Capital Campaign Microsites are created by Advancement teams within universities and institutions of higher learning to accompany their multi-year fundraising efforts and are usually treated as a separate effort from the larger institutional site. As a team of professionals who have been helping higher education organizations meet their web development needs for capital campaigns for over three years, we believe that the development of these “micro”sites (micro in quotes because they can actually be quite large) is a unique opportunity to showcase and distribute your message to a broad, and if done right, receptive audience.
Not too long ago, we were having a meeting with a representative from a local university to see how we might be of help to meet a few of their fundraising goals. As is often true in these situations, the topic of discussion quickly turned to capital campaign microsites. This representative and his team were very interested in creating one for an upcoming campaign – but he’d also viewed a lot of recent examples and just wasn’t sure where to begin and was inclined to just add a few pages to the larger university site and have done with it, rather than tackling the challenge of a stand-alone site. We believe keeping things simple is fine, but no one should ever let overwhelm stand in the way of your goals.
This experience inspired us to create a review of the current trends in Capital campaign microsites. When you don’t know where to start the best thing to do is survey the landscape to see what is working the best for your competitors and then adopt and improve on those efforts. We hope our list below gives you ideas and inspiration to get focused and get going. Here is our round up of the best trends going…
The Top Trends in Capital Campaign Microsites: Breaking Things Down
Gamification:
One of the most impressive trends taking place across capital campaign microsites (and websites in general) over the last few years has to do with the increased use of gamification – that is, applying elements that are typical of video games (like rewards, personalization and interactivity) to encourage engagement with your capital campaign.
It’s something that we’ve personally had a great deal of success with, we developed an interactive cause “game” for the Carnegie Mellon Make Possible Capital Campaign. This example lets users identify causes that are the most meaningful to them, thus allowing you to play directly into what motivates donors in the first place. We nested this interactivity in a richly animated and illustrated immersive experience. It’s a far more specific approach to engagement, and one that makes donors feel like they’re a part of something tangible as early on in the process as possible.
Personalization:
Along the same lines, site wide personalization is another opportunity that you should be leveraging as a part of your capital campaign microsites. You can have users self identify their particular role, for example, calling out whether they’re a faculty member, a staff member, a parent, an alumnus or something else entirely. Then, your site can automatically serve them with the types of content that are the most relevant. You can also track their site usage and serve up content customized to their behavior which a s bit more ‘anonymous’ and perhaps more seamless. Almost any kind of engagement can be tailored to customize content, ensuring that the message that your site is communicating is as personally optimized to the users as possible.
Interactive Infographics:
Campaign Micorsites can be statistics and data heavy. You may have a lot of number-driven information that you want to communicate to your audience to track and celebrate your progress. The challenge is to give that information personality and life. Animated and cleverly illustrated infographics can help elevate your bar carts, thermometers and leaderboards beyond the sterile visuals that one would find in a powerpoint presentation and make your message come alive
Anthem Videos
Many universities create highly produced video collateral to outline the “why” of their campaign. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University at Buffalo are great examples of this. People don’t just want to know WHAT you’re trying to do. They need to know WHY it matters so much so that they can believe in it. These video are often shared via email campaigns and played on large screens at the campaign events but make sure you give them prominence on your site too, the web is a great format to showcase these videos and if the site is properly optimized for sharing content socially then there is the opportunity for your videos to take on a life of their own.
Social Media integration:
Institutions of higher learning need to groom the next generation of donors and while the recent grads don’t always make the biggest donations the need exists to start that outreach early. This generation is of course, immersed in social media and what better place to find and incentivize them? Giving days often happen almost exclusively in this milieu, make sure that there are connections back to your microsite, perhaps in the form of a social media feed that showcases posts tagged with your campaign name. live feeds of your progress should be front and center on the campaign site with realtime updates. Your microsite should be connected to larger social web as much as possible.
Campaign Event Integration:
If you really want to drive registrations for that upcoming campaign tour events, you need to have a nice way to show all relevant event information to the people in your target audience. In addition, your microsite could include photo and video galleries of the event after it has finished, it can provide a high level overview of the outcomes generated and drive site traffic to former attendees who are often your most high value contacts.
A Media Library:
Make sure that your site intuitively houses all the high-res images, PDFs and informational videos that display the aspirations and/or the results of your campaign. They should be available in all the relevant parts of the public-facing site and can even be organized and accessible in a different portal for your gift officers to access quickly when meeting with high value donors.
Immersive Storytelling:
This particular technique is another critical part of telling your “why,” all in a way that lets you tug directly at those donor heartstrings. Instead of just listing your past outcomes in bullet points, use photos and videos and strong copywriting to literally show off all the incredible work that your campaign has accomplished. It’ll give people an opportunity to feel like they’re a part of something and, sooner or later, they’ll want to actively participate. And if the stories are compelling enough they will be shared socially and will act as ambassadors to your site and campaign.
In summary: Taking Advantage of these trends
Overall, if you truly want to increase donations for your capital campaign, it’s important to remember that you need to optimize and streamline the online giving process as much as possible. Leveraging all of these capital campaign microsites trends ultimately won’t mean a thing if the process of actually making a donation is an uphill battle.
Give yourself the ability to constantly measure your process and always refine your microsites through techniques like A/B testing to find out what works and what could be better. Use campaign tracking data to help identify which efforts result in the best outcomes. If you make it a seamless user experience, people WILL want to donate – that’s a fact.
When taken individually, every one of these trends represents a unique opportunity to not only capture the attention of the people you’re targeting, but to do so in a way that creates a far more organic and emotional experience as well. When taken together, they help create the most important advantage of all for your capital campaign: an experience that doesn’t just drive engagement to bold new levels, but that also drives donations at the exact same time.
If you’d like to find out more information about all the best and most current trends in capital campaign microsites, or if you just have any additional questions that you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t delay — we love talking about this stuff. You can also view this list of the top 10 capital campaign websites that we’ve recently compiled to not only start getting ideas for your own campaigns, but to see examples of these trends and techniques in action.