Welcome back to Grassroots Your Giving Season 2020! This year, we’re reposting some of our most helpful tips and tricks that will help you engage your community of small-dollar donors and give your end-of-year fundraising a boost. Your board members are some of your most impactful advocates: not only are they representatives of your organization and your community, they can be powerful grassroots fundraisers! With AB Charities, you can create peer-to-peer supporter forms that make it easy for your board members to connect their networks to your work. Read on to learn more about this tool:
There is no better time than giving season to get board members fundraising for you! They are some of your biggest advocates and have a clear personal connection to your cause, so invite them in to create contribution forms and make pitches to their networks about why your cause is so important! As your board members become grassroots organizers for your cause, they’ll help new donors build a strong relationship with your organization for the long term.
And we know your board members are busy: You can directly involve them in your important Giving Tuesday efforts without asking them to make a heavy lift. In fact, you have the tools to make fundraising actionable, accessible, and fun for them! Here are a few ways for you to make taking action easy.
1. Give folks peer-to-peer fundraising tools they can use in seconds
Your organization’s stakeholders can create their own fundraising pages on AB Charities in seconds to fundraise on your behalf. We call these pages supporter forms! Supporter forms put your community in the driver’s seat and allow advocates to mobilize their own networks to give.
Your board members can include personalized pitches on their supporter forms that explain in their own words why their friends, family, and professional networks should donate to your nonprofit this year-end. You can also encourage supporters to add a goal thermometer to the form that tracks either the number of donors or dollars raised, which adds urgency and excitement!
We know your board members juggle many priorities, which is why on AB Charities you can send them a link to finish creating a supporter form that you’ve already set up with a design and donation pitch!
All your board members have to do is create a custom web address and click the “Get Started” button. Then they’ll be brought to their personal form that they can customize and share with their networks!
Looking to make it even easier than a few clicks for your busiest board members? You can make the custom web addresses for your stakeholders and then send each one their specific supporter form link!
You can also make fundraising a friendly competition among your board. Check on who’s raising the most by heading to Contribution Forms in your Dashboard. Then click the “Supporter Forms” tab, where you’ll see all the supporter forms raising on your behalf, along with their contributions and dollars raised. Update your board with the current standings to give them a motivational boost and keep the fundraising going!
You can access all of the donor data from these forms by following these instructions!
2. Pre-write fundraising emails your board members can quickly send off
Now it’s time for your board members to share their supporter forms with their networks! Doing as much prep work as possible lowers your board’s barrier to action, so write fundraising emails that your board members can send to their networks to ask for donations!
Following some guidelines for crafting a successful fundraising email, you can write an email from your stakeholders’ point of view that explains why they support your cause and asks people to invest in your important work by donating! Your board members can take this pre-written email, add their supporter form link and signature, and send it off to the personal inboxes of friends, family, and colleagues.
It’s go time!
You have less than two months to go until Giving Tuesday and the end-of-year push, so it’s time to empower your biggest stakeholders to become digital organizers themselves! You have the tools and strategies to make peer-to-peer fundraising on your behalf so easy and motivating that any board member can begin introducing your cause to their communities. You’re ready to rally your supporters around year-end fundraising now to ensure your work continues far into the future.
P.S. If you need to discuss board engagement strategies or have questions, now’s the time to give our nonprofit fundraising experts a call! We’re always happy to talk digital tactics that work for you.
