How do you convince people to give to you, even if they don’t know your cause? That is most people. Most people have no reason to care about your cause. That’s okay. Your job is to find the people who DO have some reason to care about your cause. How do you find those people?
Start with where they are. They are the ones typing search words into Google. So for example, if you’re a cancer charity, they’re the ones typing “Multiple_myeloma FAQ” or “Cancer caretaker meetup Kansas city” into their search engine to see what comes up. If you are a cancer charity in Kansas city, you can meet them there and show them the support that your nonprofit provides, both online and offline.
What if you’re a human services nonprofit, for example, a nonprofit that helps single moms finish college, like H.O.P.E. Inc. in Georgia? What are people searching for around your cause? Maybe they’re searching for “Georgia college scholarships” or “single mom scholarships atlanta” or “adult learning balance work and job” or some other combination. You can start to find people who need your services, or who are doing searches for their friends and family members. These are the people who can then give back to your nonprofit. But you have to give them something to do on your website aside from listing your email address. Maybe they could sign up for your e-newsletter. Or maybe they could download a free pdf with all of the local resources that they might need, like a place to find cheap furnishings, or diapers, or infant formula, or a place to sign up for food stamps. Whatever your human services clients need, or whatever your donors need to understand about your clients, make sure that it’s readily available on your site.
What if you’re SCRAP SF, a charity dedicated to helping people recycle and make new and beautiful items out of scrap materials? Look at what your shop sells. People are googling “cheap teacher art supplies oakland, CA” or “Glass tiles for painting, california” or “ceramic tiles san francisco,” or “remainder fabric depot 95041” or something like that, and there you are, ready and waiting to help them. once they come into your shop, how can you keep them? That’s another post, but in the meantime, these words will help them find you.
The excerpt below is just one chapter from my book, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Social Media. It goes into detail to helps you convert website visits to donations. How can you help people climb up your ladder of engagement to want to donate to you? This chapter lays out how this could look, with concrete examples.
Does it work? Well, as of this writing, I have 21,000 monthly readers, 1,100 enewsletter subscribers, 3,000 twitter followers, and 500+ LinkedIn followers. I’ve been asked to speak at conferences, and given webinars to thousands of people. I’ve spoken about social media to the City of Austin and many others. Creating a ladder of engagement has helped me go from someone no one had ever heard of in November 2009 into someone who can help thousands of people each month with fundraising advice, and also give people a chance to learn even more with webinars, workshops, and my books! Pretty sweet, if you ask me! And it can work for your nonprofit too.
Check out the preview below!
Converting Visits to Sales, Step by Step
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