Your largest revenue driver can and should be your website

Increasing Digital Fundraising Results Beyond Outbound Campaigns

Thinking beyond the inbox and social feed to drive new digital revenue

We are asked by prospective clients almost weekly, “How can I drive more revenue through digital?” It’s the million dollar question. Pun intended.

The default answer that most fundraising teams use is to imply that they have the best email strategy. That their digital media execution can drive additional revenue. At givingMD, we want to layer in a qualifier before we ever make a recommendation.

Enter Digital Moneyball.

What level is your existing site traffic

Many times, when we’re asked this question, we’ll know that the volume of traffic to these organizations’ sites is very healthy. Donor-centric traffic may already be among the top health scores for visiting the site.

Instead of defaulting to “send this great email campaign that worked for another client,” we analyze the web traffic.

Your next level of digital fundraising revenue can be a sentence or two away.

Seems impossible. We know. We hear it all the time. But if your website is bringing top-of-funnel visitors to the site through great organic content, or through direct traffic and referral traffic because of great brand efforts, you need to analyze the middle-of-funnel translation of that traffic.

What if you grew that translation of traffic by 5X to your site donation forms? What would that do for your organization?

Approaching Progression Rate Optimization

If you just questioned what that phrase means, you’re not the first one to ask us that. The chart here is a glimpse of several pages on a client’s site that had high visitor volume and a mix of visibility levels on the site. Some pages were layers deep into the site while others were main navigation pages.

The key number for this analysis is the progression rate. This is the rate at which visitors progress to the main donation form through that specific page.

In July 2024, after a recent redesign from another agency, this average rate had fallen drastically from previous 4-5% levels to below 1.7%.
Our outbound campaigns had 35-45 emails a year already, driving record revenue, so driving new revenue via email and digital media was not a real opportunity.
These 9 pages each had one or two simple callouts or slight layout tweaks to put in place which could drastically increase the progression rate.

With our optimizations in place, and seasonality not involved as a factor, the progression rate was more than 5X higher. Said differently, we saw 250 NEW gifts through these pages each month, driving more than $60,000 every single month.

The Revenue Multiplier is Often the Content of Your Site

Website optimization comes in many different shapes and many different contexts. But once you have a certain volume of traffic, it can become the single most important piece to your fundraising program.

The next frontier for fundraising is through LLMs like ChatGPT and other AI content tools. Your SEO levels will need to be at the top of their game for this. Optimizing for top-of-funnel demand is different than optimizing for current traffic flow on your site. Fresh content, tagged correctly, with certain architectures can achieve high SEO results over time.

Optimizing the conversion rate of your main donation form on the site can have drastic impacts as well. We’ve seen new donation form layouts equate to millions in unrealized revenue for clients just by simple optimizations.

It’s time to start thinking far beyond “channel” activations for digital, and time to start using digital moneyball to your advantage.

Want givingMD to take a look at your digital program funnels to uncover where your focus should be to drive the highest impact possible? We're always here and ready to help.