Bernie Sanders’ record setting campaign can offer us all some key lessons in how to engage younger donors online. These simple steps can be taken today to build your online presence and attract new donors to your cause.

In late 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the US Democratic Party’s nomination for President was riding high on a wave of enthusiasm and energy. His grassroots support was a mix of young voters, Independent voters pulled into the pulled into the Democratic tent, and an ever-growing number of Americans that believed in his succinct message of democratic socialism.

Regardless of how you feel about Senator Sanders and his campaign, it was a record-setting campaign in terms of individual contributions. By July 2016, the campaign had received 8.1 million contributions – more than Obama’s entire 2012 campaign including the general election. Bernie’s average gift was in fact $27, and 94% of those came online.

Bernie’s campaign, for obvious reasons, doesn’t offer a roadmap for winning a campaign. Undeniably though, Bernie’s campaign did provide a glimpse into what a highly-effective online fundraising campaign strategy looks like.

Originally presented last month at AFP Congress 2016, I’ve gathered a series of advice tips and tricks for the average fundraiser here in Canada responsible for online fundraising results:

Four ways to expand your email subscriber base

1. Develop a ‘funnel’ mindset

-       Do you know what percentage of your email subscribers donate? If not, do a rough calculation and begin setting growth targets for the top of your ‘funnel’.

2. Make it easy to sign up

-       Be ruthless! You can collect additional information from your subscribers later through surveys, pledges, and of course – donations

3. Budget for, and test, paid lead generation.

-       If you have acquisition budgets elsewhere, make a case to get it there. If you’re already investing in direct mail acquisition or print advertising, carve yourself some from there.

4. Test!

-       Try using tasteful and relevant popups (Wisepops, PopupMonkey, Popup Domination)

-       Test landing pages (Unbounce, Mailchimp “forms”)

Three ways to write emails that beg to be opened

1. Know your audience.

-       Never stop trying to learn about your audience. Seek to understand what key messages work, any why.

2. Challenge every held assumption with testing.

-       If your list is growing, it is also changing. You can test length, personalization, timing, frequency in your fundraising emails.

3. Work your non-opening segments hard.

-       Resend an appeal/eNews/announcement to non-openers with a new subject line. Let this be a playground for edgier ideas.

-       Don’t remove inactive emails from your list. Ask more of them, and let them bow out.

Two conversion strategies you can use today

1. Send more email.

-      Obvious, but true.

-       Use segmentation to suppress where necessary. E.g., Monthly donors, recent donors, etc.

-       Seriously. Go back to the office and send a fundraising email.

2. Streamline your approval and deployment process.

-       Ask yourself, and your team: who absolutely must sign off on an email before sending? Who is the best proofreader f         for sentence structure, typos? How, and who, will manage and respond to mistakes.

One Golden Rule for your online fundraising:

1. Be valuable.

Nonprofits can be valuable to donors in countless ways by providing opportunities to:

- Fund positive, progressive social change.
- Respond to community needs, help neighbours.
- Fight for rights and equality for themselves, and others.
- Represent diverse, and equally valuable, viewpoints.
- Challenge the status quo.
- Feel love, and give love.
- Save lives

You don’t have to be Bernie Sanders to do this.

The full slides from my AFP Congress session are available here, and I highly recommend viewing Kenneth Pennington and Zack Exley’s big room session at IFC earlier this year here (you’ll need to create a free account, and the session video is available for a fee).

Brock Warner is the Manager, Development at War Child Canada. He also publishes fundraising articles and how-to's on iamafundraiser.com and writes regularly for warchild.ca. You can follow him on Twitter at @brockwarner, and feel free to connect on LinkedIn.