Fundraising

I’ve spent most of my fundraising and professional career in digital and tech so I spend a lot of my time in conversations about, well, tech, digital, and the future. What’s changing on Facebook? What’s next with mobile? How will philanthropy be different with Millennials?

Traffic. Average Gift. Conversion. These are the 3 essential ingredients to fundraising and online fundraising.

Lifetime Value is the most important metric for your organization’s fundraising. The most powerful way to boost Lifetime Value is to keep donors around longer. The best way to keep donors around longer is to make them happy and satisfy their needs.

Ariga Ibabu. There’s about a 0.1% chance that I spelled his name right. But I don’t think he’ll mind because I’ve never met him. And yet, he’s been an influential person in my life and career. Let me explain…

Have you ever wondered why people don’t give? Or why people don’t give more? A frustrating question that took on a new meaning for me after I had visited a project in Zambia I was working on with Spark Ventures. After coming back I felt so passionate, so broken, so desperate to help that when people wouldn’t give I would think to myself “why don’t you get it!!!”. Fundraising from a position of “why don’t you get it” is a recipe for disaster however as not everyone does get it and why should they?

You are what you measure.

So goes the expression. An expression I personally believe in and the older I get and more experience I have, I think the importance of such a statement only grows. Measurement doesn’t just show progress or results but shows insights and, perhaps most importantly, shapes behaviour. So measuring, when it comes to nonprofit’s and fundraising, is a very under used tool and, hopefully, this post will be helpful in understanding measuring, how to go about it, and what are some things that you should measure.

It's a long-held assumption that you get what you pay for, and that charities should accept to either pay a lot for good online fundraising tools or be stuck with clunky systems that do not really do the job.

As the first social enterprise with a global vision of an equal and connected world, we like to do things differently here at KindLink. On our platform, charities can raise funds online and engage with their donors at no cost, using state of the art tools.