The Essential Role of Fundraising for Animal Rights Advocacy
Animals have the capacity to experience pain, suffering and emotional distress, just like humans. Upholding animal rights is a moral obligation that reflects our compassion and empathy as a culture, and is a responsibility we bear towards all other sentient creatures. Supporting animal rights ensures their wellbeing and safeguards animals from cruelty and exploitation.
Fundraising plays a fundamental role in supporting animal rights organisations – it’s what enables them to advocate for and continue to protect the welfare of animals. Animal welfare organisations rely heavily on financial contributions to carry out their work effectively.
Fundraising Challenges Faced by Animal Rights Organisations
However, despite the importance of animal rights fundraising, animal welfare organisations face a set of unique challenges that can make fundraising difficult. These include:
- Competition from other charitable causes: Charities that focus on issues affecting humans rather than animals can be more appealing for some people.
- Emotional Resistance: Animal welfare issues can involve cruelty, distress and can be emotionally charged. Some people will find it difficult to confront or engage with such topics and will seek to avoid them.
- Capacity to cause discomfort and offence: Related to the above, animal rights issues are charged and emotional, and fundraising communications can run the risk of offending people and becoming the subject of complaints.
Although you will face challenges, you can secure the ongoing funding your organisation needs to continue its valuable work.
Setting the Stage for Successful Fundraising
As with any form of marketing, planning successful fundraising requires strategic forethought before any campaigns begin. Your pre-fundraising planning should include:
Setting your Fundraising Goals
Define what you want to achieve with your fundraising campaign, whether that’s a specific financial target, engaging particular donors, or expanding your organisation’s reach. Setting measurable and achievable goals provides a clear direction for your fundraising efforts and allows them to be tracked and evaluated.
Knowing your Donor Base
Understanding your target audience(s), including identifying why they’d want to donate to you and how best to reach them, will allow you to create compelling and effective communications that reach the potential supporters you want to engage.
Developing Compelling Narratives
When it comes to communicating your organisation’s work, people will respond best to stories that engage their emotions. Craft a compelling narrative to form the core of your fundraising campaign. Choose one that sets the scene for why your work is required, how people can help, and the expected outcomes.
Employing a Diversity of Fundraising Methods
You can explore a variety of fundraising methods to diversify your income streams. These can include individual campaigns, corporate partnerships, grant applications, fundraising events, online crowdfunding or selling merchandise. Diversification reduces your organisation’s reliance on a single source of revenue and broadens your reach to different donor groups.
Traditional Fundraising Approaches for Animal Rights Organisations
A common set of traditional fundraising techniques have proved popular and effective for animal rights organisations, including:
Hosting Engaging Fundraising Events
Grand events, like galas, auctions, or charity dinners, can be intensive to organise but effective in generating donations – especially for generating a large amount of donations in a short time.
Events provide an opportunity for potential supporters to learn about your organisation’s work, to experience your organisation and to meet your team as well as donate. They can also provide plenty of photos, videos, and other media to use in future fundraising communications.
The power of Direct Mail and Email Campaigns
If your organisation has access to databases of contact details, such as subscriber email lists, these can be used to great effect to generate donations, often at a reasonably low expense. Mail and email can be easily personalised and targeted to different donor groups. You can also include compelling stories, images, and video, plus links to online donation platforms.
Corporate Partnerships
Your organisation can offer businesses valuable opportunities, including awareness building, positive public relations and brand associations. You can make the most of these by offering a range of corporate partnership possibilities. These could include corporate sponsorships of events, cause-marketing collaborations, and jointly branded merchandise.
Grant Applications
A selection of grants and endowments are available for funding animal welfare work, from foundations, government agencies, and other funding sources. Grants come in a range of sizes that can be matched towards specific projects for your organisation, and can be found with straightforward online research.
Embracing Digital Fundraising
You can leverage digital fundraising and social media to reach your audience more effectively and to provide your supporters with a range of ways to donate.
Online Fundraising: Crowdfunding and Online Donations
Crowdfunding and online donation platforms like Crowdfunder, GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and Patreon offer exceptional opportunities for you to expand your fundraising efforts by providing convenient ways for supporters to donate to you. These platforms offer a number of advantages, including:
- Easy access to global audiences
- A simple to use interface, both for you and supporters to use
- Allowing you to use text, images, and video to tell compelling stories
- Transparency and open tracking of donations
Links to your organisation’s crowdfunding page can be shared easily online too via emails and social media.
easyfundraising for Simple, Cost-effective Donation for your Supporters
In addition to crowdfunding platforms, easyfundraising offers an additional, effective way for your supporters to donate to you. easyfundraising is a platform that allows online shoppers to donate money to charitable causes with their everyday online shopping.
Your supporters can shop via easyfundraising with more than 7,500 partner retailers including Amazon, Tesco, Asda, eBay and Apple. These retailers will then donate some of what is spent to a charitable cause, like your organisation. It means supporters can raise money for you at no extra cost to them. The donations will be paid for by our partner brands, not by your supporters.
To begin using easyfundraising, you’ll need to register your organisation with us as one of our good causes. We’ll then provide you with a suite of tools to help you promote us with your supporters, including templates for social media posts, email campaigns, and WhatsApp messages.
Social Media for Fundraising Success
Social media platforms can offer a cost-effective way to expand your fundraising reach and engage wider audiences. Start by identifying social media platforms that are suitable to your organisation and your capabilities, and research how other charities are using them effectively. Social media offers an opportunity to leverage storytelling via impactful and engaging visual content.
Building Long-Term Financial Sustainability through Fundraising
Individual fundraising initiatives can be effective at raising money for short-term goals. But ongoing funding streams will protect your organisation against temporary fluctuations in earnings and will ensure you can continue your activities without sudden declines in cash flow.
To transform your fundraising endeavours into long-term sustainable revenue streams, focus on:
- Developing a long-term strategic fundraising plan that spans multiple years to ensure you have a pipeline of fundraising initiatives planned.
- Using a diverse range of fundraising approaches, including events, grants, corporate partnerships, merchandise sales and online fundraising platforms.
- Cultivating long-term relationships with donors. You should seek regular and consistent donations rather than one-off contributions. Look to create monthly giving programs and foster ongoing relationships with donors through consistent and timely communications and updates.
Find out more about how easyfundraising can help your fundraising initiatives here.