The start of a new year is the perfect time for your organization to set its sights on new goals and outcomes for the next twelve months. Whether you call it an annual fundraising plan or a communications road map, now is your chance to push the envelope on your digital efforts to engage constituents, grow your list, and raise more money.

Email Is Back

With the oversaturation of social media and the challenges around fake news, email is re-emerging as a powerful communications channel. As people again turn to email from organizations they trust, 2017 is shaping up to be a great time to reboot your efforts to connect via email with your constituents, volunteers, and donors.

Improve the Email Mobile Experience

For many organizations in 2016, mobile dominated email opens, which means that more and more people are reading your email on their phones. Other, larger-screen devices are also in the mix, but the phone is the go-to device for most people. That means it's important that you create a seamless mobile experience for your subscribers, from subject line to landing page.

The beginning of the year is a great time to freshen up your email messaging templates, optimizing all your email communications to maximize your mobile subscriber engagement. In addition, Gmail and Microsoft have invested serious resources in improving their email services, so it's more important than ever to get feedback on how your emails appear to your subscribers on those platforms. One easy thing to do is to recruit volunteers to serve as email testers and provide feedback on your email layouts, embedded images, and link functionality.

If you're ready for a more complex mobile optimization project, click here to learn about media queries and fluid hybrid design.

Focus on Engaging, Personalized Content in Email

There's a lot of talk about "hyper-personalization" and "dynamic content" in email, but let's keep this simple for those with modest budgets and limited staff resources. The key to success with email messaging is relevant content and list segmentation. In other words, you need to send the right content to the right list segment at the right time.

For years, email messaging has been about blasting the same content to your whole list. In 2017, your focus instead should be on sending smaller batches of email to list subscribers who fit certain criteria. They might be people who attended an event, downloaded a PDF from your website, made a one-time donation, or signed up as a monthly donor. Identifying and engaging such segments is your key to email success in 2017.

Embrace Automation

Despite the above recommendation for personalized content in email, it's also important you use technology and automation effectively during key transactions such as email signup, event registration, and online giving. And that means an increased scrutiny of all the thank-you emails that get sent out automatically via your marketing channels. Review your thank-you emails quarterly to make sure the language is personal and fresh, and never miss the opportunity to suggest a follow-up action in your messages.

In addition to thank-you emails, pay attention to your welcome messages, a key engagement tool and often among the most-read emails sent out by an organization. Even when automated, this is the front line in terms of introducing your programs and staff, recruiting volunteers, and inspiring new supporters, and they should be reviewed quarterly to make sure they're fresh.

Interactive Media Is the New Bling

If we've learned anything in the past few years, it's that graphics and video are a huge driver of engagement, shares, and response rates. The truth is that attention in the digital economy is an extremely valuable commodity. So in 2017, think about writing less and showing more. Keep your copy short, focus on writing better headlines, use graphics to replace blocks of text, and embed videos with a call to action when possible.

This will require more in the way of planning to be successful, but the rewards will be worth it. Metrics show that images on social media platforms perform 300 percent better than plain text. And  emails that contain less copy and include graphic visual elements consistently result in improved response rates.

One other thing to note: Recent technical developments in email — notably the ability to embed HTML5 video — offer new opportunities to showcase your video content.

Donations Will Increase in 2017

Because donors tend to step up in politically charged times, many experts are predicting that online giving will grow in the coming year. So now is a good time to revisit and enhance your organization's online giving experience. Here are a few things to think about:

• Improve donation pages with stronger headlines, photos, and calls to action.
• Make sure all your donation pages are mobile responsive.
• Increase the prominence of your monthly giving option, which is the fastest growing giving segment.
• Offer additional digital payment methods such as PayPal, Amazon Checkout, Apple Pay, and Android Pay.

Invest in Social Media

There has been a lot of discussion about the impact social media has had in driving nonprofit digital engagement success. Stagnating response rates and an increase in costs have many nonprofits wondering whether it's an effective investment.

The reality is that social media channels have evolved into hybrid platforms that require significant investment of resources for optimum results. The opportunity here is that they can be a highly sophisticated message targeting tool that, combined with your email and real-world efforts, can lead to a serious increase in engagement with supporters and donors.

My advice to nonprofits for now is to allocate funds to social media platforms as part of your overall marketing and communications efforts and try to dig deeper into the best ways to use these platforms to drive your fundraising success.

Image: denizya / Shutterstock