Learning Lab
Welcome to the NIO Summit Live Stream Learning Lab!
You can use this lab as a means to find on-demand resources, tools, videos, and more to help you improve your online fundraising, marketing and communication.
While you wait for the next NIO Summit session to begin, browse the resource collection below to find your next great test idea that can lead to a lift in your revenue and a learning about your donors.
The NIO Summit live stream is free for you thanks to our generous sponsor.
Resources
Free Training Courses
Intro to Online Fundraising Optimization
Learn the foundational principles of online fundraising optimization. These aren’t just best practices – they’re tested and proven methodologies that can lead to real growth in your online fundraising efforts.
Year-End Fundraising for Online Fundraisers
In this 4-session year-end fundraising course, you’ll discover new ideas to craft a successful year-end fundraising campaign for your organization based on years of research and thousands of fundraising experiments.
Donation & Landing Page Optimization
In this online course, you'll learn tested and proven strategies to create, implement, and optimize email acquisition pages, your main donation page, campaign donation pages, and instant donation pages.
Email Fundraising Optimization
This 7-session course will teach you tested and proven strategies to write, design, launch, and optimize email fundraising campaigns that lead to more donations and revenue for your organization!
Featured Resources
DonorVoice:
Our Pick
DonorVoice is The Behavioral Science Fundraising Agency with scientists digging deeper into the why of behavior combined with fundraisers who know science is only useful if it's applied.
Bloomerang:
A Buy's Guide to Fundraising Software
Shopping for new fundraising software can be a trying experience. It isn't easy to know which option is truly best for your organization with so many vendors to choose from. This Buyer's Guide to Fundraising Software will help you cut through the noise.
A Direct Solution:
Monthly donor retention play book
This Monthly Donor Retention PlayBook contains the typical approach for the Prevention and Reactivation of Lapsed Monthly Donors. This includes hard and soft canceled approaches, email reactivations, telephone scripts, and letters to go out to anybody with a postal address.
Whole Whale:
Onelinr fundraising ideas- nonprofit fundraising during covid-19
We have compiled a list of the 20 best virtual (and coronavirus-mandated socially distance-friendly) fundraising ideas that leverage tools like Zoom, Facebook, YouTube, online gaming, and other platforms that can serve as a fundraising vehicle for your organization. Each fundraising method comes with real-world examples to spark creative ideas for your own organization!
Keela:
Fundraising Forecasting Tool
Keela and Imagine Canada’s Grant Connect have teamed up to present you with this simple forecasting calculator to help you get a handle on your nonprofit’s expected revenue. Use it to forecast major gifts accurately, grant funding from foundations, government, and corporations, as well as individual and recurring donations, and more!
Grant Writing & Funding:
Our Pick
World-renowned grant writing expert and Amazon bestselling author Holly Rustick loves to coach others to enhance their grant writing and business skills. She teaches thousands of people every week through her top-ranking podcast, Grant Writing & Funding, how to take actionable bite-sized steps skills in grant writing and business.
Top Nonprofits:
Intro to Mission Statements
Top Nonprofits has created a 4-page guide with worksheets on creating mission and vision statements for your organizations. The guide includes:
1. Intro: Guidelines, Audience, & Functions
2. Mission Statement Building Blocks
3. Mission Statement Worksheet
4. Vision Statement Worksheet
Chapman, Cubine, Allen & Hussey:
Driving Digital Donations with Direct Mail
If you are interested in learning how to drive digital donations from your direct mail audience, you need to watch this video. Principal and SVP of Digital Services Brenna Holmes gave this talk as part of our partner ROI Solutions’ Putting the Pieces Together webinar series just a few weeks ago. There are tons of actionable takeaways you can put into your fundraising programs today!
Copywriting & Messaging
Why Should I Give to You?
Learn how to effectively craft and communicate your value proposition and acquire more donors and dollars than ever! This ground-breaking study of 127 of the largest nonprofit organizations will help you understand the need to communicate your value proposition effectively.
4 Proven Ways to Help Donors Understand Why They Should Give
Whether you’re trying to raise more money online, communicate with donors face-to-face, or increase revenue from a direct mail appeal — your nonprofit value proposition is the most valuable tool to influence someone to give to you.
We have uncovered 4 key elements you can use to improve your value proposition and increase giving.
5 Nonprofit Copywriting Techniques to Create More Meaningful Connection with Donors
While writing the best copy to see results in your online fundraising requires close thought and a few more steps, it’s easier when equipped with the right, proven techniques. Use these techniques to create a more meaningful connection with your donors, leading to more conversions, more donors, and more revenue for your organization!
Data & Analytics
7 Things You Didn't Know Google Analytics Could Do to Help Your Fundraising
Google Analytics is the essential web tracking tool for online marketers and fundraisers. Without reliable analytics, you’ll never know what’s working or what to optimize. In this training, you’ll learn how to answer 7 key questions using Google Analytics.
7 Guidelines for Using Nonprofit Data to Tell a Story
These guidelines will help you create better presentations to report your fundraising success and help you communicate your impact to your donors even better!
