DonationTo | Donate Online

1. The quality of your fundraising page is key to getting more donations. Quality means taking the time to tell your fundraising story. Explain the history behind your fundraising efforts. Some examples are, taking the time to upload photos about your cause. If you expect visitors to take the time to donate, you should take the time to creating a quality fundraising page.

2. High quality photos matter.  A smartphone will enable you to take quality photos. To help with high quality photos sunlight will help - photos during the sunset or sunrise will provide the perfect setting for a high quality photo. This will avoid harsh shadows that are caused by direct sunlight.  

3. Include friends and family in your photos – Photos of friends and family will help build a community around your fundraising efforts. By uploading many photos including friends and family this will increase the quality of your story by displaying your current support. This will also create engagement within your fundraising page that can lead to additional donations.  

4. Video for your fundraising page – Video provides depth to fundraising page, and depth is what will influence visitors to donate. Again, avoid direct sunlight and shoot during sunset and sunrise. Shoot inside to avoid background noise so user can clearly hear you. Place your camera or smartphone on sometime solid to prevent the video frame from moving. Your video doesn’t need to be long either, 1-2 mins. Watch how Naada used a video to raise over $28,000 for medical bills.

5. How did your story begin – Details about the origin of your cause will give visitors perspective about the importance of your cause. An good story will give trust to new visitors to donate and increase overall engagement and sharing of your cause as well. 

6. Show an itemized list of how donations will be used – Below is an example of an itemized list for a medical donation page. This can be used for any type of fundraising campaign, this includes, funeral fundraising, marathon fundraising and more.

Where your donations will go:

Feb 10 • Emergency room triage, sutures, x-rays $1300

Feb 15 • Hand surgeon, splints, follow up visits $2850

Feb 20 • Anesthesiologist $2600

Feb 27 • Beth Israel Hospital $3255

7. Reminder –  High quality donation page will enable new visitors to quickly draw the connection between you and the cause. By building this trust you will increase the urgency to donate. This is why we suggest, adding many photos of friends and relatives. Providing the full history and story behind your cause.

8. Launch and announce your cause AFTER you have a few donations. Get a few family members and friends to donate before you launch and announce your cause. Mention, has already donated and how you appreciate their support. Details like this will get new potential donors to join and support your cause.

9: Get a team of friends and family who are known to have a large social group. We will call this team your “Amplification Team”. When you launch your fundraising page and announce to friends and family we can do this with a giant splash. By having many people do this at the same time would give you better leverage with the initial launch, in comparison to doing this alone.

10: The amplification team has two goals: Amplify exposure for your donation page  and to gain other recruits along the way to help amplify your donation page even further. Try to get five, 10 or 20 friends who actively use Facebook, LinkedIn and email (and other social networks).

11: Remind the amplification team of the goals. There will be two specific goals for the team to achieve.

12: We want to leverage their social network - Outreach to spread awareness on Facebook and LinkedIn and other social networks.

13: We want to leverage their email contacts- This will be key for the initial launch of the fundraising page and ensuring lots of emails go out.

14: Remember, the amplification team should consist of people you know that already have a large network of friends.

• This could be your sister who is in college.
• Your dad and his network of colleagues.
• This could be your mom and her friends in the neighborhood.
• Your three best friends who constantly spend all their time organizing social events.

15: Expectations for the amplification team –  Remind the team, it will not take a lot of time, but it will take small moments of dedicated time.

16: Have your amplification team use 1 click to share feature- DonationTo.com is enabled with many share features. This will enable your team to connect to all their contacts via email. Here is an example of this feature: https://www.donationto.com/Alex-Pearson-Recovery-Fund/email-share

17: Easy to share email feature: Simply select your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook/Windows or Mac address book. Confirm your connection and DonationTo  will send an email announcement to all your contacts for you.

18: Use more than 1 email account: Connect to all of your email accounts when using the DonationTo share feature. If you have Gmail and AOL, make sure to connect to Gmail and then also connect to your AOL account right after.

19: Use the same process for social media. Select LinkedIn, then connect all of your contacts and DonationTo will take care of the rest.

20: Share as much as you can for a big launch -  Get as many of your friends, family and loved ones to connect their email contacts to your campaign to help with the initial announcement. The initial launch is when the most donations take place. Without a good launch, most fundraising pages can be put at risk to hit their goal.

21: Timing is key to have a good launch. Amplify your fundraising page by having your team announce on the same day and time. To do this agree on a specific day and time – example, Wednesday at 10 a.m. In this case, everyone send out the same announcement. This is the day that everyone involved should connect their email contacts to your DonationTo page.

22: Timing should be the same for social. After your team has shared directly with their email contacts, share the same information via social media posts. These posts can take place on Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, Twitter and other social networks.

23: Keep going after you launch - The amplification team should be very reactive after the announcement. Here is their to-do list, and be sure to set these expectations for them.

24: Proactive and reactive to questions and comments - Replying quickly to emails to keep the donation page active. Encourage donations, and encourage those who can and cannot donate to further share the cause by using the donation page share feature via their email account.

25: Monitor social media. The amplification team should respond to tweets or likes on Facebook from potential supporters with additional tweets, comments and links. This will help your cause become a trending topic within your social network and outward.

26: Iterate this process - Create some short conclusions to help everyone on your team understand their tasks and remain focused.

Watch more fundraising video tips here: Part 1 of 32 fundraising mistakes, Part 2 of 32 fundraising mistakes, Part 3 of 32 fundraising mistakes.

Thanks again! From the DonationTo. To create your own fundraising page visit DonationTo.com