How Best To Integrate Your Fundraising Across Digital Platforms

It’s worth investing a little time and effort in planning your digital fundraising from the outset to make sure you spread your all-important message reaches a larger audience of followers and fans.

If your online fundraising is not integrated across your different platforms – donation pages, social media and emails etc - then it is highly likely that your fundraising campaign may appear disjointed, and therefore have less impact in generating in the support your efforts deserve. In other words, your online fundraising all needs to coordinated to make sure you reach the maximum number of people possible.

Just a short time ago, a planning your digital fundraising would have solely revolved around a website or donation page. Now there are many online platforms which need to be considered, principally social media, with Facebook and Twitter being some of the primary sources, alongside YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

With all of these options to consider – it is possibly best to go back to basics and identify who your audience is. There’s little benefit to regularly posting about your fundraising if you are using the wrong platform or your audience aren’t seeing your messages. 

1. Use a platform you know

It’s best to use platforms that you are comfortable with and that you use regularly - as you are more likely to have a larger number of followers than on platforms you’ve rarely used.

2. Follow your audience

Discover which of your social media platforms most of your friends and family use, what they use them for and how you can best engage with them. Send different types of messages on different platforms and see which ones generate the most feedback. 

3. Match your content to the platform

Certain messages work best on certain platforms. So if you're using Instagram it’s key to think about the image, whereas on Twitter short, direct messages work well. Try to tailor your messages to the different platforms you're using and make sure you use hashtags on the platforms where it’s relevant.  

4. Check out the competition

Also, why not ‘surf’ other fundraisers donation pages and social media sites and review how successful they have been at using social media. Are they reaching a good, responsive and above all generous audience and what lessons can you learn from them?

You can gain an important insight into their effectiveness by the number of likes and shares they have on their posts about their fundraising – and then make your own decisions on which digital platforms and what type of posts to use for your own campaign.

5. Be selective

Cherry picking the most useful platforms for your own fundraising event or cause, means that your digital workload will be far less time consuming throughout your campaign and will be far more effective, particularly if your message can be created as one piece of content then shared in different guises across various channels.

For example, it could entail a short tweet linked to an image placed on Instagram, which is then published on your Facebook page, supplemented by an email notifying friends, family and work colleagues of full details – and how they can contribute – and directing them to your website or online donation page.

6. Use your email template

If you work in a job that see’s you sending lots of emails each day – why not add your social media icons and a mention of your fundraising to your message template. People will eventually get curious and start to check out your pages.

7. Investigate social software

If you have a slightly bigger budget for promoting your fundraising, there are a number of time-saving software which can link your digital campaigns together. They allow you to input your message in once and seamlessly post it out to all of your social media channels.

Some platforms, such as Hootsuite, offer free 30 day trials, which is a good way to try out the time-saving technology before paying to use it longer term. And, if you’re looking for a low-cost, quick boost to your fundraising you could even use it for the month leading up to your event and then stop your account after 30 days.

8. Delegate to coordinate

The alternative is to attempt to move seamlessly between formats and devices, possibly recruiting family members or friends - to assist in sending out information in a coordinated manner, such as appeal updates, personal messages and target fund totals.

That way you will spend less time on screen and be able to devote more effort to your other fundraising tasks that will hopefully ensure your charity effort is a well-publicised success.

Feeling inspired? Why not view our list of  Partner Charities  and pick a great cause to support.

Picture credit: Vasin Lee / Shutterstock.com