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Digital engagement to drive fundraising is the flipside of crowdfunding. Where one is a short campaign usually motivated to get a program off the ground, digital engagement is a strategic and key part of your organisation’s future planning.
‘Welcome to the attention economy and the participation economy where the power has shifted from brands to audiences,’ was the catch cry that Emma Dunch used to introduce her keynote lecture for the recent Art of Fundraising conference in Sydney.
‘Once upon a time our arts organisations had the power to shape our brands and sell our product in a one-way transaction, from us to our audience. Now we’re sharing that power with our audience and, in fact, we are just one piece of a highly networked society where consumer attention is the new currency we need to trade in – that is the new money!’ she said.
Australian born Dunch has worked with 75 different arts and cultural organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. She moved to New York in 1999 and founded Dunch Arts in 2008. It is now one of the leading arts management consulting firms in the United States.
The new attention economy
In this new environment – what Dunch has labeled the attention economy – we are not competing with each other but rather with external forces: ever-multiplying channels of information and entertainment, social media, and streaming platforms that place demands on people’s leisure time.
‘These all compete against the live experience we offer,’ said Dunch, ‘but our day remains stubbornly just 24 hours in length. So as fundraisers in this environment how are we to adapt?’
Read: Why we need adaptive resilience
Dunch proposes that the answer lies in prioritising digital engagement of our patrons, and that we need to start thinking about this beyond marketing, which is the framework that we are used to dealing with the digital landscape in.
This is important for three reasons:
- Firstly keeping up – funders care that we are keeping up with the times and our digital strategy is an important factor in deeming whether or not we are worthy of funding support.
- Second is that digital engagement is important for conveying impact, and it allows us to tap the enormous power of storytelling for fundraising purposes.
- And finally, it is about leveraging data – we live in a world where every consumer brand is investing in tracking data about us to better service our needs, and the cultural sector should be no different.
Dunch’s mantra is that information is power and data is the new dollar in the arts.
She said that in the US today funders literally ask: ‘Do you have a digital strategy? How sophisticated is it and are you tracking metric? How are you harnessing your digital reach? And how are you amplifying the digital voice of your patrons and audiences?’
Most arts and cultural organisations would not be able to answer those questions.
The default is that a digital presence takes resources – both personnel and financial – of which most organisations have little to spare.
Dunch, however, demonstrated that it is not dollars that drives digital but a commitment to thinking outside the box and going to where audiences are.
As arts and culture organisations it is time to foster that attention and facilitate consumers participation in what we do, and unless we do we are limiting ourselves.
Where to start
‘First of all you have to have a digital strategy and it must include fundraising in it,’ said Dunch.
Not only do you need to ask what are you doing to collect digital data on your organisation, but how you are going to aggregate it, think about it, analyse it and use it for fundraising purposes.
In 2013 Google published the report Driving Donations Digitally. One of its key headlines stated that 75% of donors turn to online channels to research organisations before they determine whether or not to make a gift.
Screenshot, Google’s Driving Donations Digitally report (2013)
Dunch continued: ‘In fact the top three sources that donors use to research us before deciding to donate are all digital – our website, our online videos on our site and YouTube and our search engine results. And all those things rank ahead of direct mail.’
‘If you are not spending at least as much on digital fundraising engagement as other modes, you are leaving money on the table and you are leaving fundraising opportunities untapped,’ she warned blatantly.
She said that your baseline digital priorities should be:
- Every cultural organisation needs a robust fundraising portal on their website.
- You need online fundraising videos that are discoverable and on YouTube.
- You need Google search engine results that are optimised for fundraising purposes, so that when you type in your organisation’s name in search and your URL comes up with all the sub-categories – you need to have a Support Us category show up on that first page of results.
- Every transaction process on your website should include either an open option or a pre-determined popular donation option. You need to work through the back-end of your digital mechanics to ensure that there is a fundraising option with every transaction on your website.
Impact drives donations
Impact is all about the value of storytelling: 81% of donors cite your impact as their number one driver as whether they will hit that donate button.
‘We want our audiences talking about sharing, liking and perhaps even criticising us, and we need to track all of their digital engagement and turn it into dollars for fundraising purposes,’ said Dunch.
‘At Dunch Art we advise our clients to pick one of two simple approaches: either conveying your impact through the eyes of your audience or through the eyes of your artists.
‘This approach is about letting your audiences make the fundraising argument for you – letting them share their personal impact.’
She relayed case studies of Dunch Arts clients – New York City Public Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, and the successful New Yorkers for Dance campaign, which was created from scratch in 2002 with no donor base and a mere $2000 by a dance union.
They invited 30 relatively famous supporters of dance to create a short video clip – pretty low tech – which was launched as a series on YouTube. The money came in with each of those 30 supporters asked to bring at least one person they felt could give a $500 donation to launch the video series and program.
‘We also invited anyone interested in dance to make their own personal video and tweet to the web under the hashtag #NYFD. One metric of success of this online digital engagement is of course views and traffic. Four years later there have been more than 200 videos posted and more than 60,000 views and countless shares, likes and retweets,’ said Dunch.
Key to any digital engagement is tagging: ‘You should brand and hashtag all of your initiatives.’
From the initial $2000 Dunch reported their digital engagement was now raising more than $65,00 a year for the annual operating budget, and that while those grass roots donations were akin to crowdfunding they were done in a more longitudinal manner over a number of years, which has allowed it to be leveraged in multiple directions, including matched funding and patron one-on-one challenges.
And on keeping up
‘You can keep up by having a digital fundraising strategy and meet your donors where they are – on your website, on YouTube and via optimised search results,’ she said.
Particularly when you are offering free programming, make sure that you are integrating an opportunity to give a gift or support the continuing of that free program.
Dunch predicts that digital economy and fundraising success will turn on the power of leverage data in the future.
‘Our patrons are leaving digital bread crumbs for us every day in all of these areas and the trick in the future will be collecting that and applying it to a person’s record, and then to appeal to them for fundraising purposes in a very personalised manner,’ she said.
‘Very few cultural organisations are yet at this level of sophistication but it is definitely what is coming our way. That is why digital fundraising is not [exclusively] about crowdfunding. It is about this kind of longitudinal engagement and the tracking of patrons across months and years,’ Dunch concluded.
Emma Dunch presented this paper at The Art of Fundraising – Culture Business Conference presented by Agenda in Sydney 22-23 March 2016.
