Concentric Growth: The Fuel to Your Best Ever Fundraising Season Fire

Congrats, you’ve got your socks on and dominated your donation page! You’re testing, learning, and optimizing at a blistering pace. You’re already seeing results. Now what?

Now, we get to start having some FUN!

With an unshakable foundation and a donation page you can count on, it’s time to start pouring gas on your fundraising fire - it’s time to increase traffic to your donation experiences!

“Sure, let’s just flip the switch. We’ve been waiting for you to explain it.” 🙄 - every fundraiser reading this as sarcastically as possible.

I get it, if you had a secret stash of potential donors in your back pocket, you would have cashed in those chips months ago. But let me offer you some encouragement - you’ve been fighting an uphill battle in the past, driving (often unqualified) traffic to less-than-ideal giving experiences built on platforms that weren’t ready to support the strategies you were employing. That’s the beauty of the learning and optimization season - we can still see where we’ve been, but we’re looking at it in the rearview mirror as we race towards #givingseason success this year!

It’s time to introduce Concentric Growth to your fundraising program. Concentric growth is a strategic framework that helps organizations like your pinpoint the areas for optimization that will make the next best impact on your fundraising program.

Concentric Growth starts by isolating the single most important variable in the success of your fundraising program, then works step-by-step in reverse through your pipeline, optimizing each stage along the way. Believe it or not, we’ve already been following the concentric growth model throughout this series. With your donation experience identified as the most important variable, we started with a hyper-focus on making sure it was 1) brilliantly effective and 2) unwaveringly reliable; now we get to start working back up your pipeline to identify opportunities to increase and optimize traffic!

So, let’s fire up your #fundraising engines and start accelerating traffic to your beautiful giving experiences.

Own It: Organic Growth

When it comes to accelerating your donation page traffic, there is no better place to start than with people who already know and support your organization. Here are seven ideas to begin tapping into audiences that are already qualified:

Website Optimization:

Your main website is perhaps your best option for quickly increasing donation page traffic. Far too often, though, the traffic you’re bringing to your website isn’t being given a clear path to progress to a giving experience. Here is how you can start optimizing your website to increase donation page traffic.

• Remove as many clicks from your homepage to a giving experience as possible.
• Find, then optimize, pages that send the most traffic to your giving experiences.
• Make your website fast.

Email Optimization:

Your email list is your most underutilized resource; it’s time to tap into it and let the growth start flowing!

• Create segments. Then speak to each segment uniquely. Show your supporters you know, and care about, them.
• Tell stories. Like really good stories.
• Be bold. Send more email!

Growth, Supercharged: Paid Advertising

You’re doing awesome! You’re dominating this optimization game and the results keep going up and to the right. It’s finally time to start putting your ad budget to work. Here are a few ways to get started:

Lead-Gen Campaigns:

Grow your list of contacts and supporters to double down on the impact we just talked about. You can generate leads through:

• Paid Search: Deliver a relevant, valuable, piece of content when someone searches for a similar topic.Pro Tip - Use Google’s Paid Search Grant to run these ads so you’re able to leverage this strategy and learn what content performs best before putting any of your actual budget into the channel.
• Paid Social: Opposite to search, social advertising allows you to proactively deliver lead-gen ads to people who you’ve identified as ideal candidates.

Traffic Campaigns:

Unlock the full potential of your finely-tuned digital ecosystem with campaigns dedicated to bringing qualified traffic into an amazing (digital) experience with your organization!

Remember, when you’re running this type of program, you want to set up your ad campaigns to be action based rather than impression based. You don’t just want to reach a new audience, you want to focus on driving that new audience into action. You’ll pay a little more upfront, but see a much higher return on the backend!

Build the right audiences:

1. Modeled new audiences: Train advertising platforms to find the right people for us by using your existing donor database to show it the type of people you want to reach. Existing supporters (donors: active or lapsed, subscribers, volunteers, etc.): Believe it or not, the best place to start building your digital advertising pool is with the people you already know support you. Site retargeting: Just because someone came to your site and didn’t make a gift the first (or second, or third) time, doesn’t mean you’re ready to give up! Bring those qualified visitors back and give them another chance to become a donor.
2. Capture peripheral search traffic. Find keywords and phrases that work for you beyond the standard brand and “[my-organization-type] + donation” terms.
3. Reach your audiences: Through targeted display and social ads, testing ad styles and channels along the way

Surround Sound Campaign:

Finally, when you’re ready to combine everything we’ve covered and really blow the lid off your fundraising success, it’s time to launch a Surround Sound Campaign. Surround Sound Campaigns are:

1. Integrated
2. Targeted
3. Multi-Channel
4. Accelerated

If you want to go deeper on your first surround sound campaign, I’ve got just what you’re looking for!

We’ve covered a lot here. Honestly, more than I had planned. But now you have a roadmap to fundraising acceleration that you can pull from and implement what works for you when it works for you. Start small or dive in. As you're creating your master plan for this fundraising season here are a few things worth keeping in mind:

1. Plan for concentric optimization: Start optimizing from the core and continue to work outwards, one step at a time. As you increase traffic to your donation experiences, you’ll have even more opportunities to test, learn, and optimize. Move on to the next lever when you feel like you’ve squeezed what you can out of the step you’re currently on.
2. Remember your fundraising growth formula:1️⃣ (Accelerated) Volume of Traffic x (Improved) Donation Form Conversion Rate = (More) Gifts to Your Organization2️⃣ (More) Gifts to Your Organization x (Increased) Average Gift = (Best Ever) Giving Season Revenue
3. You’re going to “fail”. Some tests aren’t going to work. That’s ok. The only way your optimization program actually fails is if you don’t learn something new. A losing test can often show you more about what works than a winning test!

I’m committed to delivering as much value as I can so you can have the best fundraising season yet! All I ask in return? Share your progress with us. Tell us what works. Tell us what you learn. Together we can learn, optimize, grow, and have our best fundraising season yet!