Matching gifts offer powerful benefits to both donors and nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits enjoy virtually twice the amount of donations, and donors are pleased to know that their donations are going even further. If the matching gift is from a company, the business itself can enjoy some tax benefits as well as an increased social image.

This by far is a win-win scenario!

Matching gifts can be a great way for development practitioners to push their funding campaigns forward. It’s amazing how many charities leave money on the table because they failed to help their donors engage in the corporate matching gift annuities.

What is a Matching Gift?

Corporate matching gifts are a type of philanthropy in which companies financially match donations that their employees make to nonprofit organizations. When an employee makes a donation, they’ll request the matching gift from their employer, who then makes their own donation.

Many businesses run corporate giving programs whereby they match employee donations with contributions to eligible nonprofit organizations. Matching gifts can double, or even triple, certain donations, which can greatly assist fundraising campaigns.

For example, an employee donates $2,500 to an eligible non-profit organization and files a matching gift request. The employer company then approves this application and makes a 1:1 employee donation, writing a check of $2,500 to the same non-profit organization, thereby doubling the donation on the behalf of the employee. The nonprofit gets $5,000 from the donation, and the employee essentially donates $5,000, while only $2,500 comes from their own pocket.

Different companies employ different guidelines concerning matching donations. Employees are made aware of their company policies and ideally, should be aware of the percentage their companies are matching in donations. This information is often held by the human resources department of the company, who also may be responsible for making the employees aware of it.

Matching donations are a great way to enable nonprofit organizations to do more as donations increase while also helping businesses improve their corporate social responsibility.

Why Do Nonprofit Organizations Target Matching Gifts?

It’s a free flow of money! While any donation is free cash, matching gifts are an additional source of fundraising revenue that can help bankroll your organization.

NPOs need every bit of cash they can receive. As opposed to asking for new contributions, raising funds with matching donations lets you ask existing donors to do more without donating more of their own money. Many businesses with matching gift programs provide online portals for staff to submit requests for gifts, so it’s a painless, fast process for your donors that adds enormous returns for your nonprofit organizations.

First, nonprofit organizations have to address some important questions in order to leverage matching gifts:

• Where do your donors and their partners work?
• Are your donors knowledgeable about corporate gifting programs?
• Do your donors know about appropriate matching gift requests?

As a nonprofit, your job is to raise awareness about matching gifts. By answering the aforementioned questions, you will know whom to approach and with what information, so you can be more effective with your resources and time.

Here, we have covered six ways to make your donors aware of matching gifts:

1. Create Dedicated Matching Gift Pages
2. Educate Donors About Matching Gifts Within the Donation Process
3. Remind Donors to Request a Match in your Acknowledgement Letter
4. Encourage Matching Gift through Social Media
5. Be sure to Utilize Email Newsletters for Matching Gift Promotion
6. Include a Line About Matching Gifts Beneath Your Signature

Let’s walk through each of these best practices and what they can mean for your nonprofit!

1. Create Dedicated Matching Gift Pages

It is not just that you want donors to be informed about the matching gifts; you also want them to keep these programs at top of mind. One way to do this is to create a dedicated page on your site that has all the information about matching gifts.

A matching gift web page is a place for your donors to go when they have concerns about checking their employer’s program or submitting a request. The more information your donors have regarding the matching gift program, the more likely they will be comfortable with the whole process.

2. Educate Donors About Matching Gifts Within the Donation Process

An easy way to encourage your donors to double their contributions is to encourage matching gift programs in the midst of the giving process. You can inform your donors about matching gifts by adding an optional field to your donation pages.

You can provide an optimized link that leads to helpful information on employer matching gift programs, as well as guidelines on how to submit documentation. By including an optional field about matching gifts on the donation page, you can help them get more information and potentially make a request.

Providing donors with more information about their company’s matching gift program by including it on the donation page is a great way to motivate donors as they are already in the mood to give, and will probably take some extra time to consider requesting a match.

3. Remind Donors to Request a Match in Your Acknowledgement Letter

Sending thank-you letters right after your donors give keeps the gift in their heads for longer. By sending thank you letters, it is a perfect way to remind supporters of their company’s giving program and encourage them to pursue a match.

4. Encourage Matching Gifts Through Social Media

Promoting matching gifts on social media not only conveys important information to the donors, but it is done in a format that the majority of users are already acquainted with.

In addition, the use of social media can be a tremendous way to reach out to your younger supporters like Millennials and Generation Z. It can likewise be a great way to connect with people who have little knowledge about the nonprofit. If you share valuable information about matching gifts, your supporters will likely find the post. You can hopefully attract new donors and get more matching gifts via social media.

