Participation campaigns

I am at the RuffaloCody Annual Giving conference this week and spent part of this morning in a session on participation campaigns.  I took away five integral points that were consistently applied in all of the successful efforts and some or all were missing in those that did not succeed.

In no particular order they are:

• Integrate with Social Media - while renewals of longer lapsed donors often occurred in response to mailings, emails and phone efforts from the institution, the majority of new donor (and not just recent graduate) acquisition came from the sharing with and through social media outlets.
• Focus upon a common audience - the more narrowly you can tailor your communications, the greater the chances of success.  Trying to do a general fund, entire audience participation campaign ends up missing the motivation target with everyone.  Pick an audience, a purpose and a reason that all align and push hard with a consistent, repeated message for a concise, discreet period of time.
• Brand it - create a look and name that is unique to the effort and establish a web and print presence that supports and reinforces the brand.  
• Establish and market achievable, aggressive goals - give folks a reason to join your effort and then ask them to do so.  Once someone has made a gift, ask them to ask someone else to join them.  Repeat.  A lot.  
• Wrap it up - after the campaign concludes, celebrate your successes.  Even if you did not achieve your overall goal, ensure that you thank those who helped and give them reason to feel good about doing so.

Every campaign that had each of these criteria succeeded.  Be creative, be fun and make it something that establishes engagement beyond the gift - many folks will buy in to helping you accomplish something if you ask them to do so but they won't volunteer unless you give them the opportunity to do so.