9 Surefire Ways to Master Your Next Fundraising Campaign Launch

When planning to launch a fundraising campaign for your nonprofit organization, it can feel like there are a million details to address. From tackling the initial stages of campaign planning to selecting the most effective touchpoints for increasing engagement, we understand the challenges.

As the leader in digital fundraising innovation over the last 10 years, Classy anticipates nonprofits’ evolving needs and responds by providing smarter platform solutions to amplify their fundraising efforts.

To help you clench your next fundraising campaign, we’ve combined our latest learnings into the ultimate blueprint for organizations of any size. Explore the elements of a fundraising campaign we deem critical for conversions and community-building and discover which tools you need to achieve stellar results.

1. Test your donor experience before going live

With attention spans dwindling and other distractions vying for donors’ time, the window for activation has grown slimmer.

Donor expectations have evolved thanks to the state-of-the-art experiences they receive from our for-profit counterparts. As a result, nonprofits must provide smarter, more seamless solutions to giving—from compelling website visuals and storytelling to a quick-and-easy checkout flow.

To ensure you offer the best experience to supporters, navigate your donation process as if you were a donor. While things might look good from a bird’s-eye view, you never know where there’s a broken link or a slow page load time.

Remember that donors will interact with your fundraising platform on various devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets. Testing the donor experience from different angles is a crucial part of the prelaunch process.

How Classy can help

Classy makes it easier on your team by allowing you to see your campaigns on any device before going live, ensuring a seamless experience.

2. Start with a strategic soft launch of your campaign

Conducting a soft launch with a small group of dedicated supporters or past powerhouse fundraisers can help build campaign momentum before the official public or hard launch.

We know that initial traction is critical based on our understanding of the goal proximity effect, which reminds us that the closer you are to your fundraising goal, the more likely people are to give.

Soft launching your campaign also ensures you can address any bugs or errors you might have missed in your initial quality assurance check, like typos or broken links on your donation form, before you send it to your larger prospective donor community.

When connecting with donors during your soft launch phase, ask for their feedback:

• Would they change anything?
• Is the message clear?
• Does it excite them?

If your campaign includes a peer-to-peer fundraising element, ask participants in your soft launch to start personal fundraising pages and begin reaching out to friends and family for donations. When the time comes to invite everyone to participate, the momentum generated in your soft launch will likely carry over into your hard launch and push you toward your goal.

How Classy can help

Classy campaigns show your success to date and help encourage potential supporters to join your cause via public progress metrics or a fundraising thermometer.

3. Manage fundraising data with a single source of truth

Data is key to making strategic fundraising decisions. By monitoring donor behavior, engagement, and activity, your team can ensure it delivers personalized and relevant messages to each donor at every stage.

However, if donor data is scattered across multiple platforms, getting a complete picture of your donor base can take up significant time, energy, and resources. Consolidating donor data via a single source of truth enables you to identify trends and patterns quickly and make more data-driven decisions.

How Classy can help

Classy offers native integrations with world-class platforms like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, HubSpot, Virtuous, and more because we understand the need for a unified view of donor data.

Thanks to a near real-time sync of donation data into their preferred donor management system, nonprofits like World Changers Church International no longer have to switch between their fundraising platform and customer relationship management platform to get the information they need.

4. Keep your brand front and center

Strong branding helps build trust with supporters and serves the much simpler purpose of confirming that your fundraising campaign is, in fact, yours.

If your nonprofit’s brand, logo, and colors don’t align with your new fundraising campaign, it can confuse potential donors. Maintain a consistent look and feel across all touchpoints, including your campaign page, donation form, donation receipts, and promotional materials on social media, emails, and direct mail solicitations.

There are plenty of other ways to ensure your branding remains highly visible and unified across your channels. For example, consider creating a special logo for your new campaign. This logo should differ from your nonprofit’s main logo but use the same colors.

By incorporating this logo into your marketing outreach, people will instantly recognize it as a unique initiative from your standard campaigns.

How Classy can help

Classy Studio helps bring your story and brand to life without sacrificing personalization. Thanks to Studio’s greater flexibility in customizing your donor experience, you can enhance brand alignment and consistency to create a compelling appeal that effectively activates supporters.

5. Make giving easy with flexible payment options

Donors’ giving preferences have changed from the days of cash, checks, and credit cards. With flexible payment options, you meet donors with the payment experiences they prefer—whether credit cards, digital wallets, ACH, or a slew of other options.

Our proprietary data revealed that the average one-time gift made via ACH is nearly 2x larger than a one-time gift made through a credit card. This emphasizes the value of a frictionless donor experience and serves as a reminder to understand your donors’ preferences to ensure you meet all expectations.

How Classy can help

Classy Pay, Classy’s nonprofit payment processing solution, supports digital wallets, PayPal, Venmo, ACH, and more. In addition to offering a wide selection of payment options, each transaction gets protected by industry-leading fraud prevention measures, like Classy’s Intelligent Fraud Protection solution.

However, Classy offers more than just convenience. With the innovation of Intelligent Ask Amounts, you can finally move past a static giving experience into one that is more dynamic and tailored to each donor. Recognizing that donors have different giving capacities, our new giving levels use machine learning to provide real-time, personalized ask amounts for every donor, enhancing the chances of donation conversion.