The secret to unlocking the full potential of social media websites is consistency; by regularly engaging your audience, you can make sure that your posts advocating for matching gifts are effective. Although Facebook continues to dominate the social media space, you can use other websites to encourage matching gifts as well:

• Pinterest: Create a board dedicated to “Matching Gifts” and repin related infographics and articles for your followers to repin and like.
• Instagram: Make use of this image-based website to tell stories related to the impact your nonprofit organization is making. Add a link to your Instagram profile and inspire donors to increase their giving with matching gifts.
• Twitter: Just keep your tweets brief and focused. After all, you only have 280 characters to convey an entire message! Be sure to provide your followers with other resources for more information.

It is important to regularly and accurately keep your profiles updated. It is preferable to have one or two rock-solid social media pages that promote your matching gifts (and nonprofit) than a couple of profiles that are stagnant and silent for several months.

5. Be Sure to Utilize Email Newsletters for Matching Gift Promotion

To help your donors learn more about gift matching, a good way to help them understand is to share messages about corporate giving through your newsletter. By doing this, you can keep nurturing the relationship you have with current donors while encouraging them to make their gifts go further.

6. Include a Line About Matching Gifts Beneath Your Signature

You can include a sentence under your signature which will always remind your subscribers about matching gifts. This sentence should be concise and attention-grabbing.

For example, something like this:

“Please think about doubling your gift’s impact. Your donation could be considered for a matching gift from an employer. Please find out whether you’re eligible here [link to a matching gift database].”

Conclusion

Matching gifts are a great way to increase your fundraising efforts and scale the impact that your nonprofit is working towards. Corporate giving is a sure way to establish a stable fund inflow, although it is likely that many of your donors need to be made aware of it while they are donating.

Promoting corporate philanthropy is not limited to the strategies discussed in this post! Additionally, donors can send their employers a prompt to match a donation while donating online via donation forms like those from Donorbox. Make sure to give your donors a wholesome online donation experience, which is also likely to work in your favor and help increase your funds.

About the Author

Raviraj Hegde leads Growth at Donorbox where he is helping thousands of nonprofits build great donor experience and increasing online fundraising. Donorbox is a state of the art fundraising software to create simple and powerful donation forms. It is trusted by over 30,000 nonprofits across 25 countries.

Instagram is undoubtedly among the leading platforms for brand marketing. It has evolved from a mere photo-sharing application to a platform where nonprofit organizations and companies can share their stories and outreach activities with the public since 2010. Through the application, brands can effectively build a loyal audience by using well-filtered photos and compelling captions.

With the increase in fundraising campaigns and peer-to-peer donations hosted on social media applications in addition to Instagram’s remarkable monthly user base of 1 billion active users, it is clear that nonprofits would be well advised to sign up for an account as soon as possible.

You can convey your message and update your audience most effectively through mixed media and images.

To help guide you, we’ve highlighted 7 proven ways nonprofits can engage with donors through Instagram:

• Register for an Instagram Business Account
• Publish Regularly to Increase Your Followers
• Create Compelling Captions
• Make the Most of Stories and highlights
• Make Yourself Discoverable
• Run Instagram Stories Ads
• Get Funding Through Stickers and Buttons

1. Register for an Instagram Business Account

In contrast to a normal Instagram profile, an Instagram business account provides you with access to valuable data, such as impressions, post-performance, and data about your audience. This is useful when it comes to building a strategy and finding out the kind of content that is best for you.

An Instagram Business Account also lets you have call-to-action features like “Directions” and “Contacts.” CTA buttons such as these are particularly useful for nonprofit organizations because they want to make it convenient and easy for interested funders to connect with them. For example, you can include a “Buy Tickets” button under your bio if you have an event.

Another vital characteristic of an Instagram business account is the power to promote content with just one touch. If you’re starting a new campaign on Instagram, for instance, you can promote a teaser or preview of your campaign video to reach audiences outside of your followers. If you give your audience a reduced version of your full video content, it will make them want more. And if they’re convinced, they’ll need to visit your profile to see the whole video.

2. Publish Regularly to Increase your Followers

To grow a following for your Instagram account, you must create and publish consistently. Instagram, like all social networking platforms, rewards a well-rounded publishing plan. If you publish a few times a month and then leave the account silent for weeks, it will be very difficult for you to increase engagement or views again and gain new followers.

In terms of publishing rate, how often do you need to publish? Well, it varies! A good rate is one you can maintain. If you regularly appear in your followers’ feeds, it is much more likely that they will trust you, reach out to build an affinity with your charity, and ultimately click on the donation sticker and donate a gift.

If you are only able to publish a couple of times a week, you should ensure that you keep to that schedule. So if you can post once daily or more in Stories, then that’s awesome! Consider it an exercise. Working with social media with purpose and intention daily will give you much better results than randomly churning out content once a week.

