Encouraging Your Donors to Give During a Crisis
Fundraising has long been a challenge for local United Ways, and the blame for the difficulty of fundraising has been placed on everything from shifting donor demographics to changing technologies. While these and many other factors certainly contribute to the increasing difficulty of workplace campaigns and other fundraising efforts, there is one underlying factor that makes all of these challenges even more difficult: how you talk to your donors.
When it comes to asking donors for their support, most United Ways use too many messages that are far too complex. These messages are often difficult for donors to understand and hard for your staff and volunteers to communicate. Plus, adding the current coronavirus crisis into the mix of things to talk about has the potential to make messaging even more confusing for donors.
While our I-A-R formula is an excellent template for simplifying your messaging, having a simple message isn’t enough to engage your donors and get them to give; your message needs to be powerful and compelling while also being sensitive to the impact of COVID-19 on your community.
Based on our donor research and experience directly supporting marketing efforts at local United Ways, we have developed a simple five-step process for developing powerful messages that compel your donors to give. In recent months, we have also worked with local United Ways to develop effective approaches for attracting donors who have already supported your local coronavirus relief fund and those who feel addressing COVID-19 is more important than supporting United Way’s other work.
Learn How to Craft Messages that Engage Your Donors During a Crisis
We’re excited to share our easy five-step process for creating powerful, compelling messages and guidance for how to appropriately acknowledge the impact of COVID-19 in our upcoming webinar How to Craft Messages that Engage Your Donors During a Crisis.
This webinar will be accompanied by a follow-up workshop during which webinar attendees and their teams will be able to share the messages the have developed through our five-step process with other United Ways and the staff at Perspectives. Together, we will hone your messaging so that it is both as powerful as possible and sensitive to the coronavirus crisis. This will be a great opportunity for you to test your messaging and benefit from the suggestions and experiences of other United Ways.
Join Us
We invite you to join us on September 29, 2020 from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. to learn:
What your donors need to know in order to give and the messages your donors don’t want or need to hear
How to use our simple five-step process to craft a powerful, focused message that will motivate your donors to give
Guidance for how to acknowledge the impact of COVID-19 as you speak with donors
How to Craft Messages that Engage Your Donors During a Crisis is a how-to session for creating powerful messages for your United Way. Anyone at your United Way who is responsible for creating or using messaging to engage with donors should attend this webinar.
For more information or to join us on September 29 for How to Craft Messages that Engage Your Donors During a Crisis, please click here.