Interesting take on the microdonations-trend – I also very much believe in microdonations, however I hadn’t thought about the three types you mention. I don’t think we have any “organized” microdonation-schemes in Norway To me, micro-donations have been more important as a response channel for short (and intense) drives, campaigns where you pay for virtual goods, or where you really like an ad / campaign and pay a small donation there and then rather than making a larger donation to the cause. Some examples would be where you engage a twitter-following to raise x amount via small text-donations, or a facebook-application where you pay a small amount to put some badge / ribbon on you profile picture, or the donation-ask at the end of the brilliant iHobo-application. How could you not pay the £2 asked, even if you don’t want to immerse yourself in the cause.

I think microdonations might be good way to get better return on fundraising videos and campaign microsites too, if you see a forwarded youtube-clip, or an interesting microsite, you might not get engaged enough to become a regular donor there and then, but you might chip in a tiny amount if it’s easy enough (text, I guess). Great case from Norway this christmas was one charity who simply shared a facebook-picture that asked for text donations of about £8 (which, at least in Norway, is still within what I’d juuust call a microdonation) to pay for two meals for a homeless person. They raised a staggering £200 000 on this. So yes – microdonations provide some very interesting oportunities in the time to come:)

Then the emphasis is on content, building a plan of ongoing managed comms which matched the interests and engagement of the supporter and adds to the charities objectives. Concentratying on the message not the mechanism.

Soft sales pitch here as well.. CharityeMail is a bulk email tool that does all of the mechanics, is used by more than 500 charities, and it is FREE to set up and free to send up to 500 emails per month – we are trying to encourage smaller or new email adopters, so have lowered the entry price to £0 to encourage NFP’s to use a decent tool. It is also used by huge orgs sending 100,000+ a month and the price per email is still extremely cheap!.

One other element of making more of email that I would suggest would be to integrate it with your social media activities and communications. While there is a case to be made, as suggested above, for simplicity of message, there is also considerable potential for some simple social media functions or even content to be incorporated within email communications to gain greater impact.

For example, the inclusion of social sharing buttons for the email as a whole or for each individual story or news item could help the charity’s message spread even further.

The facility offered by various email marketing tools such as MailChimp to give you stats on what proportion of your subscribers do (or don’t) use Twitter, Facebook etc can also help in fine-tuning your messaging.