Automating the Omni-Channel Experience for Your Donors

November 23, 2021 | Grace Duginski
Automating the Omni-Channel Experience for Your Donors

At year-end, you want to be sure your donors are receiving a cohesive message across their preferred mix of channels — this is what will help you raise the most for your mission. However, end-of-year is famously busy, which is why automation across channels can give you the support you need to engage the right donors at the right time. EveryAction’s own Mike Liddell explains how to use this tactic to get results.

Q: Nonprofits want to fundraise across channels — how can they do that efficiently?

A: One of the things we’ve really tried to do with our tools is make omni-channel fundraising easy by adding automation into the process.

We’ve built out automation functionality that will trigger and automatically take care of some of these common tasks that nonprofits are trying to accomplish as they’re approaching an omni-channel world.

Automating for New Supporters

When it comes to identifying opportunities for efficient, automated fundraising, you want to prioritize the things that you can do to deliver a cohesive omni-channel experience.

For instance, let’s say that like many respondents in our recent survey, one of your priorities is supporter acquisition, so you’re designing and executing campaigns around that goal. If someone takes an action, like joining your list from your website, maybe you enter them into an automated welcome series via email — so they’ll get a stream of emails introducing them to your different areas of work, and building their connection to your cause.

Automating for Stewarding and Engagement

On the other hand, let’s say a supporter takes an advocacy action. Their experience with you should feel familiar across all the channels you use to contact them, so maybe you have their mailing address, but you’ve also asked them for their mobile phone number. After they take that advocacy action, you can send them a mobile message or a piece of direct mail a few weeks later to follow up and make a donation ask. You can automate messages to them using whichever channel they seem to prefer, based on data you can see in your unified CRM, all while keeping your messaging consistent across those channels.

Automating to Each Channel’s Strengths

As you craft your automated, omni-channel strategy, you should also consider the things that each of the different channels are good at accomplishing. SMS is great for urgent gifts or asks that you may have, so maybe you use that channel for GivingTuesday or end-of-year — that’s when you’ll automate SMS messages to capture folks’ attention, when you have that urgent deadline that you’re using to drive your donation ask.

But maybe your deadline isn’t as defined as a 24-hour giving day, and you want your supporters to spend a few uninterrupted minutes learning about your organization. Direct mail is something that’s not quite as urgent as SMS, and it gives you some opportunities to talk about things in a more tactile and expansive way, with a nice visual experience. With automation, you can be sure you’re utilizing each channel to its fullest potential, and sending the right messages in those channels to every supporter who should hear from you.

So, think about those different channels, what they’re good at, and how you can lead your supporters and donors through an overarching message and story as you’re communicating with them, no matter the mechanism or vehicle.

Engaging supporters with a smooth, cohesive, and unified omni-channel experience shouldn’t require more work. Talk to us to learn more about how support from the right platform can empower your organization to send the right messages, in the right channels, at the right time to raise more for your mission.