Digital Fundraising: Show Off Your Brand and Engage Potential Donors

Digital display marketing and digital fundraising often get bad raps. Many find them annoying and intrusive to their web-browsing experience. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The digital ads of today have a little more class to them. When designed well, they can show off your brand and re-engage people who have been active on your site. This leads to several other benefits, such as:

  • Higher Conversion — Prospects who are re-targeted are much more likely to convert to donors or more engaged alumni.
  • Brand Awareness — Digital ads are great at increasing brand awareness. For universities, this translates into stronger relationships with alumni.
  • Tracking — What’s great about digital display ads is that when paired with marketing automation, it’s a great way to track who’s been on your site.
  • Cost Effectiveness — With digital ads you can ensure that all the money that you put into it is spent on impressions, and with retargeted ads you’re hitting people who are already engaged.

In your advancement office you can use digital fundraising and display ads in a few different ways.

Retargeting

Retargeting allows you to target specific people who have visited your website. With most retargeting you are able to pick specific pages that you want to tag people on, then your banner ads are displayed to them while they are doing other web browsing on other sites.

You’ve likely seen this technique before with other sites like Amazon. You might be checking out a new pair of shoes, and then later are reminded with an ad to come back and add them to your cart.

IP Targeting

With IP targeting you are able to send people ads based on their IP address, which are matched with people’s physical address. So if you wanted to send a banner ad that encouraged all alumni to donate, all you would need is their home address, which could then be matched to their IP address.

GEO-IP Targeting

This method allows you to target people within a specific area. For example, you could serve an ad to every IP address within 10 miles of your institution inviting people to visit your new donor page.

By the popular demand of our partner colleges and universities, Capture Higher Ed university advancement to serve Advancement. Our super-charged marketing automation for higher ed, Capture Behavioral Engagement, allows alumni and development offices to find, rank and convert stealth alumni to active members and donors.

By Kristen Fisher, Brand Manager, Capture Higher Ed