Many people think that this is where a loyalty program ends. In fact, it’s only the tip of a very large iceberg. We don’t just want to drive donations based on rewards. We want to leverage our loyalty program to drive a sense of belonging and the common good.

As a non-profit, the community around the people, places, and things you serve, are often you biggest advocates. They are passionate evangelists of your cause and can appeal to potential donors at a personal level. Growing your reach through community is vital and empowering them to spread your message can be incredibly valuable.

There are several ways to utilize a community-based approach to drive new membership to your program and increase reach:

Leveraging Evangelists

We typically think of evangelists as the MVP’s of your donor loyalty program. These highly-engaged loyalists are actively talking up the work your charity does, telling people how great you are, and can speak to the value of the services you provide. Turn donors into advocates by providing rewards for program participants who are willing to spread the good word about your organization by offering referral codes.

These codes can be used to award additional points, merchandise, special event access, or just about anything else. In this way, you can see exactly how valuable your evangelists are and what they do for your organization.

Recurring Donations

The ability to garner small, automatically recurring donation, can add a big boost to your program and helps solve a monumental problem for most development managers; most often, donors choose to contribute to your nonprofit during a period of crisis or special time of year, but spending drops sharply directly thereafter.

If your organization typically puts on holiday fund drives, it’s often a lot easier (and more successful) to ask someone for $10 a month than $120 at the end of the year. This is easily done with the correct loyalty solution in place. Before onboarding a new loyalty program, ensure that it’s capable of recurring payments.

Third-Party Fundraisers

Often charities will have people reach out to them about creating third-party fundraisers or benefits events. Within your loyalty program, third-party groups should be received as a type of evangelist or ambassador. Since these tertiary groups often have access to a new group of donors, you can leverage your co-branded landing pages to capture each donor’s contact information and keep them engaged beyond the life of that one campaign.