailored to both your nonprofit and your supporters, creating a realistic and valuable experience for each individual who opts in to chat with your organization via Messenger.

Wrapping Up: Next Steps After Discovering New Supporters Online

When you discover a new audience online, you’ll suddenly have access to a wealth of information— contact details, preferences, demographics, and more. Prioritize your nonprofit’s data hygiene as you expand your online engagement efforts to ensure your organization’s constituent relationship management (CRM) system isn’t overwhelmed by all of your new supporters.

From there, it’s up to you to continue engaging with these supporters and building relationships over time! Aim to treat your newfound online supporters as you would those discovered through more traditional means. By embracing the third wave of giving, social fundraising, you’ll be set up for success in the coming years. Good luck!

Cassie Losquadro is a sales leader at GoodUnited, the social giving solution. Cassie has spent the last 5 years in the fundraising technology space. Cassie is energized by working with nonprofit leaders and changemakers who are to a person, saving the world through their initiatives. Hailing from Rhode Island, Cassie lives in Charleston, SC with her husband, two children, and a rescue pup, Bella. Connect with Cassie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassiefaella/