Three tips for a Halloween ThankView campaign that’s scary-good

Does it feel like a nightmare to communicate with your entire donor community? So many alums, so little time. Especially as we come into the holiday season, inboxes are flooded and it can be really challenging to build and send messages to your alums that will actually get seen. 

Good news! Sending personalized video messages helps to humanize your donor communications – and video messages achieve open rates that are 3x the industry average than traditional emails. 

Here are three quick tips that will help you dust off the cobwebs from your alumni outreach, add personalized and authentic flair, and lean into the power of video for your holiday messaging to alums. (And since we love spookyszn, we’ll start with Halloween.)

1. Use video messages to share a simple “thank you.” Your donors are used to receiving requests from you: asks for money, asks for time, asks to register for various events. And all of those asks are wonderful! BUT, so many donors never receive a message of “thanks” (one out of every three donors, according to our EverTrue data, which is a very sad stat). Surprise your donors with a message of gratitude – no tricks, just treats – in their inboxes.
2. Don’t let video production haunt you. Making and sending a successful video message to your donors doesn’t have to take weeks, or even days. Keep it simple and work within your resources. You may have a video expert on your team that you can partner with to create something special. Or you may be a one-person-shop, in which case your iPhone will be more than enough! Video editing tools like iMovie or Animoto can turn anyone into a production pro, and in ThankView, we offer built-in video intro themes that help to give your videos that professional polish. (Also, they’re super cute. Just watch the video below for an example.)
3. Make your videos sharable! Holiday videos are significantly more likely to be shared across the interwebs. When you put effort into sending a branded, personalized message to your donor, it’s likely they’ll want to share it with their friends and family. Make it easy for them! In ThankView, we recommend referencing the “share” button right in your video message to encourage your alums to spread the love.

To see these three tips in action, we dug into the ThankView Tip Top Tuesday archives for an example of a Halloween campaign that’s so good that it’s scary. (And very stealable.) Happy Halloween!