My Craziest Fundraising Idea Yet

I have a crazy idea for your next matching gift campaign and it might just get me laughed out of the room:

Use a match to run a subscriber referral incentive program!

🤪 Crazy digital guy say WHAT?! 🤪

Common knowledge says you should use a match to drive gifts and acquire donors, it works and we can count on it.

What if we challenged that? What if we took a matching gift opportunity and used it for long-term growth rather than an immediate return?

Enter the subscriber incentive program!

What is it? It's a model first introduced by high-value, luxury product brands, but adopted and widely popularized by the e-newsletter industry, where existing customers or subscribers are given the chance to win or earn something with tangible value in return for getting people in their network to sign up for the product. Simply put, it is incentivizing someone to get someone else to subscribe to you.

💸 "Why would I waste a match on this, Schwab?!" I'm glad you asked!

Your email list is your #1 most underutilized resource at your organization.

👉 Email consistently maintains the top seat in ROI for digital fundraising (and will likely going to be the #1 overall channel soon).

👉 Email is the most efficient and effective way to communicate with your constituents. You can have an email created and delivered to everyone in your file within a business day (if you absolutely needed it) without incurring any added expense, find me another channel that you can accomplish that!

👉 Email + Automation becomes a force multiplier for growth. The more people enter your system, the bigger the impact you can create... WITHOUT burning out!

What keeps most organizations from realizing the potential of email fundraising, though? A lack of available audience and a clear way to grow it!

Most organizations rely on growing their email roster through online donations and the few people who stumble upon a "subscribe" option in the footer of their website.

This is where a subscriber referral match becomes so exciting 💡 you get to incentivize the people who are already supporting you to grow your email audience without incurring the cost of a traditional incentive program!

Ok let's look at how this could play out for you:

1️⃣ You have a donor who will sponsor the challenge (let's say it's a $10,000 match)

2️⃣ You introduce the match offer to your existing audience (bonus you can use your ENTIRE email file for this, not just donors because it applies to everyone who already follows you!). To keep it simple let's call this a dollar-per-subscriber match: every new subscriber will be matched with a dollar donation.

3️⃣ Your constituents LOVE this campaign and blow it away. You not only get the $10,000 match completed by gaining 10,000 NEW subscribers, you beat the goal by an additional 50% and have 15,000 new subscribers on your file!

4️⃣ Each new subscriber enters into a beautifully crafted welcome series, introducing them to your organization, the cause you serve and how you’re uniquely approaching the solution, and how they can choose to support you going forward (hint this doesn’t just have to be with a gift!)

Now let’s look at some numbers to see why this is so valuable:

Let’s assume an overall 5% donor conversion rate with your welcome series (a fairly conservative number).

15,000 new subscribers enter your welcome series turning into 750 new donors 👉 “Cost” (remember you didn’t PAY anything for this!) per new donor acquired = $13.33

Let’s assume those 750 new donors give at least $50 on average (industry standard average gift is $100 so this is a very safe assumption) 👉 You’ve now raised $37,500 (for those doing the math at home, that’s an EXTRA $17,500 over what you would have made with a standard matching gift challenge!)

🤔 Hey, this is starting to get interesting! 🤔

If we stopped there this would be a resounding win. But we’re not done yet!

Let’s assume you have at least the average donor retention rate of 50% and the lifetime value of a donor is roughly 2.5x their initial gift* 👉 That turns into nearly $50,000 of ADDITIONAL revenue over the life of the donors acquired.

Your $20,000 matching gift challenge just turned into over $75,000 in revenue for your organization.

But wait THERE’S MORE! 🤯

We haven’t even looked at the intangible impact (what I call “peripheral growth”)! While these are nearly impossible to quantify, let’s think about how many:

➡️ New volunteers your organization will add to the roster

➡️ Existing non-donor subscribers who convert to a first time donor

➡️ Earned media value through buzz and exposure for doing something genuinely unique

➡️ Earned relational value with existing supporters and subscribers through the impact of referring you to friends, family, and network (they’re going to want to see you succeed more now than ever because they’ve put their reputation behind your organization)!!

➡️ Sustained growth beyond the first run outlined above… you still have over 14,000 new people to engage and cultivate!

➡️ Potential for new major donor connections. Think about all the possibilities if you went beyond this campaign and enriched this new audience with wealth and capacity screening and handed off that warm lead list to your major donor officers!

Is there a risk to trying this vs sticking with the tried-and-true matching gift challenge?

Abso-freaking-lutely!

But I’m here to say the upside is worth the risk!

👇🏻 Tag a fundraiser or an organization who would be crazy enough to try this with me! 👇🏻

*There isn’t a firm industry benchmark for this, so I’m using this number for the sake of calculation and example