3 Lesson from Analyzing the Key Metrics of 155 Nonprofits
Learn about some additional insights from analyzing the 3 essential online fundraising metrics of 155 organizations (web traffic, monthly donations, and average gift).
Tools & Platforms
6 Unexpect Online Fundraising Tools That Can Grow Your Revenue
The key to growing your nonprofit’s online revenue doesn’t lie in new online fundraising tools. Because people give to people – not to the latest CRM, email marketing platform, or social media listening tool. These 6 tools will help you implement new strategies that connect with donors on a personal level, even when they’re just browsing your website.
5 Donation Platform Questions to Ask When Choosing a New Tool
The solution to your online fundraising growth will never be a new tool – like a donation platform. You have to have the right strategy – and sometimes, the right strategy requires a new donation platform. As you consider and evaluate what the right donation platform is for your fundraising efforts, there are 5 questions you need to ask about the platform that are deal-breakers for online fundraising growth.
Email Fundraising & Cultivation
A Quick Reference Guide to Email Fundraising
We’ve outlined 9 questions to ask when creating your next email fundraising appeal based on learnings from 2,500+ online fundraising experiments. In this quick email fundraising reference guide, you’ll find data-driven and proven tactics to improve your subject lines, email copy, design, calls-to-action, and much more!
5 Ways to Improve Your Email Subject Line
Here we will focus on one thing: writing great fundraising email subject lines. There are many reasons why people don’t read your emails, and one of the biggest is that they don’t even open them. The subject line can play a crucial role in changing that.
What is the Best Time to Send Fundraising Emails?
The right message to the right person at the right time is an old marketing maxim. And while much has been done around email messaging and targeting and segmentation — although more can and should be done — there isn’t a lot out there about the best time to send fundraising emails. Here is some data to show you what is the best time to send fundraising emails.
A Beginners Guide to Donor Cultivation
Donor cultivation is critical to your nonprofit fundraising success. However, a lack of cultivation may be contributing to the industry-wide problem of low donor retention rates. We’ve discovered in our own research that there’s plenty of opportunities to improve donor cultivation and lead to more donations and revenue.
Donor & Email Acquisition
A Proven 4-Step Model to Acquire New Donors
Donor acquisition is the lifeline of nonprofit fundraising. Not only do new donors help you grow and expand your nonprofit's efforts and programs, but low donor retention rates mean you have to keep acquiring new donors to maintain. This guide will show you how to build a sustainable donor acquisition program that is cost-effective, digital-first, and proven to work.
How 13 Email Acquisition Page Elements Helped One Organization Increase Conversions by 448%
You can utilize and invest in a million channels to try and grow your email file. But regardless of what marketing channels you use to get your message out, you always need two things: a content offer and an email acquisition page. We’re going to talk in-depth about the email acquisition page and a few tips on acquiring new emails.
Instant Donation Pages: How to Turn New Subscribers Into New Donors Instantly
There is no one-size-fits-all donation page that will ensure high conversion. And there is no ultimate donation page template. We’ve found from 300+ donation page experiments that there are 3 types of donation pages: general donation pages, campaign donation pages, and instant donation pages.
Donation Pages
11 Donation Page Examples That Are Proven to Increase Donations
We analyzed 500+ nonprofit donation pages, which showed that 95% of donation pages have clear elements of friction that have been proven through A/B testing to kill donation rates. Learn from donation page examples that demonstrate new concepts that are proven to increase donations and revenue.
7 Donation Page Secrets to Instantly Optimize Your Fundraising
If you want your donation pages for fundraising to be more successful, then this powerful guide is for you! Our fundraising optimization team at NextAfter has spent many years performing hundreds of experiments to create the best nonprofit donation pages.
The Donation Page Friction Self-Assessment
Friction on your donation page can be hard to identify yourself, but your donors feel it every time they consider making a gift. This free tool will walk you through questions about your donation page and give you a personalized friction score with tips to start optimizing your page.
The Donation Page Friction Research Study
By developing a 25 question self-assessment tool for nonprofits to discover friction points in their online giving experience, we’ve compiled data to analyze friction in the giving experience of 643 organizations. In this free benchmark report, you’ll be able to explore 8 types of friction that are killing your donation pages and see real data-driven strategies to reduce this friction and raise more money.
A/B Testing & Optimization
A/B Testing Guide for Nonprofits
A/B testing is something that not many nonprofits are doing well, but those running a/b tests are seeing major lifts in donations and revenue. In the 8 steps below, you’ll learn exactly how to find where to test, what to test, and how to test. But before we get there, let’s look at why you need to be testing.
8 A/B Tests to Try on Your Donation Page
The only way to know what truly works to increase giving on your donation page is to A/B test. But knowing what to test and where to start is a challenge for many fundraisers — especially if you’ve never run an A/B test before. Here you'll find 8 unique donation page tests that have been proven to lead to more donations and revenue.
The Best New Online Fundraising Research, 2021
New online fundraising research is being conducted every day — with organizations decoding what works to increase giving and generosity. That’s why we put together this new online fundraising research journal documenting 18 of the latest learnings about what works to increase giving.
