Digital fundraising is, at its simplest, raising money through online channels: email, social media, video, web pages and the giving forms behind them. But that definition is too narrow. The more useful way to think about it is that digital fundraising decentralises the ask. Instead of one central office writing to a list, it gives supporters the tools to share your cause and raise money from their own networks, and it gives your team a way to reach audiences that direct mail and the telephone never could. It might just as accurately be called social or personal fundraising, because so much of what makes it work is the warmth of a friend asking a friend.

This guide is the overview. It explains what digital fundraising is, the main campaign types and the channels that power them, how they add up to a programme rather than a series of one-off appeals, and where a team should start. Wherever a topic deserves fuller treatment, we link to an in-depth guide. Think of this page as the map, and the guides it points to as the territory. Many of the examples here come from fundraisers at UK universities who have made the shift to digital, including Kat Carter of Hubbub, Tom Piercy at the University of York, and colleagues at Leeds and Manchester.

Why digital fundraising matters now

The case for going digital is no longer theoretical; the sector's own data makes it. Kat Carter of Hubbub sets out the picture: "In the latest Status of UK Fundraising report from Blackbaud, 60% of nonprofit professionals agreed that digital transformation is crucial to success, that technology must be used to improve the way organizations operate, and that data must also be used to improve overall performance. But only 12% of respondents described themselves as digitally mature."

That gap, between the many who know it matters and the few who feel they have mastered it, is where most teams sit. The encouraging part is what maturity tends to bring. Digitally mature organisations, Kat Carter notes, "were found to be more likely to gain more supporters than they were losing, to be optimistic that they would reach new audiences, that they would be more effective at managing change and being agile." None of that requires a vast budget. It requires the right skills, the right systems and the leadership to back them.

The institutions that have made this shift describe the same change and the same prize: going digital let them reach audiences they had previously struggled to touch. At the University of York, Tom Piercy introduced a giving day and a digital community programme alongside the existing channels, and the result was striking: "there was a 50%, it was actually a 49.9% increase in donors numbers" in a single year, with no rise in the operating budget. "This is all just about redistributing our investment," he explains. Bringing the ask online also made internal audiences far easier to reach. York's staff giving rate, Tom notes, went "from 9% to 35% since we made that change." Digital does not replace what already works. It adds a layer that engages different people and, done well, lets you raise considerably more.

The main campaign types

Most digital programmes are built from a small set of recognisable campaign formats. Each suits a different goal, audience and level of resource, and most teams run two or three of them in rotation through the year.

A Giving Day is a short, intense, centrally led push, usually around 36 hours, focused on your institution's own priorities. It made the biggest difference at York, and became a fixture once it proved itself. Tom Piercy describes how the appetite changed: "now, I don't even need to tell people about it in senior positions. They're coming to me asking when the next Giving Day is, which is so different to where we were a few years ago." Our guide to how to run a Giving Day covers forecasting, match funding and the run of play.

A Challenge Week sits between a Giving Day and crowdfunding. It is led by the development office, but the fundraising is done by clubs, societies and groups for their own causes, over roughly a week. It is a forgiving way to trial peer-led fundraising and to bring in large numbers of brand-new donors, many of them friends and family rather than alumni. Our guide to how to run a Challenge Week walks through recruiting groups, training them and running the match-funding incentives that drive the competition.

Crowdfunding runs year-round and is owned by the people raising the money: students, staff or community groups create project pages and rally their own networks. Many institutions begin their digital journey here. York "made the decision to invest in our very own crowdfunding platform" as far back as 2013-14, and at Leeds and Manchester a crowdfunding platform became the vehicle for emergency student-support appeals when the pandemic hit. Our guide to how to run a crowdfunding campaign shows how to set up projects, recruit project owners and keep momentum going across a longer timeframe.

A telephone appeal is not digital in the strict sense, but it belongs in the conversation because it remains the strongest channel for one thing the digital channels still find hard: converting and retaining regular givers. Tom Piercy is candid about this at York: "telephone still being the main contributor in terms of new regular donors. That's not really going to change for us." The lesson is that digital and telephone work best together, with digital acquiring single-gift donors and the phone converting them to a regular commitment. Our guide to how to run a telephone appeal covers caller training, segmentation and the conversion ask.

