How To: Effective Virtual Campaign Pledge Pages
This campaign season for United Ways will be unlike any that has come before. Under the pressure of social distancing and the reality that many offices will remain empty until at least the end of the year, many United Ways are making the switch to virtual campaigns.
What these virtual campaigns look like varies greatly and depends largely on the capacity of local United Ways and the needs of employers. Despite the variety, a consistent trend has emerged within North American United Ways; in lieu of traditional paper pledge forms, many United Ways are developing virtual campaign pledge pages.
While developing effective campaign pledge pages can be a daunting task for United Ways, virtual campaign pledge pages have the potential to offer unique and powerful benefits when they contain the right information and are utilized appropriately.
In this blog post, we will explore what information you need to include on virtual pledge pages and how to utilize data to maximize donor conversions in order to maximize the success of this and future campaign seasons.
Pledge Page Basics
Some website design companies, such as OneEach Technologies, have begun offering templates for virtual pledge pages. These templates are highly customizable, so some United Ways may feel overwhelmed selecting the right content to include in these pages. While this blog post will spend time exploring the specifics of what you should include in your pledge pages, there are four broad categories of information that should be on each of your campaign pledge pages:
Campaign Specifics: Your page should list the name of the employer for which your pledge page has been developed and any details relevant to that campaign, such as office fundraisers or when the campaign ends
Contact Information: Your page should include contact information for either the campaign liaison at the employer or United Way staff who can answer donor questions
United Way Background: Your page should include information about the value of United Way and why someone should give to United Way
An Ask: Your page should conclude with a clear, compelling ask for a donor’s financial support with easy-to-follow instructions for making a donation
With these broad categories in mind, let’s take a deeper dive into building effective messaging for your campaign pledge pages.
Customize Your Campaigns
The key to developing effective virtual pledge pages is customization. In any in-person campaign presentation, you would strategically select a few key stories or statistics to highlight your United Way’s work based on what you expect would resonate with a particular audience. The same strategic selection of the information you share with a campaign should occur as you develop your virtual pledge pages.
As you develop your pledge pages, align the information you share with an employer’s philanthropic focus or the interests of employees. For example, if you have a virtual campaign within your local school district, make sure that the stories you tell are focused on education while your virtual campaign for a local hospital is focused on how United Way is working to improve the health of the community.
That said, you do not need your content to be wholly unique between campaigns. While each campaign should have its own pledge page, we would suggest that you only need to develop between one and three sets of messages that can be tweaked to align with each campaign’s interests.
Essential Information
How your pledge pages communicate the value of United Way and why people should give to United Way matters. It isn’t enough to just post your campaign video at the top of a pledge page and add a form for people to enter in their credit card information below. Instead, you need to fulfill your stakeholders’ informational needs, convey that information through messages that resonate, and make a clear and compelling ask for their support.
From our more than 30 years of donor research, we know that there are three pieces of information United Way needs to communicate with stakeholders in order for them to be willing to make a donation: the local issues your United Way is working to address, the actions you are taking to address those issues, and the results of your actions. This means that these three elements must be clearly articulated on your virtual campaign pledge forms in order for them to be effective as possible. We’ve written about this topic over the years ad nauseum and would invite you to explore our free webinar or blog posts to learn more about integrating these pieces of information into effective messages.
From our research we also know that when asked how they would prefer to learn about a United Way’s issues, actions, and results, stakeholders are almost perfectly divided between preferring stories and statistics. Therefore, when you fail to use either stories or statistics when communicating your issues, actions, and results, you lose the opportunity to make a connection with half of your potential donors. In order for your campaign pledge page to resonate with as many stakeholders as possible, your must to be sure to illustrate your issues, actions, and results through a combination of both stories and statistics.
Lastly, you need to be sure that your campaign pledge pages make a clear and compelling ask for support. Again, it is not enough to simply provide a donation form at the bottom of your pledge page. Instead, you need to cultivate a sense within stakeholders that their support is critical to improving their community. Your ask does not need to be long, but it should make clear that no matter their contribution, a stakeholder’s support will make change within the community possible. For example, you may consider an ask like: “Join us in supporting life-changing opportunities for our community’s most vulnerable through a donation. No matter the size of your gift, you will be making a difference in the lives of those who need our help the most.”
Honing Your Pledge Pages
The great blessing of virtual pledge pages is that they give you the ability to collect data on the effectiveness of different campaign messages and then use that data to craft more effective pledge pages for future campaigns. Since United Ways are hosting campaign pledge pages on their websites, they have access to all sorts of data relevant to maximizing the success of a pledge page. Of particular note is the ability of United Ways to calculate a conversion rate for pledge page visitors turned donors.
While differences between the results of in-person campaign presentations may be chalked up to variations in a presenters’ styles or their ability to connect with a crowd, virtual pledge pages offer sterile environments which can easily be compared to each other. Campaign pledge pages don’t lend themselves to truly randomized A/B tests, but if you see a particular set of messages outperforming others in campaign after campaign, you can use those messages to maximize the success of upcoming virtual campaigns.
Moving Forward
While the impetus for the mass conversion to virtual campaigns may have been driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, there already existed pressure from employers – especially large corporations – for United Ways to implement virtual campaigns. It is therefore unlikely that all of your campaigns that previously allowed in-person campaign presentations will return to in-person presentations once social distancing guidelines have been lifted.
We therefore strongly encourage you to dive head on into the challenge of developing compelling virtual campaign pledge pages. The time you take this year to develop powerful messages that communicate your United Way’s issues, actions, and results will be to your long-term benefit. Honing your messages using data from your website will strengthen future virtual campaigns.
At the end of the day, it boils down to this: the sooner your United Way is able to develop a compelling virtual pledge page, the sooner you can maximize future fundraising success.