Many digital fundraisers have experienced several impactful changes in the past few years including increased online demand, the introduction of new privacy restrictions, and the shifting in donation patterns. Such challenges, along with other equally impactful external events, demand that nonprofit organizations invest more time and effort into building and cultivating their online community.
Digital Advertising’s Latest Challenges
[Challenge 1: Increased Online Demand] The year 2020 was unique, to say the least. Today, in 2024, we are still feeling the long tail of the pandemic impacting everyone’s lives – and for many, our jobs too. As 2020 and the years that followed have accelerated the rate at which organizations were migrating to the online environment, we are seeing record-breaking numbers of nonprofits competing for a piece of the digital marketing pie. This fast migration has caused a heightened demand for ad placement making it more difficult for organizations to get their message across through the clutter and reach their target audience.
[Challenge 2: New Privacy Restrictions] If you have been paying attention to the news around digital advertising, you have probably heard terms like cookies, pixels and data privacy. In the past few years, many have voiced their concern about users’ data privacy while top companies have taken steps to ease their users’ minds. One of the most prevalent steps taken to support data privacy was Apple’s rollout of the IOS 14 update in 2021 which gave its consumers an opt-out option from being tracked. Appel’s update along with many other changes across the board have created holes in the data needed to conduct digital marketing as usual.
Without going into the technical portion of data tracking and new restrictions, it is important to understand that digital marketing heavily relies on data tracking. Understanding user behavior online is not only important to retarget them later, but to reach them with content that is relevant and timely to them. Therefore, changes like IOS 14 and all the many that have followed, have a detrimental impact on how digital fundraising marketers identify donor prospects and deliver the best experience to existing donors.
[Challenge 3: Shifting in Donation Patterns] Another big challenge impacting online giving has been the shift in donation patterns which have become harder to predict. For example, the year 2020 and part of 2021 saw an overwhelming giving response from supporters of nonprofit organizations. In particular, the Hunger and Poverty sector was positively impacted. Since then, giving patterns have shifted multiple times as the pandemic effect dust settles. While nonprofits continue to raise more funds compared to pre-pandemic years, online fundraising trends now look slightly different every year. For example, in 2022 our Donor Detectives Nonprofit Benchmarks showed a smaller number of donations but at much higher values than the prior year. In 2023, the opposite trend was true. All of this is to say that while donor response during and after the pandemic was extremely positive and impactful, it also brought much uncertainty in how to predict future behavior.
[Challenge 4: External Events] If all the challenges mentioned above don’t seem enough to make digital fundraising difficult, add to this list emerging external events. In the past two years, we have seen wars and natural disasters impacting people’s livelihoods around the world. As a result, many domestic nonprofit sectors have seen a decline in year-over-year revenue as more funds go towards supporting Disaster/International Aid organizations. While it is important to support such international efforts, domestic nonprofits find themselves down year-over-year which is impacting their programs here at home.
Building Online Community to Counter Digital Challenges
[Solution] There is no silver bullet to counter so many challenges, but our team has found an easy, inexpensive, and effective tactic for organizations to build (and maintain) a strong digital foundation. Running engagement and cultivation ads on social media and other channels consistently has proven to be a strong tool for organizations to reach a wide audience, generate high engagement, and cultivate their existing supporters and followers. All coming together to build a strong online community that cannot be shaken by increased demand, privacy restrictions, and other challenges.
Turning an Organic Post into an Ad
Having a consistent presence in digital media is a must-have, and most nonprofits do a great job at it. Many organizations don’t know that their current organic posts can be turned into ads to reach a much wider audience and take engagement to the next level. While organic posts only show in the page followers’ feeds, ads can be targeted to contact lists and prospects modelled after the desired audience group (e.g. a lookalike audience pool modelled after active donors to show the ads to high-quality donor prospects).
For example, our Animal Welfare client SPCA of Wake County noticed that one of their organic posts had a particularly high engagement and decided to try this method to reach a wider audience. Our team turned the original organic post into an ad which saw an outstanding success. The ad was shown over 100k times, reached almost 80k unique Facebook and Instagram users, and generated 6.7k engagements including clicks, comments, and shares.
Turning an Article, Blog Post, or News Broadcast into an Ad
Another great tactic is to utilize first or third-party content that is relevant to the organization to create a “news” ad. This strategy has proven to be a great tool for our client The Community Foodbank of New Jersey as they are often featured in local newspapers’ articles and broadcasts. In the last three years CFBNJ has served over 2.7 million impressions and reached over 1 million unique users following this strategy allowing them to educate the community, further their mission, and cultivate their existing supporters.
Overall Marketing Benefits
From a Digital Marketing Funnel perspective, the cultivation and engagement ads strategy addresses multiple levels of the funnel. By reaching such a wide audience, the ads help fill the funnel at the very top by increasing brand awareness to those who are less familiar with the organization. Moving one step down into the funnel, the strategy is also effective at adding to brand recognition to those who have been exposed to the brand before and generating engagement overall. Finally, one of the biggest strengths of this type of ad is that it cultivates existing supporters, volunteers, followers, etc. ensuring retention.
In conclusion, the digital landscape has experienced multiple changes in the past few years with many more to come. Such changes create new challenges for digital marketing, particularly for nonprofits to conduct digital fundraising as usual. As most of such challenges are outside of our control, digital marketers and nonprofits must adapt and find ways to counter the downsides of the ever-changing digital world. One effective strategy that Donor Detectives has implemented for multiple clients has been to invest resources into engaging and cultivating audiences via paid advertising.