How Automation Can Step Up Your Matching Gifts Program

Time: there never seems to be enough of it! Wishing there were more hours in the day is probably something every nonprofit fundraiser has done once or twice. From brainstorming campaigns to support your nonprofit’s initiatives and missions to organizing your team and volunteers, we know that ever minute is precious for you and the rest of your staff.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with the matching gift specialists at Double the Donation to help you learn where (and how!) you can automate parts of your gift matching marketing strategy, which will help you save time for the other parts of your job. 

Step up your matching gifts program by focusing on these three tips:

1. Include company information in the giving process
2. Simplify the donor’s journey to their matching gift
3. Automate your matching gift email outreach

1. Include Company Information in the Giving Process

One of the biggest setbacks for organizations encounter when they include matching gifts in their fundraising strategy is the extra work it requires. When you have to contact employers to confirm a gift, you have to deal with he extra step of finding out where your donors work. Manually contacting donors after they make a gift to identify their employer isn’t a good use of your staff’s time! Investing that extra time is even more of a burden when there’s no guarantee of a match—or even a response—from the donor. Donors want to make a positive impact on your organization, but they also have time commitments of their own! That can make contacting them when they’re not expecting a call even more challenging.

So how do you catch their attention quickly and efficiently without creating more work for your own team? 

We recommend introducing donors to matching gifts during the giving process! That way, you can collect their company information while they’re actively using your form. It also gives you the opportunity to introduce the concept of matched gifts to donors who didn’t even know it was a possibility.

You can automate this process with Double the Donation’s 360MatchPro tool. This tool is a streamlined autocomplete search field that seamlessly integrates into Qgiv forms for an improved donor experience. If they want to see if they’re eligible for a match, donors can enter their company name in the search field and 360MatchPro will match them to the correct employer automatically. Your team doesn’t have to do a think! Automating the screening process for company information and tying entries to a matching gift database saves you an incredible amount of time. 

2. Simplify the Donor’s Journey to their Matching Gift

Over 18 million individuals work for companies with corporate matching gift programs. Unfortunately, organizations receive very little of the revenue corporations set aside for them!

If you’ve ever pursued matching gifts, you know that getting donors to fill out the matching gift request form is nearly impossible. That’s why we recommend leading donors to their matching gift request forms with as few steps as possible. The less work they have to do to request a match, the more likely they are to do it! You can help them by providing a direct link to their company’s matching gift request forms. 

Investing in a matching gift automation tool allows you to link donors to the appropriate forms right after they make their donation. When submitting a matching gift request is just a click away, donors will be more likely to fill out that form. 

3. Automate Your Matching Gift Email Outreach

One of the most important (and time consuming!) elements of any fundraising strategy is email outreach. Email is how most of your donors prefer to hear about events, campaigns, updates, and more—and automating some of those communications is an important way to make your email outreach more effective and more efficient.

So how can you use matching gifts emails effectively and efficiently?

Double the Donation’s research shows that sending matching gift emails within 24 hours of a donation results in a 53% open rate, which is 2-3 times higher than the average nonprofit email open rate. With an open rate that high, imagine how many donors will complete their matching gifts!

We recommend that you automate your matching gift emails to arrive in donors’ inboxes within the first 24 hours of their gift. That way, you’ll maximize your open rate and increase the odds of getting matching gifts funds!

Qgiv and Double the Donation: Automate Your Gift Matching with Ease

Marketing matching gifts is an extremely valuable strategy that can dramatically increase your fundraising revenue. There’s no reason your organization should miss out on all that potential revenue! Following our recommendations will save you and your donors time. Instead of spending hours finding eligible matches, encouraging donors to request a matching gift, and driving those matches to completion, turn those process into a simple but effective automated process.