Recruiting new supporters online
Howard Lake | 27 July 2016 | Blogs
With Change.org having recently announced that they’re no longer going to be offering sponsored petitions to help charities recruit new supporters, and with all the changes over the past year with ensuring people have opted in to receiving communications, it’s an important time to think strategically about supporter recruitment.
Here are some of my favourite ways to sign up new people to your email list online.
Pop ups on your website
Have pop ups encouraging people to sign up to your email list in certain key places on your website.
Don’t overuse them, as that just annoys people, but displaying them when people go to close the browser or tab when they’ve been reading a blog post or when someone has been on the website for over a minute might be good opportunities to test if they work for your audience.
One good tool to use for this is Opt In Monster.
Fundraising via campaigning
Campaign actions such as petitions can be an easy way in to your organisation for new supporters. And Care2 of course are still offering this very successful model as a way of recruiting new supporters.
Signing a petition or other form of campaign action and giving people the option to join your email list is a great recruitment method.
But there are three key things to bear in mind to get the most out of this:
Advertisement
- Drive lots of good quality traffic to your campaign action (see below).
- Be creative – don’t just set up a petition, think of other ways for people to take part (adding their name to a letter for example).
- Set up a great welcome email journey for new people who join your email list from the action.
Drive traffic to your campaign action
Once you’ve got your campaign action and a great welcome journey prepared, you need to get people to the page.
My two favourite methods for this are Google ads and Facebook promoted posts.
- Google ads – use your Google grant to display really targeted ads to people when they are searching for content related to your action. Global Witness have promoted their tax havens work this way. Their ad is displayed when people search for Mossack Fonseca (of Panama Papers infamy).
GlobalWitness’ Google advert on a search for Mossack Fonseca
- Facebook promoted posts – you can promote your campaign actions in a very targeted fashion to people you think will be interested in your work using Facebook promoted posts. You can exclude people who already like your page, create a custom audience to exclude people who are already on your email list, and target people who like similar organisations to you, with posts that link through to your campaign action.
Leverage your existing supporter base
Your existing supporters can be your biggest and best resource for bringing in new supporters.
Here are some things to try:
- Ask them to share campaign actions with their friends and family on social media.
- Include email sign up forms in any creative content you produce (such as infographics) and ask your existing supporters to share that content.
Want to learn much more about these and many other ways to recruit supporters online?
Glyn Thomas is a digital communications consultant who has worked with NGOs and charities in the UK, Germany, Romania, the USA, Canada and Mexico. He specialises in helping charities recruit new supporters online, retain and reactivate lapsed supporters and maximise the numbers of people taking part in campaigns and donating. He has helped several UK-based charities more than quadruple their online fundraising income, and regularly delivers training on online campaigning and fundraising.
He and Amelia Showalter (who was Director of Analytics during the Obama campaign in 2012) are running a training session in London on 8th September. There are still a few reduced rate early bird tickets available.
They will be covering a whole range of best practice tips and tactics to help you get the most out of petitions and campaign actions on your own website. They will also look at how you get traffic to them through:
- online ads
- social media (paid and organic)
- incentives and contests
- gamification
Main image: Helping hands – Photoraidz on Shutterstock.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.