How Fundraise Up helps Outlier Media understand and convert their donors
Share this story:
A growing number of news organizations are turning to fundraising tools for features beyond donation collection. The trend goes hand-in-hand with a profound shift in how audiences are engaging with news organizations and a need to not only monetize a digital readership, but also track and manage such an audience.
For Detroit-based local news outlet Outlier Media, selecting Fundraise Up as their fundraising tool was based on many factors. They wanted a platform that would make the process of migrating off their existing donation tools — including Givebutter, Donorbox, and Memberful — as seamless as possible. They also sought a tool that was easy to use, offered better data on donor behavior and integrated with their CRM.
“Fundraise Up was confident they’d be able to help us get from Givebutter and Memberful to their platform relatively easily and honestly, that was the biggest selling point. We didn’t want to have to figure out how to do that ourselves, and potentially miss out on a lot of revenue,” says Ashley Fassett, Outlier Media’s Membership & Events Manager.
Here’s how Outlier Media parsed through the options, the challenges they hoped to solve, and why they’re happy with choosing Fundraise Up.
Three reasons to use Fundraise Up:
- Insightful user information: Gives abundant data on donors, including information about which article or platform led them to donate.
- Responsive customer service: Has an extremely responsive customer service team that often replies to inquiries “within the day,” Fassett says
- Conversion features galore: Offers an array of AI-powered features designed to convert one-time donors into recurring ones, recover abandoned donations and more.
About Outlier Media
Founded in 2016, Outlier Media is a nonprofit newsroom of less than 25 staffers that serves the greater Detroit area. Via its investigative content, Outlier Media empowers local Detroiters to “hold people and systems accountable for harm.” Its model is built around assessing and responding to community coverage needs.
The organization is dependent on grants and donations from individuals, foundations and corporations, all made possible by a robust membership program.
To run it, Outlier relies on a constellation of systems: Bloomerang serves as their database of transactions, BlueLena as their audience management platform, ActiveCampaign as their email service provider, and Newspack as their publishing platform. Event ticket sales also make up a significant part of their revenue.
Organizations seeking to grow their membership program and integrate it with a multitude of other products and platforms might most resonate with Outlier’s collaboration with Fundraise Up.
The problem: Consolidating donation platforms without losing donors
Outlier needed a donation platform that offered a wide breadth of features to support their membership program and, importantly, one that would help them migrate off their other donation platforms — accrued following a merger — with ease.
To address the second challenge, the team had to seriously consider the fact that, in the process of consolidating to two donation platforms, they had already forced a significant slice of givers through a migration. They did not want to put them through yet another move.
Outlier wanted to not only make this next migration as frictionless as possible, they also wanted to solve a number of pain points.
One major issue with previous fundraising tools was that the team had to manually import all donation information into their database of transactions on a monthly basis.
“It was a lot of manual work,” Fassett says. “We probably could’ve had a Zapier connection to Bloomerang and our CRM, but as a small news organization, you don’t have that kind of support.”
The team also wanted a tool that would give them more features and more donor behavior information.
The solution: A supportive donation platform worth the expense
When Outlier decided to explore Fundraise Up’s platform, Fassett says that “not a lot of people were on it.”
Fassett also notes Fundraise Up’s “high fees.”
What ultimately convinced Outlier to make the switch was an ample amount of research, coupled with confident assurances by Fundraise Up.
“We had a sandbox before deciding on going with Fundraise Up, so we were able to test out some of the features before we committed to switching. We also spoke to many, many newsrooms and I did more maths than I care to admit,” says Fassett.
When the Fundraise Up team expressed confidence in shepherding them through the logistics of consolidating their donation information into a single platform, it was a done deal.
The impact: Successful donor upsells and useful audience information
Despite their initial hesitations around Fundraise Up’s high fees, Outlier Media says the investment in the platform has paid dividends.
Currently, average recurring donations incur a fee of around 9.6% while average one-time donations incur a 7% fee. Fundraise Up does not charge a platform fee.
“The pre-donation upsell, which convinces one-time donors to create a recurring plan, has generated $1,835/year in revenue since we switched to Fundraise Up. The post donation upsell, which does the same in reverse, has generated $984/year,” Fassett says.
“Those are the most impressive metrics that I can point to and say we definitely didn’t have that before. For us, the fee structure is worth it.”
AI-powered and non-personally identifiable insights into donation sources has also positively affected their audience strategy, letting them understand which platforms, and more specifically, exactly which stories have converted readers into donors.
The tool identifies which UTM source, browser, link, and even Fundraise Up element people are using to become a donor.
“We have all these insights and it does come in handy when you’re trying to think, okay, what are people interested in? How can we change the products that we offer, in terms of the membership program?” Fassett says. “We were already changing the way that we did things, but we didn’t have the insight to know if they were landing the way that we thought that they should land. It’s helpful to have a tool that [tells] us [that].”
And finally, if Outlier decides to change donation platforms again, Fundraise Up makes it possible to make that transition with ease because it gives Outlier ownership of all their giver data. Not all donation platforms provide this.
“If we were ever to leave Fundraise Up, we have ownership of those donors, and we are able to connect them to the new donation platform,” Fassett says.
Security and privacy
Fundraise Up is serious about protecting donor information. According to their website, their high security standards are secured with “stringent certifications like SOC II, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS.”
In contrast, Givebutter and Memberful don’t have (or at least don’t advertise) such certificates and rather choose to rely on PCI-compliant partners such as Stripe.
Fundraise Up’s data practices also seem to prioritize donors’ privacy, for the most part: They practice data minimization (only collecting information necessary for processing donations), don’t sell donor data and use anonymized data for their AI models.
Verdict: Fundraise Up met Outlier’s consolidation needs
Thanks to Fundraise Up’s customer service support and access to donor data, Outlier Media was able to successfully consolidate their donation program into a single platform. Going forward, the newsroom also has more features than before to convert donors and an abundant amount of donor data to help them make strategic decisions about their coverage.
Alternatives
- Givebutter: Their core product is advertised as easy-to-use and free, but partners receive limited access and ownership to donor data. Platform fee: 0% if optional donor tips are enabled. Transaction fee: 2.9% + $0.30
- Donorbox: Comes with more security certificates than other alternatives (but less than Fundraise Up) as well as more features. However, they aren’t as optimized for conversions, and are only available to paid users. Platform fee: Free or pro $150/month options available. Transaction fee: 2.2% + $0.30
Share this story:
