Crafting a successful wildlife conservation fundraising campaign will take time, hard work, and consistent effort, but it can reap considerable results and have a significant impact on your organisation. Here we give you clear advice and actionable tips on how you can be successful in your conservation fundraising.
Why is Wildlife Conservation Fundraising Important?
The natural world is facing unprecedented threats. Conservation fundraising is a critical tool for helping to fund research and projects that protect biodiversity, preserve ecosystems, and promote sustainability. Funding wildlife conservation efforts can help ensure the survival of wildlife and contribute to the health and resilience of our communities and our planet.
How to Start your Wildlife Conservation Fundraising Campaign?
You’ll need to clearly answer the following key questions to establish the focus of your fundraising campaign.
What Are You Raising Money For?
Identify a specific cause you want to raise funds for, such as a conservation charity, a wildlife research project, or a conservation initiative for a particular species or habitat. When promoting your fundraising campaign, you’ll need to be able to state precisely what you’re raising money for, so people clearly understand what they’re donating to.
What Are Your Fundraising Goals?
As well as defining who you’re raising money for, you need to set clear and achievable fundraising goals. Goals will help shape your fundraising strategy and messaging, and will give everyone involved a common target to work towards. Fundraising goals can include raising a specific amount of money, attracting a certain number of donors, or raising awareness for important issues.
Who is Your Target Audience?
Your target audience is the group of people you want to support your cause. Identifying who your targets are will help you craft compelling and effective communications and promotional efforts that are specifically tailored to your audience.
You may well have more than one target audience, including public, corporate and government audiences. It’s key to understand the motivations for donating for each of your audiences and define what you want from each audience. This will help you tailor and customise your communications to make them as effective as possible.
Creating Your Wildlife Conservation Fundraising Campaign
Once you’ve set your goals and defined your target audiences, you can begin to shape your fundraising efforts. This includes fashioning your narratives and identifying the most suitable fundraising methods.
Craft a Compelling Story
People respond to narratives. If you can create interesting stories for your fundraising efforts, you’ll better engage your target audiences and improve the chances they’ll donate to you.
Your fundraising stories should communicate why wildlife conservation is so important and how the funds you collect will impact conservation. The better your stories, the more they will evoke emotion and create a personal connection with your audience. And they will be all the better and more effective for it. You should research and take inspiration from other successful wildlife conservation efforts to help form your narrative, but make sure you focus on why yours is unique and what it truly offers.
Choose the Right Fundraising Approaches
As well as creating engaging narratives, you’ll need to decide which fundraising methods are most appropriate for your goals, your resources and skills, and your target audiences. Options include fundraising events like festivals and fetes, online fundraising events, direct mail campaigns, corporate sponsorship opportunities, and the sale of regular or limited-offer products.
Identify the Best Ways to Collect Contributions
As well as making it easier to reach audiences, the online world has also opened up the ways in which you can receive donations for your fundraising efforts. Crowdfunding platforms in particular give donors an easy way to contribute to your campaign. Links to crowdfunding pages can also be shared easily online.
Our own platform also offers you a unique way to receive donations. All you need to do is register your fundraising project as a cause with us, and supporters can donate to you with their regular online shopping. easyfundraising offers you a unique, compelling, and cost-effective way to raise funds for your conservation initiatives.
Promoting your Wildlife Conservation Fundraising Campaign
Once you’ve crafted compelling stories, you’ll need to communicate them to your target audiences.
Use Social Media and Other Online Platforms
The digital world has revolutionised fundraising, giving you a suite of tools to communicate your efforts and reach your audiences. Digital communication can be hugely effective and great value for money, but it can also fall flat if it’s not executed with care and planning.
Online options include leveraging social media platforms, creating email newsletters, establishing a dedicated website for your fundraising campaign, and creating content for other sites like local news services and community blogs.
Digital communication channels should be appropriate to your goals, audiences, and capabilities. Choose social media platforms your audiences use and channels that you understand and can employ effectively. If you have access to a database of email contacts, then you can leverage it for email campaigns. If you have the capacity to create artwork or photography, Instagram may be an effective choice. If you can create video content, then consider TikTok.
Again, you can research how other organisations use online communications effectively to inspire your own efforts.
Partner with Influencers and Local Businesses
Influencers and other partners can give you access to established audiences and can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of your fundraising communications. If you’re thinking of going down the influencer route, you’ll need to work with someone who shares the same goals as your organisation. Have they engaged with their audience on conservation matters before? Do they genuinely care? Authenticity is so important.
You can also look to work with influential individuals, businesses, and other organisations like local government bodies, that have a shared interest in wildlife conservation. Partnerships will be most effective when you understand the needs of the other party and can offer ways to achieve them through collaboration with you. This could be by raising awareness for them, reaching new customers, or providing them with public relations and brand building opportunities.
Engaging and Retaining Donors
Rather than seeking one-off donations, aim to build and maintain ongoing relationships with your target audiences and donors. You can do so by:
Thanking Donors
Recognising and rewarding the contributions of donors can help to keep them engaged and will make it more likely they’ll donate again. Options for thanking donors include thank you notes, expressing gratitude in person, and publicly recognising and celebrating contributions in newsletters, in online articles, and on social media.
Provide Regular Fundraising Updates
Timely updates can keep donors engaged with your fundraising efforts. Aim to keep donors informed about the progress of your projects, share success stories, and showcase the achievement of any key milestones.
Offer Opportunities for Donors to Become Involved
If you provide ways for donors to become actively involved in your wildlife conservation efforts, they can contribute in ways that have meaning for them. Examples could include participating in conservation work, volunteering at fundraising events, or creating media for your communications. Encourage donors’ input and listen to their ideas to make them feel like valued members in your fundraising team.
Create a Donor Community
Try to foster a sense of community amongst your donors by encouraging them to connect with each other. You can do so by establishing offline networking events and by creating online social spaces like social media groups and forums.
The Power of Effective Fundraising for Wildlife Conservation
Fundraising is at the very heart of wildlife conservation. Effective fundraising provides the financial support needed for conservation research, to implement conservation work, to engage communities and stakeholders, and ultimately, to protect the natural world.
Find out more about how you can register with easyfundraising to provide your supporters with a cost-effective way to donate to you.