How to Mazimise Your Religious Organization's Fundraising with easyfundraising

The Power of Online Fundraising

Online fundraising opens up the possibilities to increase the scope of your fundraising initiatives. You’re making it easy for both your congregation and the wider community to give to you when they don’t necessarily need to be present at your services or events. It also offers an opportunity to supplement your in-person fundraising efforts with an ongoing stream of income. And you can reach a wider audience too.

With more and more of your organisation’s activities happening online, it makes sense to embrace the digital world for your fundraising as well. Here we’ll explain what easyfundraising is, how it works and how we can help you raise funds for your organisation.

Understanding easyfundraising

So, what is easyfundraising and how does it work? Let us explain.

What is easyfundraising?

easyfundraising is a simple and hassle-free way for you to receive donations from your congregation and supporters. We’re an online platform that provides donations to charities and good causes, taken from people’s online shopping.

We can help you raise money for your religious organisation on an ongoing basis. It’s simple and free for you to set up, and it doesn’t cost you a penny when you receive donations. It also doesn’t cost your supporters, apart from what they’re spending when they shop online. It’s a great way to provide a continual flow of donations alongside any other fundraising activities and events you run.

How Does easyfundraising Work?

The first step is for you to register your organisation as one of our good causes. It’s free for you to do and it’s a super quick process. Once you’re registered you can start receiving donations.

Donations work like this. Every time one of your supporters shops online with one of our 7,500+ partner retailers, they need to select your organisation as their chosen cause. Once they spend online, that retailer will make a donation on their behalf out of the money spent. It doesn’t cost your supporters anything extra and the donation is organised between us and the retailer. How much you get each time depends on the agreement between the retailer and us, and the available donation chosen by each supporter. Often it will be a flat fee or a percentage of their spend.

The key is to get as many people to choose you as their selected good cause when they shop online with us.

Maximising Fundraising with easyfundraising?

How do you ensure people are picking your cause? Here’s how.

Setting up a Successful easyfundraising Campaign

When you sign up to easyfundraising, you get to complete your own fundraising page for your good cause. This is your opportunity to showcase the fantastic work you do and why fundraising is so important for the future of your organisation. How you set up your page can make a huge difference to the success of your campaign. Here are a few tips to help:

Set a clear goal: How much are you trying to raise and why? Let people know what your goal is on your page, why you need these funds and the impact that any donations, big or small, will make. If people can see what their money is going towards, they will be much more likely to donate.
Tell a compelling story: People want to engage with your organisation and work. Storytelling is the best technique to do this. Tell potential supporters about the work you do, the impact it has on your congregation and the wider community. If you can create a compelling narrative, potential supporters will be much more likely to engage with you on a human and emotional level.
Use emotive language: The language you use is key. You want to be clear and concise about your work, but also use emotive language to help build that emotional connection.
Use high-quality visuals: Humans are visual beings. High-quality visuals that work alongside your emotive language are super important.

Engaging the Community Through easyfundraising

Engaging with your existing community will be crucial to your digital fundraising efforts. You want them to clearly understand the benefits of donating through easyfundraising. Namely:

The fact it’s easy and hassle-free to do.
That we work with over 7,500 online retailers, many of which they probably shop with already.
It doesn’t cost them anything extra on top of the money they’re already spending online.
The real difference it can make to your ongoing fundraising efforts.

Spend some time at the end of one of your services or in-person events explaining how you’re now using easyfundraising and run through each of the above points in detail. It also makes sense to create flyers and handouts that people can take away with them. You may also want to consider putting posters up around your premises too as a helpful reminder for your congregation and community.

And as this is a digital fundraising method, digital promotion is vital too. Your social media channels and emails offer the perfect opportunity to get your message out to your community but also to a wider audience. You’ll need to highlight the great work you do, showcase the ease of easyfundraising and the impact it can have. When you sign up with us, we have a handy ToolKit with a range of templates you can use in your communication, including social media templates, email templates and WhatsApp templates.

Leveraging easyfundraising’s Features for Success

What other features does easyfundraising have to help? Let’s have a look.

Taking Advantage of Retailer Partnerships

As we mentioned already, we have partnerships with more than 7,500 online retailers. They include retail giants like Amazon, eBay, John Lewis and Lakeland. It’s likely many of your congregation will shop with most of our retailers regularly.

But it isn’t just their regular shopping either. With partnerships with the likes of Skyscanner, National Holidays and TUI, they can donate to your organisation when they book a holiday. They can do so when they get their weekly shop with Tesco Groceries or when they sign up to new insurance with a range of providers. They can even do so when they book driving lessons with PassMeFast.

It all comes down to how you communicate with your community. You need to help them understand the scale of our retailer partnerships and how just a simple thing, like signing up to easyfundraising, before they shop can make such a huge difference to your organisation.

Utilising the easyfundraising Donation Reminder

We get it, 7,500+ online retailers is a lot to keep track of. You can’t go through the whole list with your supporters, and they won’t want to read through all of them online. Fortunately, we have a handy Donation Reminder browser extension that helps.

When you download it to your browser, it will pop up every time you land on the website of a retailer that’s partnered with us. It means people never miss a chance to donate to your organisation. When you explain how you’re now using easyfundraising – whether in-person or in your emails for example, highlight the importance of the Donation Reminder.

If you can get people signed up in the first place and using the Donation Reminder, you can really maximise the potential of your fundraising.

Looking Forward with easyfundraising

easyfundraising holds huge potential for religious organisations. It offers a real opportunity to secure funds for your organisation. It doesn’t cost you anything to use and doesn’t cost your supporters anything either. Now you have a chance to boost your fundraising efforts with a hassle-free digital method that can work alongside your ongoing in-person fundraising and events.