7 Unique Ways Text Messaging Can Increase GivingTuesday Donations
4 min to read ✭ Leading up to GivingTuesday, more nonprofits are relying on text messaging to get their GivingTuesday messages in front of constituents and donors.
GivingTuesday is a very competitive time for nonprofits. Every year, most organizations follow a pretty standard blueprint, which usually includes:
- A lightbox on the organization’s home page
- Four or five emails on the days around GivingTuesday
- An updated donation form
- Social media posts
- Social, digital, and search ads
Unfortunately, deliverability and ROI concerns have made it harder to reach audiences using these methods, and if you’re not reaching your supporters on GivingTuesday, they’ll give elsewhere. More nonprofits are turning to text messaging to get their GivingTuesday messages in front of constituents and donors.
The following are seven unique ways text messaging can increase GivingTuesday donations:
Bypass Junk and Spam Filters
One in five emails never makes it to inboxes. If an email gets delivered at all, it may never make it past the spam or junk filter, may end up in the Promotions tab, or simply sit unread indefinitely in the recipient’s inbox. In fact, to improve deliverability, email service providers recommend not sending to recipients who haven’t opened emails in more than three months. As a result, for most nonprofits, more than half of their supporters never even see those emails.
For example, a nonprofit with 100,000 email subscribers may only reach about 25,000 of them. Text messaging offers the organization another way to reach those other 75,000 people.
Increase Engagement and Boost Conversion Rates
Only 20% of emails are opened, whereas text messages have a 99% open rate and four and a half times the click-through rate of emails. Plus, the conversion rate for fundraising text messages is four times higher than emails.
This doesn’t mean your organization should abandon email. But it’s clear that to reach more supporters, increase engagement, and meet your fundraising goals—especially for GivingTuesday—text messaging must be a key element of your strategy.
Personalize Messages with Donation Amounts
Message personalization is common in email marketing, though not as likely to be used on channels such as search and social media ads, where asking for specific amounts or recognizing an individual’s past support are much harder.
You can personalize text messages with a supporter’s name and a specific donation amount request, make reference to their donor status, and customize the messages with other personal touches. This level of customization helps you make the right ask at the right time to the right person and ensures the supporter receives and reads that message.
Empower Supporters to Fundraise for You in Minutes
Some supporters may want to fundraise for your nonprofit, but let’s be honest, setting up their own GivingTuesay fundraiser is not easy. They’ll need to complete a registration, add a photo, craft a story, email friends, and post on social media—so many steps! Text messaging is a much simpler way for them to ask for donations on your behalf.
The Click to Message feature from Tatango empowers your supporters to ask for donations quickly and easily. To take advantage of this feature, you’ll send a text asking supporters to invite friends to give. Tapping the link in your message will create a new text and prepopulate it with a GivingTuesday message and link. Your supporter then adds friends from their contacts and sends them the text. It’s that simple.
Experience Less Competition Than in Email Inboxes
Leading up to GivingTuesday, your donors’ inboxes will be flooded with Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing emails. Emails asking for their support may get lost in the noise, but text messages will have less competition—especially on GivingTuesday. While more nonprofits are using text messaging, there’s still far less competition than email. That means more donors will receive your GivingTuesday messages.
Get Trustworthy Engagement Metrics
Apple’s iOS15 Mail Privacy Protection October 2021 update led to inflated and unreliable email open rates. In addition, some recipient spam filters may “click” on email links to verify that they are trustworthy, which can further inflate click-through rates. As a result, it’s now harder for nonprofits to trust their email engagement metrics.
In contrast, text message open and click-through rates are reliable, making it easier for nonprofits to trust which messaging, stories and strategies produced higher engagement. This can be especially important leading up to GivingTuesday as nonprofits analyze and test which messages resonated most with their supporters.
Send an Audio Thank-You Text Message
While donors expect to receive thank-you a email after GivingTuesday, very few expect to receive a thank-you audio text message from your organization’s president or executive director.
Recipients can play the audio message directly from the text message, so there’s no need to click or open a browser window. Audio thank-you messages are a unique way to express your appreciation—and stand apart from other nonprofits they support. This personal touch can help improve donor retention so more of your GivingTuesday donors return next year.
Meet Your GivingTuesday Fundraising Goals with Tatango
Tatango has helped nonprofits send tens of billions of text messages. We know fundraising. Our technology can send up to 6 million text messages per hour, and our clients report a five-to-one ROI. On average, every dollar invested in SMS text messaging brings in $5 in donations. Contact our experts today to get the most from your GivingTuesday campaign this year.
