If you’re looking for a way attract more high-quality subscribers to your file — the kind of subscribers who have an affinity for your mission and are more likely to make a donation — then creating lead magnets can have a huge impact on your mission by helping you find more donors, in less time, for a fraction of the cost.
In this guide, you’ll learn what lead magnets are, why nonprofits need to be using them, and how to create lead magnets that produce a solid ROI for your organization.
What are lead magnets?
Lead magnets (sometimes called content offers) are acquisition tools that provide up-front value to potential donors by offering a free resource in exchange for contact information.
Lead magnets leverage the principle of reciprocity to build trust and increase the likelihood that someone will respond favorably to future donation appeals.
Here are a few examples of lead magnets that can often be created in-house:
- eBooks (PDFs delivering educational value or entertainment)
- Quizzes (Online quiz to test a potential donor’s knowledge on a topic)
- Petitions (An opportunity to give potential donors a voice concerning an issue)
- Email Courses (Help potential donors solve a problem with an email drip course)
Tip: creating lead magnets doesn’t necessarily require you to create new content from scratch. You probably already have great educational material you have used in other contexts — pamphlets, booklets, surveys, etc. — that can be repackaged into lead magnets.
Create lead magnets for donor acquisition in 5 simple steps
The key to creating a successful lead magnet is finding the sweet spot where your content provides tangible value to your potential donors while also relating closely to your mission.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to hit that sweet spot by using 5 key concepts to create lead magnets that resonate with your audience and prime them to make a donation:
- Create lead magnets that appeal to your ideal donor
- Create lead magnets that are relevant to your organization
- Make your lead magnets actionable
- Make your lead magnets tangible
- Give your lead magnet away freely (in exchange for contact info)
1. Create lead magnets that appeal to your ideal donor
You don’t need to create a lead magnet that appeals to everyone on planet earth. In fact, making your offer too broad may dilute its impact.
Before you invest the time and resources into creating your offer, consider what people who care about your case find valuable and how you can provide new insights and knowledge unique to your nonprofit’s area of expertise.
This will ensure your lead magnet appeals to the right people while positioning your nonprofit as a subject matter expert, building goodwill and trust for your organization.
2. Create lead magnets relevant to your organization
If you want to convert new subscribers into new donors quickly, you need to create a lead magnet that is relevant to your organization.
The purpose of the free offer is to help a potential donor receive value and discover that your organization is uniquely equipped to solve a problem that your donors care about.
Offering a free cruise, vacation getaways, move tickets, etc. might sound like a good idea, but these offers do nothing to educate your donors about your mission, nor do they prime new subscribers to make a donation.
To help you start brainstorming, here are a few examples of donor-focused offers that may help potential donors begin to trust your organization:
- Environment & Wildlife: 10 Daily Habits to Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
- Faith-Based: 40-Day Devotional to Prepare Your Heart for Easter
- Public Policy & Advocacy: 6 Proven Ways to Reduce Police Violence
- Social Services: 5 Practical Ways To Help Serve the Homeless in Your Community
- Higher Education: A relevant online course that you can offer for free
These are just examples: please use your own data, surveys, or a/b tests to determine which lead magnet topics might best resonate with your ideal donors.
3. Make your lead magnets actionable
In the fundraising experiment below, we were promoting a webinar on how to create more effective year-end donation pages.
In Version A of our Facebook ad, the headline and title of the webinar said “The Elements of a Year-End Donation Page.”
This was an accurate description of what someone would learn in the webinar. But we wondered if a more actionable title could lead to more registrations by more clearly demonstrating the value the reader would receive.
Version B’s headline and title focused on “How to craft an effective year-end donation page.”
- Version A was passive in its tone, while version B made the content actionable.
- Version A focused on the “features” of the webinar, while version B focused on the “benefits” someone could receive if they attended.
- Version A focused on what it is, while version B answers, “What’s in it for me?”
The more actionable, benefit-driven headline led to a 275% increase in registrations.
4. Make your lead magnets tangible
You’ll also want to make sure that the value you are delivering is something relevant and tangible. In other words, you want to make sure your offering value that your donors can use to practically improve their day-to-day lives
In the experiment below, we hypothesized that a more tangible headline could lead to better click through rates.
Version A described the content as “The Nonprofit Email Subject Line Formula.” Maybe catchy. Maybe not. But it certainly isn’t specific — making it more difficult for a reader to understand it’s relevance and thus, it’s value (what’s in it for them).
Version B improved the clarity and value of the offer by telling the reader exactly what they’d get: 5 Ways to Improve Your Email Subject Line.
The more tangible headline led to a 201% increase in clicks.
So when you promote your own content offer, consider using a number in your eBook or email offer title to make the content more tangible to the reader.
Could this headline be further improved? Maybe.
While this headline is more specific, is it actionable?
What if it read as follows: 5 Ways to Improve Your Nonprofit Email Subject Lines so that you can get more clicks?
That could make the offer appear even more valuable by using what we learned above to make the offer more actionable as well as more tangible!
5. Give your lead magnet away for free
This step may be “last,” but it might also be the most important — because nothing else you do will matter if your content offer isn’t free.
You will gain more value over time by using led magnets as part of a proven donor acquisition strategy than by trying to sell your content. So take the long view.
Freely providing value to your ideal donors up front allows you to leverage the concept of reciprocity to develop a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship that helps fill your pipeline with donors who know and trust your organization.
Especially when you welcome them to your organization with an effective New Subscriber Welcome Series specifically designed to turn subscribers into donors in their first 30 days.
Choosing the right lead magnet
When choosing your lead magnet, you must present something that the visitor perceives to be of greater value than their personal contact information.
What matters most is choosing an offer that adequately inspires your audience to enter a value exchange.
In the example below, we tested three unique offers against each other using an email acquisition form for the Texas State Historical Association.
Visitors completed a ten-question education quiz over Texas history called “Are you Smarter than a Texas Seventh-Grader?”
Each question was based on real material taught in seventh-grade classrooms throughout the state. It was designed as a unique way for people to experience their value proposition as an organization.
The goal of the final page was to present the visitor with an opportunity to learn more about the Texas State Historical Association.
The initial incentive was a free chapter of the Texas Almanac. We tested this against an e-book about the Battle of the Alamo.
We also tested this against a compilation of several scholarly essays produced through their Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
After conducting an A/B/C test, we discovered that Treatment 1 produced a 50% increase in conversion and Treatment 2 produced a 12% increase.
By running this split test with different offers, we were able to identify what specific offer would be most appealing to our target audience – very valuable data!
As a result, the TSHA achieved increased their acquisition of qualified email addresses which could then be cultivated into donors.
This is an easy way to evolve your incentive into the best possible offer for your audience!
A content offer can give someone a tangible reason to give you their contact information because they are receiving value in return.
And testing your way to the right incentive will not only help you get a higher conversion rate in your acquisition efforts. It will also help you grow a deeper understanding of the motivation of your target audience.
Conclusion
In this guide, you learned how to create lead magnets to attract new subscribers to your file. But not just any subscribers — the kind most likely to convert to new donors.
Key learnings:
The key to creating lead magnets is finding the sweet spot of giving tangible value to your potential donors while also relating closely to your mission.
Make your lead magnets relevant to your mission
Make your lead magnets actionable
Make your lead magnets tangible for your donor
Give your lead magnet away for free
