We’ve Moved
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Brick Factory, a Washington, DC-based digital agency founded by former employees of The Bivings Group. You can read the details of the transition here.
As a result of the change, The Bivings Report will no longer be updated, although we intend to keep the site up as an archive of the great content that has been produced over the years. To read new entries, please check out the Brick Factory blog, Brick by Brick.
Five Fundraising Tips from the charity:water September Campaign
From a fundraising perspective, one of the great successes of the last few years has been charity: water. In five years the organization has evolved from a lean startup charity into a fundraising juggernaut that has raised millions online and provided potable water to an estimated two million people.
The organization just rolled out its annual September campaign, which is their big fundraising push each year. While charity: water clearly has more resources at its disposal than the average non-profit at this point, the fundamental set up of the campaign is something that any organization should be able to replicate.
(1) Set a goal and a timeline.
The goal of this year’s September campaign is to raise $1,200,000 by the end of September. On their site they include a real-time counter showing their progress in the campaign.
Setting clear goals like this and showing progress helps to make donors feel invested in the campaign and creates a sense of community.
Continue reading “Five Fundraising Tips from the charity:water September Campaign” »
Announcing Giving eCards
An increasing part of our work at The Bivings Group revolves around helping non-profits and political organizations fine tune their fundraising strategies. This work has taught us that raising money is tough. The down economy has created fierce competition for donor dollars, so organizations have to get creative in order for their solicitations to have an impact.
Into this environment we’re pleased to launch Givings eCards, a new product that provides organizations with a creative and cost-effective way to raise money online.
An eCard is a personalized image and message that an organization’s supporters can send to their friends and family. Giving eCards allows your supporters to not only send a custom eCard through the site, but make a donation to your organization in someone’s name.
Here is how it works from an organizational perspective:
- Organizations sign up for a free account on www.givingecards.com. When signing up, the organization reserves a custom URL for their Giving eCards page (www.givingecards.com/page_name).
- Once the account is created, organizations upload their custom designed eCards to their account. eCards can be categorized dynamically, allowing for sets of cards to be created for common occasions such as birthdays,the 4th of July, graduation, etc.
- Once the eCards are uploaded, the organization promotes their eCard page to their supporter base via email, social media, website links, etc.
- As supporters donate and send cards on behalf of friends and family, the money is automatically deposited into the Paypal account of the organization. Giving eCards takes 5% of the amount raised on top of Paypal’s fees.
- Organizations can access and export all donor information from their Giving eCards control panel at any time.
We’re planning to launch the product in closed beta next week with a more complete roll out in July. If you are interested in giving the product a whirl, please visit www.givingecards.com and sign up to request access to the beta.
Stay tuned….
eCards Organization Page
eCard Purchase Page
Nonprofit Benchmarks 2011: Email
M+R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network recently released its “2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study” covering a broad range of digital issues regarding NPOs. The study has a lot of great information that I intend to breakdown and analyze in a few manageable posts. Today, we’ll start with Email.
As many nonprofits know, a large, engaged email list is like gold. Crafting a simple email, sending to your supporters and watching the donations, petitions signatures, and/or website traffic roll in is like hitting an easy button for engagement. But, as most know, that sort of Utopian world exists only for the elite few who have constantly refined, built, and reengaged their supporters over and over.
Lets take a look at some key stats from the study:
13% Average Email Open Rates
One of the most frustrating things about email is the open rate. Having a list of 10,000 and only 1,300 people opening your messages may seem disappointing but keep in mind that these numbers are often underreported. Many email clients use a small embedded .gif file that counts the number of loads to determine opens so users with images turned off will not be counted.
1.9% Average Click Through Rates
Just when you thought you made a breakthrough with your open rates you realize your stuck with a low click through rate. Your 2,000 opens just turned into only 38 clicks. Sorry to say its an unfortunate truth that not everyone is going to want to do what you ask them to – even if what you are asking is really, really great. I’ll touch on it a bit more later but clear consistent messaging and calls to action can help with this one.
18% Email List Churn Rate
Season change and so do email addresses. Through unsubscribers, inactive email addresses, and the like your list will constantly be losing emails. Its important to remember that this is a natural and sometimes good process. Constantly monitoring the health of your email list is a good practice to get into – what’s better 5,000 people that you know exist and will respond to your calls to action or 10,000 that never look at anything you send them?
The Bivings Group suggestions for improved numbers
Numbers are great, but you’ll be hard pressed to find an “average” organization that fits a cookie cutter mold. Here are a few tips on improving these numbers regardless of where you fall:
Analyze the Success of Emails
Every list will be different and no supporter is the same. Track the days your emails were sent, the number of links in the email, etc. Did you use a specific template? What time of day did you send it? How many days since your last email? Take a look at all those factors and how they effect your open rates, click throughs, and shares. Now am I saying just because one email you sent on a Tuesday was extremely successful that you should send all emails on a Tuesday? Absolutely not. I am saying that tracking and monitoring all of these factors will help you develop a better overall strategy.
Eating Our Own Dog Food
One thing we preach to our clients is the need for an iterative approach to the development of websites. Too many organizations neglect their website for long periods, and then launch a major redesign project every three or four years that ends up monopolizing staff resources and breaking the bank. Assuming the site is on solid technical ground, developing iteratively by making frequent, small improvements is a much more manageable approach. We decided to eat our own dog food and apply our philosophy to our own website.
The current version of www.bivings.com has been up for over a year, and everyone at The Bivings Group was anxious to start making improvements. We were happy with the Content Management System we were using (Drupal) and thought the overall site design had held up well. We wanted to make a series of refinements as opposed to completely overhauling the site.
So we decided to redesign the site section-by-section. Instead of making all our improvements at once, we created 3-4 smaller projects that could each be accomplished in a few days time. Late last week, we decided to start with our homepage.
Our old homepage featured a Flash branding element that we all agreed had worn out its welcome. We feel the best way to tell the story of our firm is to show our work, so we wanted project samples to be the first thing people see when coming to the site. These examples will introduce visitors to our various practice areas. We also wanted to move away from using Flash generally so that our site would render better on the iPad, iPhone, etc.
The old homepage featured three columns of news items at the bottom of the page. It was too much. Google Analytics showed us that because we were providing so much news, users were overwhelmed and not clicking on any of it. We think by more prominently featuring fewer items we’ll see better results. If we don’t, we’ll tweak some more.
You can see before and after shots below, and can check out the site live here. Look for more improvements in the coming weeks.
Let us know what you think.