3. Create Compelling Captions

While visual media will forever be the core of every Instagram post, the content never stops at the great pictures. Captions are a great way to share the story underlying each picture.

To accentuate a specific message, you can also directly add the message to an image. This will work for quotes, campaigns, and other occasions where a still photo is not good enough. Try to use a photo editing application like Instasize for this. Instasize provides you with a wide range of stylized fonts that can conveniently be added to an image and uploaded directly to your feed.

4. Make the Most of Stories and Highlights

Instagram Stories is an excellent tool for companies to capture events happening in real-time, share moments behind the scenes, and reveal the culture of the company. Since the stories have a 24-hour expiration date, you can save your highlights for anyone who comes to your profile to see beyond the 24-hour window.

The Stories feature also means you can start polls and ask questions. It’s an easy way to gather user-generated content and interact with your followers.

Interacting with your followers could be as personalized as a live Question and Answer session or it could be as easy as a multiple-choice question. You can ask your audience certain things to make them feel that their opinion matters, such as where the next charity event should be or if they are attracted to a particular topic. To make it entertaining and appealing, be sure to add GIFs and stickers.

5. Make Yourself Discoverable

Consider your profile as the homepage of your organization. It’s where you can find all the relevant information about the organization, and there are only 150 characters available for that — use it wisely. Of course, by using your organization’s full name and a brief outline of your cause, that’s one of the first ways to do it. You should also include keywords related to your page to ensure that when people look for them, you are one of the profiles that will appear.

Instagram permits you to place a link on your bio, which in most cases should be a direct link to your site. However, if you run an ongoing campaign, you may like to direct your audience to a special landing page. Also, there are third-party resources, like Leadpages, that let you publish multiple links at once if necessary.

6. Run Instagram Stories Ads

Putting away even a small amount of money for Instagram Stories Ads can help you increase your audience, exposure, and gain more buzz about your stories.

This is how to set up an Instagram Stories ad with the Facebook Ad Manager:

1. Navigate to the Ad Manager and click + Create.
2. Select a target that matches your marketing goal.
3. Complete the campaign details.
4. Under the Placements level, click on Edit Placements.
5. From the Instagram section, check the Stories box.
6. Define your ad schedule and budget. Instagram Stories Ads can run the length of time you want and will reach as many audiences as your budget can afford.
7. Design your ad.
8. Finish your ad by clicking on Confirm.

Use the ad preview before sending your ad for review. Make use of the drop-down menu and choose Instagram Stories to see exactly how your ad will appear in that location.

7. Get Funding Through Stickers and Buttons

About 55 percent of individuals who engage in social media causes are motivated to participate in the action.

Understanding that it’s now up to nonprofits to get their cause in the spotlight. As a nonprofit organization, fundraising is a vital part of sustaining your cause. Fortunately, Instagram has devised simple ways for nonprofits to receive donations without leaving the application.

Now, apart from the “Get Directions” and “Contact” buttons, you can also include a “Donate” button on your profile. After clicking the button, contributors can simply choose the amount to contribute.

A donation sticker is also available on the stories tab. This can be done by any U.S. nonprofit organization that signs up to accept donations through Facebook and connects it to their Instagram account. Organizations like the No Kid Hungry American Cancer Society and the Wounded Warrior Project have already done so successfully.

Averaging 2-7% engagement on every published content, Instagram is regarded as the most engaging social brand platform. This fact alone makes the photo-sharing application a great point of contact for nonprofits to connect and engage with their followers. So, attach that donation sticker, and spread the word about the good you’re doing — a billion people are watching!

Bonus Tips

Change your Grid

Instagram is always going to be associated with photos, but that doesn’t imply that you have to confine your posts to that. Today, you can upload infographics, illustrations, and videos if you want to. By creating various types of visual content, your audience is more inclined to anticipate your next post. Therefore, try to change the content to know what is working and what is not.

Go live on Instagram

Instagram Live is a wonderful way to draw the curtain on your work and take people deeper and deeper into the fold. People enjoy the live video by interacting in real-time with the nonprofits they are interested in, asking questions, and giving you a fuller picture of the individuals driving the cause.

So include the donation sticker when you are live so that your viewers can donate when they are most inspired.

Then, save your live Instagram video to your Instagram Highlights so others can view it once the live broadcast is over and continue to give.

This post was contributed by Donorbox.

Raviraj Hegde leads Growth at Donorbox where he is helping thousands of nonprofits build great donor experiences and increase online fundraising. Donorbox is a state of the art fundraising software to create simple and powerful donation forms. It is trusted by over 30,000 nonprofits across 25 countries.