The channels that power them

Underneath the campaigns sit the channels: the day-to-day means of reaching and converting supporters. Get these right and every campaign performs better.

Email is almost always the right place to begin. It is cheap, measurable and quick to test, and it is where most teams start. Asked what a small team with little budget should do first, Tom Piercy does not hesitate: "I think if I was in this position, the first thing I would do is introduce email appeals, because they're quite easy to manage. You can build in the segmentation, track all the results, make sure you know how each segment's responding before you then scale that up into something more substantial like a giving day." Jessica at Leeds adds a note about making each email earn its place: "how do you make the most out of every email and just be really, really working them hard," capturing data and driving engagement, not only asking for money. Our guide to email fundraising goes into segmentation, copy and the systems worth using.

Social media amplifies everything else and, at its best, hands the ask to your supporters. This is the heart of the decentralising idea: people simply "find it a lot easier to share and ask when it's on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram." For many teams it is the least developed channel. At York, Tom Piercy uses paid social to "accompany anything else that we're doing," running A/B tests on a few hundred pounds of lifetime budget and switching off the underperforming advert after a couple of days. His warning is worth heeding: York had "not had the right trackable links in place" to see how many of those who clicked went on to give. Our guide to social media for fundraising covers organic and paid approaches, and the tracking that tells you whether they worked.

Video and storytelling is what makes a digital ask feel personal at scale. Manchester leaned on it heavily for stewardship. As Emma at Manchester describes it: "We created loads of video content so that people felt they were being spoken to in a personal way, direct from beneficiaries that they'd given to." The same emotive case for support that powers a direct mail pack works online, and often travels further. Our guide to video and storytelling shows how to build stories that move people without a film crew.

Donation pages are where intention becomes income, and they are the most common point of failure. Kat Carter puts a sharp number on it: "look at the conversion rate on your online giving form. If it's anything below 20%, it's probably time to really consider, is that really delivering what we need?" The word she uses for everything that gets in the donor's way is friction: "You want the donor to get that email, make that decision to give from the email, and then the donation platform is just the last place they go to confirm how much they want to give." Leeds saw the difference a good page makes, with the share of gifts received online rising from 15 per cent in 2018-19 to 31 per cent in 2021. Our guide to donation pages and conversion covers reducing friction, social proof and the testing that lifts your conversion rate.

How it adds up to a programme

Individual campaigns and channels are not the goal. The goal is a programme: a joined-up system that acquires supporters, retains them, and turns single gifts into regular ones. Jessica at Leeds describes the ambition well. The aim is a communications plan where "our alumni and donors or other supporters aren't faced with three different asks for three different platforms," but instead experience "a really joined up communication plan across all platforms," where "all that's different is how you're engaging with us, not what you're engaging with."

The destination for most programmes is a healthy base of regular givers. Single online gifts are valuable, but a regular giving programme of committed donors is what gives a fundraising operation its stability. Moving someone from a first online gift to a standing commitment is mostly a question of timing and channel. York built dedicated telephone segments around its giving day to "make a regular giving ask instead of a single ask," and Manchester used conversion mailings and streamlined direct-debit upgrades to do the same.

Three connected disciplines hold a programme together. Donor stewardship is how you keep supporters feeling valued between asks, and it is also one of the best retention tools you have: Jessica at Leeds calls stewardship "such a powerful way to be able to retain donors." Our guide to donor stewardship and journeys maps the communications a supporter receives from their first gift onwards. Acquisition and retention is the balance every team has to strike, and digital changes its shape, opening up audiences, as Tom Piercy puts it, "that maybe hadn't donated in the past when we were sending them stuff in the post or trying to call them up over the phone." Our guide to donor acquisition and retention covers both sides of the ledger. And a culture of giving is what makes all of it sustainable inside your institution. The transformation at Leeds was as much cultural as technical: fundraising impact stories moved into general alumni communications, and, as Jessica describes, "more people getting invested in what we could do" meant "more money, more resource has been put into our digital platforms." Our guide to building a culture of giving addresses the internal buy-in without which nothing else lasts.

