Campaign Theme or Recurring Giving Program: How to Think Creatively
2 min to read ✭ In this post, we will talk about how to think creatively about a campaign theme or a recurring giving program.
Getting Started
The first thing that you’re going to want to do is make sure that you’ve got a nice hot cup of coffee and team members who are willing to think outside the box with you. It’s really important to create an environment where no one’s going to shoot any ideas down and everyone has an open mind. We also recommend getting a whiteboard or some kind of tablet to record all of your ideas on.
Inspiration
Then we want to think about what are some of the best nonprofits doing in the realm of creativity? And today we’re going to talk a little bit more about recurring giving programs. We can think about Charity: Water and their Spring program. It’s so simple. It’s one word, but it means so many different things. It talks about the effect of water coming out of the ground and also has this element of joy and lightness to it. Then we think about Pencils of Promise and their Passport program. You can see the use of alliterations with Pencils of Promise, passport, three Ps, but it also describes what you’re going to get when you’re in the program.
Applying Ideas to Your Nonprofit
What you want to do is break down the different ways of how you can discuss your nonprofit. To give a real-life example, we work with a nonprofit here in San Diego that goes to bat for the citizens of San Diego to help save them millions of dollars a year on their electricity bills. We were coming up with a recurring giving offer for this nonprofit, and we’re thinking of what do we call this thing, right? How do we make this something that is bite-sized but also creative and appealing? So we started writing down on a whiteboard all of the different words and components that could even be in the realm of what we’d want to talk about. Things like power, electricity, and then there’s this idea of fighting the man, going to bat for the consumer against major power companies. We started thinking of words that went with authority. Words ended up on there, like dictator and stuff that of course wasn’t gonna make it into the name of the recurring giving program, but all deserved a place. We had thesaurus.com open. There were three of us in the room and all looking up different words that could be contenders. When you’re in these meetings looking to be creative, especially if it’s one of your first times doing it with your team, there are no bad ideas.
When you’re thinking of a campaign theme, it can feel challenging. It can feel daunting. You feel like you need to come up with this massively creative idea, but sometimes just adding some flare or alliteration into your messaging can take it that extra mile. Your donors already love you. Coming up with a recurring giving offer should be fun and ultimately easy.
