Where your 2019 Tax Appeal can benefit from a digital boost
Charitable giving remains strong in Australia with almost $143b being generated from funding and donations last year. And it’s no surprise that the end of the financial year remains the peak period for giving.
We know many of you are now counting down the weeks to press go on your Tax Appeal campaign, wanting a bigger piece of that $143b pie.
In this edition, we are on a mission to help you get there, by adding a digital boost to your 2019 end of financial year campaign.
Here goes…
1. Make music with your Tax Appeal Schedule
Okay, we don’t mean your team breaking out into song (although that would be fun too ♫ 😊!) We mean everyone singing from the same song sheet.
We don’t think you can have the BEST EVER TAX APPEAL without a clearly laid out plan.
Your campaign will undoubtedly involve internal stakeholders and external agencies. It will be made up of many moving parts from your messaging to your content requirements across mediums, channels, and platforms. And all this needs to come together in a timely and harmonious manner.
Everyone singing from the same song sheet.
We help our clients by laying out their entire campaign in a Tax Appeal Campaign Scheduler. If you don’t have one of these, please download ours.
It’s worked musical wonders for us and our clients!
2. Create a ridiculously persuasive landing page that converts
A landing page is no ordinary thing.
We love Elon Musk and his vision for multi-planetary life. Imagine one of his SpaceX ships landing on a new planet and discovering another life form. This would create the opportunity to “make contact” and meaningful exchange.
Landing pages are exciting as landing on new planets. They create opportunities to make contact in new and refreshing ways. Yet, despite this excitement, it’s easy and quite common to get caught up in the sameness of creating one.
You have a new tax message, grab your go-to template, clone the same form you use every time… Where’s the sense of adventure?
Where’s the creative exploration that makes your potential donor actually want to convert?
If you are using the same landing page template as last year.
STOP!
Download our easily digestible Whitepaper on Creating killer landing pages that convert. If you can’t apply everything, try ONE adventurous thing you haven’t done before.
3. Take your donation experience to a new stratosphere
More than any other time, the action you want your prospects to take at Tax time is donation.
For many of our clients, donating online has far outgrown offline and the CPA is much lower…2.5X lower. So it makes sense that you want the online donation experience to be as engaging as possible. If you thought landing pages were an adventure, donation platforms are on another stratosphere.
To achieve the desired outcome, you have to map out your prospects’ entire journey to donation.
4. Benefit from the power of smart integrations
Your tax appeal is a great opportunity to integrate your platforms to optimise information flows. We sometimes refer to this as the interconnectedness of things.
In your Tax Appeal campaign, being able to push your contacts and payments through your CRM, gives you a powerful source of truth.
Imagine what is possible with a real-time view of your donors online interactions and their giving behaviour and the amounts they give. So what could you do:
- Personalisation of the giving experience using PURLs and giving handles based on past giving history.
- Setup incomplete-abandon cart functionality to use social, Google and email remarketing to reconnect with those prospective donors who did not complete their initial donation. This also is a great way for lead generation.
- Use integrations between your landing pages and your CRM and payment gateways to get the data in real time. This removes the need for manual daily exporting and importing of data from one system to another.
- Implement Google Analytics eCommerce tracking on your donation flows and get detailed insights into your online conversion metrics by channel, user demographics, product (giving handles), etc.
- Go one step further and push Google Analytics information, such as UTM tracking parameters, directly into your CRM for each transaction.
Done right this type of integration is one of the most exciting things that will happen in the nonprofit sector.
So, why wait.
Talk to us about smart integrations as part of your 2019 Tax Appeal campaign.
5. Skyrocket your conversion with A/B Testing
Run A/B testing for your tax appeal to test different variables (e.g. creative, tag lines, content, call-to-action, etc.) to see what works best for your audience segments. by creating 2 identical versions of your Tax Appeal landing page except for 1 core element (the thing you’re going to test). Here’s a list of core elements you can test, and optimise on your page:
- Headline
- Messaging
- Call to action (CTA)
- The colour of your CTA button
- Images
- Copy
- Layout /structure
Continue running tests until you achieve skyrocketing conversion rates!
This is so easy and fun and to do. And you learn so much about your audience along the way. Luckily they’re not aliens from another planet!
6. Ad Grants your way to success!
Like Elon Musk won’t magically land on Mars, prospects won’t magically appear on your Tax Appeal landing page. You need to actively amplify your efforts to stand out from the crowd.
With $10,000 USD/ month free ad spend from Google available for nonprofits, Tax is a prime time for making the most of your Ad Grants account to drive leads and donations.
The starting point is to set up everything correctly. So make sure your Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Conversion Tracking are set up according to best practice. This will enable you to report and track against your campaign objectives.
There are special rules for Grants accounts: 5% CTR, no single-word or overly generic keywords, no low quality score keywords and so on. It can be complex, particularly at Tax time but made simpler with expert advice. Do talk to us if you need help.
In the meantime, read up on the happy Granters who’ve benefited from the use of Google Ad Grants around the world.
Wrapping Up
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
— ELON MUSK, SPACEX
At Leafcutter we embrace disruptive technologies that improve the ability for marketers and fundraisers to connect to their audience, tell stories and raise money for their cause.
We hope the above has been useful in planning for your 2019 Tax Appeal.
If you want to dive deeper into any of the topics to reach for those stars, then talk to us.
