One of the neat things about the internet is that it’s really made asking for monthly donations so much easier. Especially after they’ve just done something else.
There are so many success stories. Where to begin?
Let’s start with your auto-responder.
Say, you’re an advocacy organization and you do ask people to sign your petition. Did you know that you can use the auto-responder after they signed the petition not only to share the petition with others? You can also use that opportunity to ask petition signers to consider making a small donation each month.
All you need is a short reference to this option and a link straight to your monthly donor page. You’ve just converted prospects to sustaining donors!
Your message can read something like this (of course you’ll make it more fitting to your organization, this gives you some talking points):
Thank you for signing the petition to…. (fill in what the petition was for and what you’re going to do with it)
We can only do what we do with the support of people like you. Will you consider joining our monthly giving program (name)… ? A small monthly gift of $xx, or perhaps $xx will make a difference to our (fill in the difference it will make to the people, animals, cause you serve)…
Link to your monthly donor page (do not distract with one time donations), track it and see what happens.
This should be an easy and virtually free test to implement. And if you’d rather do the convert petitions to one time donors first and then ask them to convert to give monthly, certainly possible. You can do a split test to convert to one time versus monthly… Key is that you don’t want to ask too high… but you get individuals who are ‘hot to trot’ about the issue and they like what you’re offering them. One of my clients gets some 200 monthly donors a month this way.
If you need help creating your messaging or if you’d like me to review your program, just contact me at erica@adirectsolution.com or via (508) 776 1224.
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