Mailchimp Donation Button Creator

Email marketing is very effective in engaging contacts for charities and Not-for-profit organisations. Assisting charities get more, and bigger, donations is a frequent request that my charity clients ask of me. All too often charities haven’t considered email marketing as a way to increase donations but it is a perfect way to encourage donations with little effort (and typically a very high ROI) whilst making it very simple for the recipient to donate.

How to Increase Donations with Email Marketing

Let’s assume that you have three objectives in regards to your email campaign:

1. Get more of your contacts to donate.
2. Increase the donation amount.
3. Increase the donation frequency.

Item 1, getting more people to donate, is relatively painless; import all your contacts into a Mailchimp list.

Item 2, increasing the donation amount comes down to design, wording, personalization and segmentation. I’ve always found that describing what each value of donation contributes helps contacts be more involved. For example, don’t just ask for a $10 or $30 donation but rather describe the benefit e.g. a $10 donation buys a blanket for a homeless person and a $30 donation buys a blanket and provides nutritious meals for a week. Personalization too helps the potential donor be more involved; using the potential donors first name in the message is powerful in increasing conversions.

Increasing the donation frequency may be achieved by requesting ongoing donations. For example, don’t ask for a one off donation in your email campaign but rather ask for a monthly donation (this is also termed a subscription).

One of the best ways of encouraging people to give is to make it easy for people to do so.

All three of the above objectives can be met with an email campaign where we include donation buttons to make it very simple for the recipient to donate monthly via PayPal or credit card.

Generate One-Click Donation Buttons for Marketing

Accepting ongoing and regular donations usually involves high costs and complex software. Fortunately we can use PayPal to very easily collect and manage the ‘subscriptions’ for us. All you need is a PayPal account for your Charity or NFP or NGO and the correct hyperlink to use in your donation request email campaign.

Below is a form that will generate the URL that you may add to a Mailchimp button so that the recipient can easily donate a set amount (also called a fixed contribution amount) on a regular basis.

The steps are:

1. Sign up for a PayPal account and setup your account.
2. Add your contacts to your Mailchimp list.
3. Create your email campaign in Mailchimp.
4. Whilst creating your campaign, generate your donation URLs using the form above. Add the URL to a button (use the Mailchimp Button content block and paste the URL generated by the form to the button).
5. Test then send your campaign.

Please let me know how you get along in the comments section below.