Recently, Everfund shared its skepticism about dynamic donation platforms. While the technology may ultimately turn out to have merit, presently its AI-powered promises remain marred by three big problems. Curtailment of cookies, quagmires of questionable ethics, and the alarming inconsistency of AI.
Of course the natural question nonprofits may have at this point is ‘What’s the alternative’?
After all, a donation platform that simply sits statically still requesting money would be rather like a street performer quietly replacing his silver ‘living statue’ routine with an identically-shaped facsimile of himself crafted from stone and polished steel. Decidedly missing the point.
What Everfund would suggest instead - and what we offer to our clients - can be summarised in three words.
Tailored donation experiences.
This option offers nonprofits several key advantages. Not only can they sidestep cookie-caused concerns, escape ethical quicksand, and avoid AI-related abasement, nonprofits also get to enjoy several key advantages. Advantages that allow nonprofits to stride into the online donation-seeking space with confidence, creativity, and completeness.
1. Tailored to your taste - segmented to your style
No one understands your cause, charity, or campaigns better than your nonprofit and its team. Thus, it’s natural that you should be the ones dictating how any campaign is segmented, structured, and set up. This includes everything from the tone and style of advertisements to the approach taken by the segmentation plans of your donation platform.
For example, imagine you are an animal-affiliated charity. While dynamic platforms may infer or reverse-engineer which users visiting your websites are parakeet-people or hamster-horders, because it cannot be absolutely certain, it can only make limited adjustments and hope generally to get it right.
However you may actually have a contact list within your CRM where you know for certain who is more likely to gather goldfish or goats or guinea-pigs. Also, because you have this information, you also know things like your campaign is naturally going to resonate better with the goat-oriented types, but that friends of goldfish will still engage if reached via e-mail, while the guinea-pig people will engage more via social media.
You know your cause, and you know your audience. You can choose the words and pictures and styles and formats that you know appeal to them best. Specific phrases, puns, and other very particular pieces of prose could have importance in your cause’s space that would make no sense anywhere else. This is something a tailored campagin approch allows you . Rather than placing your trust in an algorithmic system that may or may not track what it needs to know from cookies etc, you can deal with people directly in a way that they understand, appreciate, and engage with to the point of wanting to donate.
2. Modelled to the reflection you see in the mirror - fitted to your form
Imagine the following patently absurd scenario.
You go to a brick and mortar store to buy some new clothes. After browsing for a while, you take a few selections into the changing room, and are rather confused by what you find.
Instead of mirrors, what you see instead is a strange camera, computer and video screen arrangement, connected to a single red button. There is a set of printed instructions on the wall explaining how it works.
Apparantly, once you don your outfit, you press the red button. The camera then scans you and feeds the image into the computer. Whereupon the video screen displays images from across the web of people wearing the same or similar clothes.
‘All very technically impressive,’ you might think, ‘but I’d prefer a mirror because I want to see how the clothes I might buy look when I am the one wearing them’.
Yet the above scenario approximates what you might experience without the help of tailored donation experiences.
Why?
Because without such systems, any tailoring or changes or other types of adjustment made in a ‘dynamic’ fashion does not produce accessible results. Algorithmic changes are all effectively black boxed. All you can ever get is approximated results.
You will not be able to see the data results of who responded best to which model of campaign and why. All that information will be processed and stored through a mess of linear algebra generated through and by whatever algorithmic model your dynamic system throws together.
If on the other hand you use a tailored model, where you yourself know the spread and segmentation of specific donor experiences, you can monitor the details of how many responses each one gets, in which way, and how. From that information, you can then make your own inferences about which campaigns have succeeded best, and what can be built on in the future. You get to know how things have actually worked, who likes what method, how much they like it, and where donations are most likely to come from in the future. In other words, information that you actually need, and is actually useful for securing your nonprofit’s future.
The truly brilliant thing about doing this through the programmes designed and developed by Everfund is the customisablity of the dashboard details. Talk to Everfund today to find out more about the amazing things our donation platforms can do for your charity.
3. Crafted to your critique - driven by your demands
When you’re the one designing the campaign, and you’re the one who can track and follow the results as they come in, the natural result can be summarised in one word.
Control.
The specific details of the campaigns and content around it can be adjusted by you and your team. You’re able to react as new data flows in about who likes which campaign and why, which in turn means you can more effectively optimise.
The extent to which this applies is immense.
Copy about and around the donation ask
Branding around the specific campaign/appeal
Amounts in the suggested donation buttons
Channels for the donation platforms to arrive via (email, social media, webpage etc)
Types of donation - regular recurring vs one off
Audience selections for any campaign/appeal material to be sent to
All of this can be controlled and crafted in response to the information that gets fed to your campaign teams. In the event you see one side underperforming, or another area needing a new and different approach, or even if there are outside events shaping the situation that demand a response, with Everfund’s approach all this can be adapted to and changed as you go.
All the control you could ask for to drive the donations that you need in the way that you want.
Suit up! Discover tailored donation platforms with Everfund
Your nonprofit has the opportunity to craft the best online donation experience possible, with the help of Everfund.
Talk to our team today, and discover how carefully crafted donation experiences can to drive donations, catalyse campaigns, and achieve amazing things for you and your cause