Pop-up funding
Pop-up funding campaigns give charities the opportunity to raise money online very quickly, usually based on a live event.
The secret sauce to any great crowdfunding campaign is to set up your strategy and design templates so that you are ready to go live very quickly. The strategy should cover communications messages, creative work, financial targets, a timeframe and a roadmap for the deliverables.
Stories
What you say is as important as why you say it. The reality of running a live campaign is that a tragic event is likely to have happened, so your stories of the event need to have empathy as well as a direct message of support.
As humans, we need to feel an emotional connection to the cause and story-telling for charities is more important than ever. The sometimes cold delivery of the News is now presented in conjunction with stories direct from peoples phones. These can be much more raw and emotional. Finding the balance on your site and feed can tell the story of the event and also help donors understand why your cause could be important to them.
How you share your pop-up campaign is the critical piece. Without impressions (the number of people your content is shown to), there will be no engagement (the number of people who took an action on your content — share, like, comment).
To work out where your audience are, its important to find the insight that tells you how they feel, what they think, what they are interested in. Once you know that, then the right platform will become apparent.
Great for immediate impact, excellent targeting through their Adverts Manager pages and an element of creative freedom. Downsides are that it can be expensive and if you don’t get your message or creative right, then people will ignore it.
Visual and quick to reach people if you get your hashtag strategy right. There are lots of tools online that will give you the top hashtags for your message, sector and audience. Research those and include up to 30 per post.
Pro-tip: Upload your image first with a sentence or two about what you are trying to achieve, then add your hashtags as the first comment. This means that your message is clean as people won’t see the hashtags on a search.
Curation
Wegiveit is the best options for curated charities. It takes current videos from the top charities, news feeds or sponsors and presents them in a feed. The user watches videos and donation is automatically done in the background and paid for by sponsors. Including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%* so posting to your own blog and social feeds as well as youtube and wegiveit can give your cause a much better chance of being viewed and donated too.
Google Adwords / PPC
By far the most effective choice for any business as it can reach people searching in google and present ads back to them on other sites. It can be very complicated to get right and an investment of weeks is needed to manage your keywords and only keep the performing ones. PPC won’t give you an immediate spike for a live event but it will guarantee that people find your site based on search terms.
You’ll need to have built a large base of followers that engage with you for twitter to be really successful for your charity. Advertising can work well on twitter with a clear call to action. Building a “moments” campaign in twitter for live news is a powerful way to reach people that are currently searching for updates on the event.
Blog post
Use your own platform to push posts from facebook, instagram, twitter, PPC back to your own blog. This should be the landing page for the pop-up and have clear directions on how to donate, ideally with a simple button and sign-up integration from facebook or twitter.
To sum up
Plan ahead so you can be agile when you launch. Source quality photos and videos, ones that tell the real story of what you are looking to get across. Build trust and be honest.