How to give donors a more personal experience on your site
- Tue, July 17 2012
- Filed under: Fundraising essentials
A conundrum for many fundraisers is that donors often want to focus their support on specific parts of your work, but you need to raise money for the full gamut of what you do.
I wanted to share a great example of how one organization - the World Society for the Protection of Animals - is handling that challenge with its Animal Protector Site. (Hat tip to Mark Phillips of Queer Ideas blog for this example. He designed the site.)
As he explains: “WSPA works with a wide range of animals in many different parts of the world, and it seems obvious that one way to enhance a donor’s relationship with the charity is to allow them to choose to fund work that benefits a favorite species. It’s obvious. But it’s wrong. Donors may have a preference, but that doesn’t mean they want to fund work that only benefits that type of animal (if they did, there are many species-specific charities they could easily discover on Google). By choosing one specific creature, donors have to say no to others. And that can make people feel uncomfortable, particularly when their primary aim is to stop cruelty to ALL animals. So rather than ask people to choose just one project, we gave them the opportunity to align themselves with their favorite animal in a different way – by customizing their Animal Protector site.”
When people sign up, they are presented with different menus, one of which allows them to choose their masthead… Pretty nifty!
How can you help people choose the experience they get with your organization?