Digital Strategies That Drive Donations For Your Nonprofit
Originally featured on Ask a Responsive Fundraiser with Virtuous Software
When my friend, Scott Holthaus at Virtuous Software asked me to answer questions submitted by real nonprofit marketers and fundraisers, I said yes immediately, because these aren't hypothetical questions. They're the same ones I hear from organizations every week.
I want to share my answers here, because I think they apply far beyond any one organization.
Question 1: Our email open and conversion rates are declining. What strategies can we use to improve email marketing and turn more subscribers into donors?
I want to approach this from two angles: strategic first, tactical second. Because if we jump straight to subject lines and click rates without setting the table, we're optimizing the wrong things.
Strategically, start by defining your goals and make sure "drive donations" isn't the only one on the list. A value that should inform your goals that often gets overlooked is this: provide genuine value for your readers. The way to figure out what value looks like is to ask yourself one honest question: Why do people give to our work?
Most of the time, people give because they believe in the impact of what you're doing and they want to see it continue. That's the value you should be delivering through your emails. Not newsletters full of organizational updates and event announcements, but stories of impact and meaningful metrics that show people their belief is well-placed.
When you reframe your emails around that question, your whole approach shifts. You stop asking "how do we get more clicks?" and start asking "what story are we telling, and why does it deserve to be told?"
Tactically, here are a few things we've seen move the needle:
For open rates, your subject line is doing more work than you think. People are getting hundreds of emails a day. We run every single subject line through the Omnisend Subject Line Tester before hitting send. If it grades below 83%, we rework it. It's free, it takes two minutes, and it matters.
For click rates, two trends are worth knowing right now. First, video thumbnails (a screenshot with a play button overlay) are driving strong engagement. Second, and this one surprised me, plain text links are outperforming graphic buttons by 60 to 70% in some cases. Mobile email clients don't always load images automatically, and native text hyperlinks just work. Test them.
And finally: not every click needs to go to a donation page. Sometimes the next step is a blog post, a story, or a video. The goal is to bring people further into your organization's world, and eventually you'll create a path to giving that feels earned.
Question 2: Our website gets traffic, but our donation page conversion rates are low. What can we do to improve donor engagement and increase online giving?
Conversion rate is one of my favorite metrics because it captures multiple things at once. The formula: number of conversions divided by number of page visitors, multiplied by 100. Simple math, but what it reveals is nuanced.
If your conversion rate is low, there are typically two possible explanations.
The first is traffic quality. The people landing on your donation page may not be warm enough to give yet. In that case, don't start on the donation page. Go back upstream and ask how you're preparing people to take that step. Are you telling stories that build trust? Are you nurturing people before making the ask?
The second is that the page itself isn't optimized. Here's a quick checklist:
Is your mission and value clearly communicated on the page? Don't assume people arriving there already know who you are.
Are you drawing a direct line between a donor's dollar and a tangible outcome? Be that specific. ($30 a month provides clean water for five people.)
Are you offering clear giving amounts so people can see themselves fitting in?
What's your page load time? Slow pages bleed conversions.
How many exit points are on the page? This one trips people up. The instinct is to add links so people can learn more, but in our experience, fewer links on a donation page means more donations. Strip the clutter and give people one clear thing to do.
Question 3: We're a small team with limited bandwidth. What digital strategies should we prioritize to get the best results?
This is the question I hear from most nonprofits. And I've sat in that seat. I know what it feels like to be responsible for all of digital marketing with a fraction of the time and resources it actually takes.
Here's what I tell every organization in that position.
First, audit before you build. You can't know where to go if you don't know where you are. Auditing takes time upfront, but everything you do afterward becomes more efficient because you're making decisions based on actual data and not guesses. At Spark, every recommendation we make is grounded in data. If you're not doing that, you're throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Second, focus on the donors you already have. Your best donors aren't strangers. They're already in your database. Nurture them first. Build a solid email strategy, set up automations that keep people engaged, and personalize where you can. The temptation with AI and automation is to strip out all the human touch in the name of efficiency. Resist that. The organizations I've seen grow generosity sustainably are the ones that hold both things in tension: systems that scale and communication that still feels like it came from a real person.
Email won't be the only channel you invest in forever. But if resources are tight, it's the one that will most reliably nurture the people most likely to give.
The Thread That Runs Through All Three
Whether we're talking about email, donation pages, or resource prioritization, the same principle underlies everything: digital marketing should inspire people to take the next step with your work.
Sometimes that step is a donation. Sometimes it's reading a story, attending an event, or simply staying connected. Our job is to remove the barriers that stand between your audience and that next step and to earn that step through consistent, honest storytelling.
If you're stuck on any of these questions and want to think through what this looks like for your organization specifically, I'd love to connect.
