Every nonprofit organization looks for ways to recruit new supporters, particularly those deeply committed supporters who are willing to fight and fundraise in the trenches for your cause or mission. But how can your organization find, recruit, and develop those kinds of social ambassadors and strong supporters?
A strong community helps recruit new supporters
A community is more than simply a group of people living in the same area. It’s also a sense of fellowship with others who share common interests and goals. And, that’s what you have in your supporters — people who have come together because they believe in your mission. But too often, you have a set of disconnected supporters trying to fundraise on their own for an event, or those who have completed an event and would like to do more but don’t know where to begin.
That’s why having a strong online presence is important. By building a virtual home base for your community, you provide a location for potential supporters to feel welcome and invested in your mission, and to connect with other enthusiastic members. To do that, you need to assess your website experience to determine if it is meeting your goals.
AACR improved their website UX to attract new supporters
An example of a successful strategy to recruit new supporters: The American Association for Cancer Research, a member organization of cancer researchers, realized that as the work of its members gained public visibility, so did the organization — and revenue increased. AACR evaluated its website to see how it could better achieve its goals of raising the organization’s public profile, turning members into supporters, and attracting new donors.
The organization decided to focus its recruitment efforts through its foundation website and elevate the site to be its public face. Charity Dynamics worked with AACR to build a new foundation site geared toward supporting the organization’s goals. In particular, we focused on the following redesign strategies to recruit new supporters:
- Defined the audience: We honed in on the specific community AACR wanted to target (cancer survivors and family/friends)
- Repackaged content: We put content in layman’s terms geared to educate a more public audience about cancer research and discoveries
- Focused on organization and donor impact: We highlighted survivor success stories and connected those results to members’ research
- Featured easy engagement actions: We made it easy and accessible to donate (cross-promoting on AACR’s main site)
One way we encouraged supporters to connect with the organization was inviting cancer survivors to share their story on the website. We also included different donation options (one-time gift, recurring giving, etc.) and made it easy to give across multiple platforms with a responsive design.
By creating an engaging and educational online environment that resonates with its target audience, AACR was able to more easily invite them to become a part of its community and gain their support, from volunteer to monetary. AACR developed that connection with its audience through a defined content strategy that highlights its members’ important work and the impact its donors have on that work. By following a similar strategy, your organization could be well on its way to recruiting its own deeply committed community.