The role of data and AI

Digital fundraising generates something the older channels never did: instant, granular feedback on what works. Emma at Manchester names it as one of the format's real advantages, and also its recurring challenge: "this is one of the real opportunities of digital, right? We get this instant data on what works and what doesn't. And I think like most of us, it's just finding the time to actually look at that."

Using that data well starts with the basics: connect your giving platform to analytics and tag your links, so you can see which channel produced each gift. Kat Carter's "number one metric" is conversion, tracked end to end, so you know whether the money you spend turns into donations. Beyond conversion lies segmentation: understanding which groups respond to which messages, so every appeal lands better than the last. Our guide to using your data and segmentation covers analytics, tracking links and the segments worth building.

Sitting on top of good data is the newest layer, AI in fundraising, which is increasingly used to draft and tailor copy, personalise donor journeys, summarise engagement and surface the prospects most likely to give. AI is most useful when it accelerates work you already understand, not when it stands in for a strategy you have not yet built. Our guide sets out where it genuinely helps and where to be cautious.

Where to start

If you are getting started, the advice from experienced practitioners is consistent and refreshingly modest. Begin with email, because it is the easiest channel to manage, test and learn from. Add a small social media budget alongside it if you can, so more than one channel contributes. And anchor everything to something you are already doing: if you have a print appeal in the pipeline, run an email and a social push alongside it rather than inventing a campaign from scratch.

Before reaching for the newest tool, take a step back. Emma at Manchester advises a small, stretched team to "really take a step back" and "go right back to basics to think about what your leaders are expecting you to deliver," then "find the products that match what you are being asked to do." She offers a reminder that lowers the barrier to entry considerably: "loads of this stuff that we've used over the past couple of years have been free for us to use. We have not had an increase in budget for any of this work." Much of digital fundraising is about redistributing effort and reusing what you already have, not spending more.

Two further moves pay off early. First, prove the concept small and then make the case. York's pattern, as Tom Piercy describes it, was to "do a really good job of it and then don't stop," and to let senior leaders begin "celebrating our successes as their own." A modest pilot with clear results is the most persuasive budget request you can make. Second, lean on colleagues outside your immediate team. Emma is emphatic that Manchester's transformation "would simply not have happened without our colleagues in our alumni comms team," whose expertise in content, channels and systems was indispensable.

If you are maturing an existing programme, the priorities shift towards measurement and integration: connect your platforms to analytics, fix the leaks in your donation pages, build meaningful engagement KPIs alongside the financial ones, and design the journeys that carry a first-time online donor towards a regular gift. And throughout, hold on to the lesson every practitioner returns to. Digital does not retire your other channels. As Emma at Manchester puts it: "Digital is not getting rid of telephone, it is not getting rid of print. Those things are still performing really well for us. And it just adds an extra layer to our fundraising offer."

Frequently asked questions

What is digital fundraising, in one sentence? It is raising money through online channels, email, social media, video, web pages and giving forms, in a way that decentralises the ask and lets supporters share your cause with their own networks. Some people call it social or personal fundraising for exactly that reason.

Does digital fundraising replace direct mail and the telephone? No. The strongest programmes treat digital as an additional layer that reaches new audiences and complements existing channels. The telephone in particular remains the leading channel for acquiring and retaining regular givers, and print continues to perform well.

How much budget do I need to start? Less than you might think. Email is inexpensive, and many useful tools are free or already available within larger institutions. Several teams have run significant digital transformations by redistributing existing budget rather than securing new money.

Which channel should I begin with? Email. It is the easiest to set up, test and measure, and the data you gather from it tells you how each audience responds before you scale up to a larger campaign such as a Giving Day.

How do I know if it is working? Track conversion end to end by connecting your giving platform to analytics and tagging your links. As a rule of thumb, if your donation form converts below 20 per cent of visitors, it is worth investigating. Look at engagement measures, opens, clicks and shares, as well as income.

What is the end goal? A joined-up programme that acquires supporters, stewards them well, and converts single gifts into regular ones, so that fundraising rests on a stable base of committed donors rather than one-off appeals.

Members' resource pack

Tools

Hubbub's Giving Day Simulator: model likely results before you commit to a target
Fundraising Copy Checker: sharpen your appeal and email copy
QR Code Generator: link in-person moments straight to a donation page

What is digital fundraising?