When going down the digital rabbit hole of the Internet, it can be easy to focus all of your attention in the wrong place when coming up with a digital fundraising strategy. Although that can be worrisome, there is a simple framework that can help you get some peace of mind and a great strategy. According to one article that I found online, the best strategies consist of four simple elements: goals, target audiences, tone/personality and ultimately channeling the strategy. Below is a more concrete outline of how this works:
Goals: Always start with the overall business goals of your organization. Once you have these, you can find out how digital channels can help achieve them. These will be the goals of your digital strategy. Prioritize them, and then you have a great outline of what your digital goals are.
Target audiences: Prioritize who you want to talk to to get these goals met. You want to find what your different targets have in common; knowing what situation they’re in means that you’re talking to them instead of just looking at demographic data.
Tone/personality: When speaking on behalf of an organization, you might not know what your personality is. It can be easy to act way too formal, or even worse, let the personality of the organization’s copy writer dictate the personality. So define who this organization is. Make a list of personal traits it should have until you have a clear picture of what they all mean. Come up with examples of how to write and how not to write.
Channel strategy: Now that you know what you want and who you want to reach, you need to choose some channels. Look at what channels your target audiences use and where you can reach them. List all of the channels you currently have or would like, then prioritize them based on importance to goals and target audiences. For each channel, define a set of partial goals that are related to the main goals you’ve decided.