We also understand the power of matching gifts, which can double a donor’s generosity. That’s why Classy seamlessly integrates with popular platforms like Double the Donation and Amply. This allows nonprofits to incorporate donation-matching opportunities across all giving experiences, ensuring donors never miss a chance to maximize their impact.

6. Encourage recurring gifts

As donor lifetime value remains a focal point for many nonprofits, uplifting your recurring giving program is a surefire way to create a predictable income stream and cultivate long-lasting relationships with supporters.

Classy’s 2023 State of Modern Philanthropy report found that the average lifetime of a recurring donation is 4.6 years, and 29% of first-time donors who become recurring donors do so within the first 90 days.

Plus, recurring donors are 9x more valuable to your nonprofit than one-time donors, making recurring giving a critical part of reaching your fundraising goal. In fact, our Recurring Donor Sentiment Report found that 84% of recurring donors take additional action on top of their recurring donation, including volunteering, making additional one-time gifts, attending an event, and more.

In your messaging, use bold calls to action, highlight exclusive incentives, and showcase how much more of an impact a recurring gift makes versus a one-time donation. You should also consider sending email appeals that ask recipients to support your campaign and long-term mission by committing to a recurring gift at the frequency of their choice.

How Classy can help

Classy’s Donor Dashboard allows donors to independently adjust their recurring plans by modifying the amount or payment method and pausing, reactivating, or canceling.

7. Fuel donations with a tie to impact

Apathy is the enemy of charitable giving. If donors don’t believe their support will make a difference, they likely won’t give. To eliminate that barrier, communicate clearly how each donation carries over into tangible solutions. Every contribution can help advance your mission, whether big or small.

How Classy can help

Classy Studio’s design tools provide customizable storytelling opportunities, enabling you to communicate each campaign’s impact effectively and show donors the real difference their support makes.

Specifically, Studio’s Impact Tiles show donors how their contributions can drive meaningful outcomes, offering dynamic and flexible giving options.

Additionally, Classy’s Giving Cart functionality, currently in beta, allows you to bring impact to life by showcasing your portfolio of programs and making the outcomes of donors’ contributions more tangible. By leveraging this tool, you can inspire more generous giving by enabling donors to support in multiple ways simultaneously, with e-commerce-like ease.

8. Inspire action with peer-to-peer fundraising

A thriving supporter community is a nonprofit’s most valuable asset. As such, peer-to-peer fundraising has emerged as a dominant force in next-generation fundraising. This giving vehicle provides supporters a voice to share their passion and rally support organically around your cause.

Our research shows that 80% of people who give to a peer-to-peer campaign on Classy are new donors to the nonprofit. Additionally, GoFundMe campaigns shared more than 6x in the first few days are likely to raise more donations.

How Classy can help

Classy offers a peer-to-peer fundraising platform that includes customizable fundraising pages, email automation, built-in social and text-sharing features, gamification integrations, and more to help you tap into this potential. These tools make it easier than ever for your supporters to share their passion and advocate for your cause, driving engagement and increasing donations.

Nonprofits have experienced intense peer-to-peer growth using Classy products. For an emergency relief organization like Baby2Baby, the ability to launch a campaign quickly is crucial to their fundraising success. In six weeks of utilizing Classy’s peer-to-peer tools, Baby2Baby acquired nearly 4,500 new donors, raised over $1 million, and delivered 1.5 million emergency items to children affected by wildfires. 

9. Say thank you and celebrate donors’ success

Acknowledging and celebrating milestones, creative ideas, and fundraising success is critical if you want to keep your donor base focused and inspired to reach the next big goal.

Consider setting smaller, incremental goals that you can celebrate together along the way. When the campaign goal feels too overwhelming, potential donors may give up before they start. This is especially crucial for peer-to-peer fundraisers.

Celebration also applies to your internal staff, board members, and partners. They work just as hard to ensure your fundraising campaigns’ design, launch, and wrap-up go off without a hitch, so don’t forget to highlight their involvement and thank them for their effort. Consider thanking them in person with a small happy hour or sending a handwritten note.

Also, remember that expressing gratitude is essential, but a true thank-you goes beyond a simple gift acknowledgment message. This should be the springboard for a lifelong donor journey.

By nurturing ongoing engagement, you can transform a one-time transaction into a lasting relationship fueled by passion and purpose. This means moving beyond acknowledging their gift and including impact storytelling, exclusive event invitations, recurring giving opportunities, and clear pathways to advocate.

How Classy can help

Classy can help you ensure donors stay on track by sending milestone emails emphasizing their impact and encouraging them to keep going or leaving motivating messages on their campaign activity wall for supporters to see.

Ace your next fundraising campaign

Launching a successful fundraising campaign can feel overwhelming, from crafting a compelling message to navigating donor engagement. But with the right fundraising platform, you can transform your fundraising strategy, create unforgettable experiences, and unlock greater generosity.

If you’re ready to take your fundraising campaigns to the next level and learn more about Classy, schedule a demo with one of our team members.

Copy Editor: Ayanna Julien