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When To Ask Donors For Cash
sms text fundraising

Birthdays, anniversaries, vacation memories, retirements are all milestones. While in some cases you don’t want to be reminded, there are many ways a nonprofit marketer can help an organization cash in on them.

The Wounded Warrior Project leverages milestones in in had a response rate tick upward of 35 percent leading to a 27 percent hike in gross revenue. A straightforward letter package led to a 1,398 percent gain in net revenue from those donors, who were grabbed before they lapsed.

There were many concepts discussed during a session titled “#Stealsmart: What Nonprofit Fundraisers Can Learn from For-Profit Digital Marketers,” at the 2018 Bridge To Integrated Marketing Conference in National Harbor, Md.

The panelists said that SMS (short message service) produces six to eight times greater engagement than email because the average person looks at their phone 150 times daily. SMS is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet, and mobile-device systems.

SMS uses standardized communication protocols to enable mobile devices to exchange short text messages. It originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers that used standardized phone protocols. These were defined in 1985 as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards. The first SMS message was sent in 1992.

And, a fundraising appeal via a social media messenger has a response rate five times greater than email with a cost per acquisition roughly half than Facebook ads.

Organizational blasts are generally news, updated action alerts, rapid response and fundraising appeals.

Don’t forget voice technology is starting to gain steam, according to the panelists. More than one in six Americans owns a smart speaker, up 128 percent since January 2017. Those donors can react to massages with simple voice commands.