Mar/Apr 2006

Convio’s Latest Offering Changes Landscape of Online Fundraising

In the past few years, the Internet has emerged as a primary channel for giving to nonprofits. The surge in online giving — fed in part by the unprecedented response to natural disasters including the late 2004 tsunami and last year's Gulf Coast hurricanes — has placed new demands on Internet tools used by nonprofits. But so far, Internet tools typically have not provided the power and flexibility nonprofits must have to act quickly and effectively in this era of heightened donor expectations.

To help nonprofits create online fundraising campaigns that accelerate giving and enhance the online donor experience, Convio now offers Convio5. Based on lessons learned over years of working with more than 500 customers that collectively have used the Internet to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, Convio5 enables groups to move beyond the "one-size-fits-all" online donation process.

"In developing Convio5, it is impressive that Convio proactively sought feedback from the nonprofit marketplace and incorporated critical online fundraising functionality that's important to any organization," said Michal Heiplik, Database Administrator, HoustonPBS.

Unprecedented flexibility in shaping the online donor experience

Nonprofits now can quickly build customized, campaign-specific online donation forms instead of relying on third-party technical assistance from their technology vendors or canned form templates that cannot be altered which, to date, has been the industry standard. With Convio5, nonprofit professionals can easily modify donation forms or quickly create a micro-site to best meet the needs of different types of fundraising campaigns, such as running an annual pledge drive or capital campaign, or driving funds in response to a natural disaster or other urgent needs.

Convio5 allows nonprofits to maximize giving because they can, without the delay and cost of tapping a vendor, employ more sophisticated fundraising techniques and create campaigns that are most suitable for their organizations' objectives. With Convio5, nonprofits now have significantly increased flexibility to build more effective donation forms and campaigns, including options such as changing language, adding questions, customizing branding and design, changing the order of donation fields, choosing single versus multi-page forms, etc.

Convio5 gives organizations the ability to:

• Create different donation forms to test which form drives the most giving. At the same time, an organization can track which promotions for a fundraising campaign (e.g., Yahoo! banner ad, email, search engine key word, etc.) are driving the most donations.

• Quickly and easily build micro-sites around fundraising themes or specific, time-based events. An animal welfare group, for instance, could produce different micro-sites specific to dog owners or cat owners. The same group could instantaneously build and deploy a campaign specific micro-site in response to a natural disaster to drive online giving and support relief efforts. This would include specific landing pages, branding, a customized donation form and auto-responder thank you messaging.

• Incorporate different branding to match a specific campaign, event, affiliate or institution. A large, multi-affiliate organization, for example, could customize online donation forms that match the individual brands of its chapters, while a university could customize capital campaigns to match the brands of different schools across campus. Or, a cause-based group could brand fundraising campaigns that are specific to a particular issue.

• Increase giving and donor satisfaction by allowing constituents to choose a giving option most comfortable to them within the context of a specific campaign, such as automatic bank withdrawals for monthly giving or installment payments for a large donation.

Built-in best practices

When developing the latest version of its offering, Convio also recognized that often, organizations do not have the time or desire to customize their forms. And, while every nonprofit and fundraising campaign is different, successful online fundraising programs do share common characteristics. That is why Convio5 features built-in best practices and provides a starting point for any fundraising campaign with a collection of pre-configured donation form templates for a variety of purposes.

To start raising money online immediately, organizations can activate these forms in minutes, taking advantage of the type of form proven to best meet specific online fundraising needs. Then, if desired and as time allows, the organization can modify the form with wording and branding specific to their organization.

The solution also incorporates proven online fundraising techniques in areas such as testing, data capture and viral marketing.

Find out more about Convio5.