NPR Digital Services Blog

Quick Pledge, our industry-specific online pledge system, has an enormous impact on results…and it gets better each year.  Just take a look!

During the Fall 2010 drive months (Sept-Oct) stations using Quick Pledge raised  $7.7 million online, with 75,000 donor transactions at an average pledge of $103.

This fall during same time period, stations using Quick Pledge raised $9.6 million in some 89,000 donor transactions with average pledge amount $107 .

That’s a 25% increase in dollars raised and a 19% increase in the number of individual transactions!

Looking at the past full year (Nov 1, 2010-Oct 31, 2011), our stations as a whole raised a total of $31 million with Quick Pledge. That’s a whopping 292,000 pledge transactions, with an average pledge amount of $106.

Last year’s numbers in comparison were $22.6 million in 227,000 transactions with an average pledge amount of $100. That makes the increase 37% for dollars raised and 29% for number of transactions

Segmenting your email list and sending targeted messages to groups of people based on their interests, behavior or demographics is a proven tactic to increase the effectiveness of email campaigns and open rates. People want to receive information that is relevant to them, and sending an e-blast to everyone on your list will not necessarily accomplish that.

Segments can be based on particular characteristics or interests of the person or how they have interacted with your organization or emails in the past. If you do not have the necessary data already in your database, collecting interest information on the sign up form is a great place to start collecting data that you can then use to create segments easily.

For your e-renewal efforts, you could build segments based on donation history. For example:

• Exclude people who have made a gift in the past three months, are currently in renewal cycle, or have specifically requested not to receive e-solicitations via email.

We’ve improved the Pulse to Quick Pledge prefilled pledge forms functionality to make e-renewals and other fundraising campaigns even easier and more effective. You can now prefill the donor’s pledge level based on their last giving amount,  in addition to Name, Title, Email, Address, City, State, Zip, Country, Home and Work Phone number. The information will come from the person’s profile in Pulse.

To take advantage of this feature, you will need to:

• Upload the donor’s latest gift amount from your membership database to Pulse’s “Last Renewal Amount” field.
• Send your email campaign from Pulse, including the pledge tracking links [ instructions].
• When the donor clicks to donate via the pledge tracking link in this email, they’ll be taken to a prefilled Quick Pledge form. The donation level will be preselected based on their last donation amount, and their personal information will be  prepopulated as well.

Quick Pledge gives donors the ability to browse your premiums and choose one or more premiums, as long as the total donation level is greater than the total level of the premiums selected.

Some of you have requested to be able to limit the number of premiums to just one per donation and this is now possible.

This is an optional feature you can choose to activate in the Quick Pledge administration tools.

If you do not turn it on, as in the past, donor will be able to select any number of premiums up to the dollar amount of their donation. If you activate it and donor selects more than one item, they will be instructed to review their selections and only choose one item.

To limit premiums to one per donation:

• In your Quick Pledge Administrative tools Go to Pledge form Manager

After launching the monthly Sustaining Membership template few months ago, we heard that you also wanted the option to offer premiums with your sustaining member program. You can now do that.

You can activate your existing premiums on the sustaining member form, or create separate sustaining only premiums and assign them to that form only. Since premiums can be shared between your Default pledge form and the Sustaining Membership form, be sure to always enter annual pledge totals into the system. The amounts are automatically translated into monthly giving levels when displayed on the Sustaining Membership form.

For example: $120 gift level premium would be displayed as:

• $120 gift on your default form.
• $10 gift on your Sustaining Membership form.

Sarianne Palmesano sent out an email about year-end fundraising that’s definitely worth sharing.

The end of the year is a great time to reach out to your listeners and members and thank them for being a valued listener, and at the same time ask for a contribution.

People are in the holiday spirit, and with tax time around the corner it’s a good time to remind them of the tax advantages of contributing to your non-profit organization.

Ideas and more info here.

The credit card industry is tightening their guidelines. The PCI (Payment Card Industry) now requires all organizations that process, store or transmit credit card information to be PCI compliant.

What does this mean for you as a station?

It means that if you store any credit card information for any length of time, whether in electronic format on your server or simply written on a piece of paper, you need to go through the certification process and become PCI compliant. The only way to avoid this is by not storing any credit card numbers in your systems, and Public Interactive can help you with this.

How we can help

Now is the perfect time to consider Quick Pledge with integrated real-time processing to eliminate the need to store credit card info. No credit card numbers are sent to you for processing – that’s online and phone orders, too – so your systems are less vulnerable.

Quick Pledge Fundraising Stats

Thought you might be interested to know that in the last year, from: 4/2009 to 4/2010, stations raised $20 million online using Quick Pledge, with an average gift of $100.

• Total Quick Pledge transactions: 199,500
• Total Amount raised using Quick Pledge: $20 million
• Average Quick Pledge Amount: $100

Congratulations to all our stations!