EveryAction has an interview series with their consulting partners. In this interview, EveryAction’s Michael Stein speaks with K2D’s own Karin Kirchoff and Angela Guzman.
Michael Stein: We’re excited to share learnings from your work with American Foundation for the Blind. What kind of growth have you seen in their direct response fundraising program in the past year?
Karin Kirchoff & Angela Guzman: The overall AFB direct response program has demonstrated steady growth year over year, and recent organizational priorities have pushed working more aggressively in the digital space to the forefront, thus aligning AFB with EveryAction.
We are pleased to have seen strong year-over-year growth, particularly at year-end within the digital space, doubling the dollars raised for this period. We are further excited to note that of the donors who gave through the EveryAction platform in December, more than 70% represent first-time gifts on the platform. (Not necessarily new to AFB.)
Michael: What marketing channels have been driving that growth, and which ones performed especially well this recent year-end?
Karin & Angela: We’ve been having success for AFB across a number of direct response channels. Postal mail campaigns have continued to be strong, and we’ve made important refinements to grow revenue in that channel.
In digital channels, we’re having success with Google Grant search ads and Microsoft search ads. Google Grant search ads drove a good amount of revenue at year-end…nearly 7% of December online revenue! Microsoft search ads are new terrain for us with AFB, and we’re seeing a 200% ROI on our year-end test run, so we’ll certainly be expanding in this market in 2020. We did not run Facebook ads at year-end this year. We’ve been working to get some critical privacy protection infrastructure in place first and will be expanding efforts in this regard later in 2020.
Michael: You mentioned that you took advantage of accessibility improvements on EveryAction’s donation forms for people who are blind or low vision. Tell us more about that project and how you think it improved fundraising performance.
Karin & Angela: In order to launch their new website in April 2019, AFB had us implement a “workaround” coding solution that enabled proper accessible navigation of their donate pages while EveryAction worked to implement a broader, more seamless experience. The workaround included radio buttons beside each giving option, to allow for tabbed navigation between ask amounts. Ensuring accessible forms was not only critical for AFB’s fundraising success, but for maintaining trust as a leading organization on the accessibility front. Once the EveryAction improvements were ready for launch later in the year, we were able to remove the workaround for a cleaner user experience. We’re really excited that EveryAction has made a strong commitment to accessibility for people who are blind or low vision.
Note: This article originally appeared on the EveryAction blog
