Raising Funds & Voices: Tips for Funding Advocacy Campaigns
Advocacy campaigns are exciting, empowering endeavors that allow your organization to make a difference while strengthening relationships with your supporters. But whether your campaign aims to spread awareness of an issue or inspire voters to make their voices heard, it needs funding—meaning you need an effective fundraising strategy to make your advocacy campaign a reality.
What does this look like? While nonprofits don’t fundraise for political campaigns or elections themselves, you may raise funds to pay for petitioning software, outreach materials, and other resources that help you advocate for relevant policy change.
Fundraising for advocacy can be trickier than fundraising for a program, however. Use these tips to communicate your message effectively and raise the funds you need to amplify community voices through advocacy.
1. Use social media to gather grassroots support
Social media’s communal nature and global reach have enabled platforms like Instagram and TikTok to become hubs for grassroots activism. Users view, share, and create content that asks others to take actions like calling their representatives or signing petitions, ultimately inspiring large numbers of individuals to participate in advocacy.
Naturally, you can use the same social media platforms and tactics to fundraise for your advocacy campaigns. To run a grassroots fundraising campaign on social media, use the following strategies:
Create educational posts like infographics that are easy to share.
Post calls for donations regularly on your stories and link to your donation page.
Showcase the impact of your advocacy by sharing your wins and the results of past campaigns.
Use compelling, empowering calls to action that emphasize how donations fund your advocacy work.
For example, say that your animal welfare organization needs funding to continue its work advocating for more animal protection laws in your state. You might run a social media fundraiser in which you share photos of happy pets alongside data about the results of your latest advocacy initiative. At the end of each post, you emphasize how donors made these results possible and ask readers to donate to protect pets’ lives.
2. Discuss your advocacy work with major donors
Major donors can springboard your advocacy efforts. In addition to targeting small-dollar grassroots donors through social media, it’s crucial to seek out potential major donors who may be willing to give thousands of dollars to support your advocacy efforts.
Use prospect research to zero in on prospective and existing major donors with a passion for advocacy and a history of involvement in advocacy campaigns. Search your database and other prospect research tools for indicators of wealth, cause alignment, and a habit of giving to similar advocacy initiatives.
Once you have a list of likely prospects, schedule meetings or make phone calls to discuss your plans and goals for the campaign, along with what you’ve achieved so far through your organization’s advocacy. When the time is right, ask for a major gift that they’re capable of giving based on donation history and the wealth indicators you discovered during prospect research.
If you need help finding, cultivating, and stewarding your major donors, don’t be afraid to reach out to an expert consultant for help.
3. Partner with other community groups
Advocacy is all about power in numbers, so why not combine forces with another organization to spread awareness of your work further? Working with other nonprofits or community groups empowers you to tap into a much wider audience of advocates and potential donors.
Plus, partnering with other advocacy organizations gives you valuable insight into the kind of campaigns similar groups are running. As you plan a joint event or host an online fundraiser with a coalition of other nonprofits, you might get inspired by the variety of nonprofit advocacy examples and approaches your organization can learn from.
For instance, the example animal welfare group we mentioned earlier might partner with a voting rights organization to host a mass voter registration drive and a fundraiser to support the event. In the process of working with this group, the nonprofit might discover what GOTV is (“get out the vote”) and decide to expand their campaign by:
Creating social media infographics about local voter turnout rates and the difference more voters could make on animal rights issues.
Asking for funds to create educational materials that they can distribute to educate voters about animal welfare.
Emailing donors about the additional impact they could make by giving to support GOTV efforts.
When you consider what kind of organizations to partner with, make sure that their mission can clearly relate to yours. Contact them about the opportunity, and explain both why you want to work with them and how their nonprofit could benefit, too.
4. Tap into the potential of matching gifts
If you haven’t already incorporated matching gifts into your fundraising campaign, it’s a valuable avenue to explore. Matching gifts are a type of donation that corporations give to support the nonprofits their employees care about. If an employee donates $50, the company would typically donate another $50 on top of that (depending on their match ratio), doubling the original gift.
Highlighting matching donation programs often inspires donors to give larger gifts in the first place, too. When donors know their gift will be matched by their employer, they’re more likely to increase the size of their initial donation to generate more total impact on your advocacy work.
To tap into matching gifts to fund your next advocacy campaign, follow these steps:
Add a matching gift search tool or information about how to request a match to your donation page.
Set up automated emails to remind eligible donors to request matching gifts after they give.
Encourage your loyal advocates to check their employer’s matching policies and donate at least the minimum amount that can get doubled by their employer.
Provide tangible examples of the additional impact you can make with a matched gift.
Thank everyone who successfully requests a matching gift in support of your advocacy work.
Matching gifts are an excellent fundraising avenue for advocacy campaigns and much more. Once you have information on your donation page and practice promoting matching gifts to donors, you’ll boost the revenue potential of every future fundraising campaign.
As you try out these strategies, remember that advocacy campaigns at their heart are about community. Stay open to the ideas and insights of community members during your campaign, and take any feedback they have into consideration. Together, you can generate real, lasting change.