Written by
Sadie
Stephens
Published on
April 2, 2025
Digital Strategies to Diversify Your Fundraising Portfolio
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Fundraising is the lifeblood of the charitable sector–the electricity running through our organizations that keeps us moving. Without successful, ongoing fundraising efforts, you will be unable to have an impact.
Establishing a robust, multi-channel digital fundraising strategy is crucial to your success as a charitable organization. Across Canada, online donations are growing faster than overall giving as more charitable donors, especially younger donors, prefer to engage with causes virtually. To attract and retain these groups of donors, you need a plan for fundraising digitally.
Keep reading, discover the core digital-first fundraising strategies charities like yours can use to achieve financial stability, raise more money, and maximize your impact–all based on the latest research, trends and expert insights in digital fundraising.
Inside this chapter of our new e-book:
COVID, the Canada Post service disruption and economic uncertainty over inflation and the threat of American tariffs underscore some of the societal and economic reasons behind why charities need to diversify the sources of revenue in their fundraising portfolios.
Creating a robust fundraising network with both offline and online donation streams will carry your organization through financial hardships and the ups and downs of the economy. As you take your fundraising digital, let's explore how to prepare your digital toolkit, and once this is set up, delve into the top five fundraising strategies charities like yours can harness to take your fundraising game to the next level.
Making the perfect fried egg begins with a frying pan and a spatula. Successful fundraising is like cooking–you need the right tools.
Start with an online payment processor that can accept donations directly on your website. We recommend choosing CanadaHelps’ Customizable Donation Form and linking or embedding it on a landing page within your website.
Your online giving process should offer donors:
- A seamless checkout flow
- Multiple payment tiers ($25, $50, $100, $250)
- Multiple payment options (Credit, Google Pay, PayPal, gift cards)
- A donation confirmation page and email
- Donor data in one place (no clunky spreadsheets!)
Your goal is to simplify the giving process as much as possible. Charities often make the mistake of collecting online donations through ‘low-cost’ donation processing systems that create unnecessary friction or barriers to donating.
Do not accept donations over these systems:
- Interac eTransfer
- Hyperlinking to the CanadaHelps charity profile
- Exclusively taking mailed donations
Now that you’ve established a system for accepting donations, let’s explore the five digital fundraising practices you can implement to grow your impact.
1. Email & Digital Communication
Effective digital fundraising hinges on building meaningful and lasting relationships with donors. Relationships are established through digital communication, primarily over email.
Best Practices for Digital Donor Communication:
- Personalized (name, acknowledgement of past gift ect)
- Consistent
- Segmented (age, high-value donors, lapsed donors etc)
- Tailored (to the donors’ needs and preferences)
- Thankful and gracious
- Timely
Ensure your donors are thanked and feel acknowledged. Outline the impact of their gift and reinforce the importance of their generosity to your organization’s mission. Engage with donors consistently at monthly or quarterly intervals, and always within the first 24 hours after a donation comes in.
2. Social Media
Fundraising over social platforms is getting harder. Use fewer platforms but develop them consistently and well.
Best practices for fundraising on social media:
- Post consistently
- Make content interactive
- Share impact stories
- Focus on relationship building (reply to users who interact with your content)
- Leverage unique hashtags to increase visibility
- Have a clear and easy flow to make donations, and direct users to your donate link
3. Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a powerful digital fundraising strategy where individual supporters raise money for a charity by leveraging their personal network. P2P campaigns can be independent, or connected to a specific event or date in the year –runs, walk-a-thons, birthday fundraisers etc. P2P campaigns are powerful as they give you a personal testimonial on behalf of the fundraiser, similar to how ‘word of mouth’ operates.
4. Virtual Events
Virtual events are an important component of a robust digital fundraising strategy. Some of the benefits of online events fundraising are:
- Showing your faces to donors
- Reaching many donors at once
- Engaging with donors in real-time
Virtual events are opportunities for engagement and interaction. Some of the strategies you can use to engage your audience include:
- Q&A sessions
- Live polls,
- Discussions
- Chat moderation
During the beginning, middle, and end of your event, take the opportunity to make a live fundraising pitch. Ask your audience for donations in a straightforward manner.
5. Mobile Giving
Mobile and tablet giving is a growing area of online fundraising. It is an important part of a comprehensive digital fundraising strategy, especially if you are trying to appeal to younger supporters.
Mobile giving strategies:
- Optimize donation pages for smartphones and tablets
- Offer QR code donation options on brochures and other paraphernalia
For each of the five digital fundraising methods, it’s essential that you use analytics to track the effectiveness of the strategy and that you iterate and make adjustments as needed. Digital fundraising must be an ongoing process, with some trial and testing along the way.
Remember, digital fundraising is meant to work in tandem with offline fundraising efforts. Even as you digitize your fundraising portfolio, you don’t need to rely exclusively on digital strategies. Certain members of your audience will still respond better to traditional offline fundraising practices like phone calls, direct mail, and in-person events, and you want to continue exercising some of these methods so that you don’t want to alienate or lose these supporters.
Your goal is to harness the five strategies mentioned above to diversify your donation streams and establish a strong digital fundraising presence that maximizes your ability to achieve long-term success.
For more information on going digital, download our new ebook on digital first steps for charities.
If you found this blog helpful, be sure to check out the eBook: Digital First Steps for Your Small Charity or check out the other blogs in this series:
