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Text-to-give best practices: How to choose a good keyword

Text-to-give best practices: How to choose a good keyword.

Choosing a good keyword for your text-to-give campaign can be critical your fundraising campaign. A keyword is a unique word or phrase that people text to your unique giving number to join your donor list to make a contribution. Here are some of our tried and tested text-to-give best practices that can help you create successful campaigns, every time! Let’s get right to them. Remember, good keywords are always:

Easy to remember

Keep your keywords short and simple -so simple that your donors remember and recall them easily.
Also, in one-on-one conversations, it becomes easier for your teams to talk about the new campaign and let donors know how to join.

Relevant

Just because you get it doesn’t mean others will. Stick to keywords that are a direct reflection of your organization or relevant to your campaign. For example, if you are fundraising for Christmas, some appropriate keywords might be “Noel”, “XMASGIFT” and not “Appeal55”

Free from special characters

This one is pretty straight-forward. Don’t reserve a keyword like “Noel$” or “Appeal_ Chicago.” Special characters do you no good. Underscores can be confused for hyphens or if it is too much of an effort typing the symbol while trying to sign up for your mobile giving campaign, your donor might skip joining all together.

One word

Though you would be doing nothing wrong by two words for your keyword, it complicates the signup process. Think about your average donors- what is easier to remember? “Gift4Xmas” or “Xmas_Fundraising?” Or better yet, just “Xmas.” Adding details add to complications that can be avoided by being minimal.

Emotionally appealing

Pick keywords that help forge an emotional connection. A good keyword is related to your charity but also clearly conveys a sentiment. Action oriented words like SAVE, HELP, FEED and very popular.

Commonly Understood

If you’re using abbreviations or acronyms make sure they are well known by your supporters so that they do not end up typing the wrong letters. Believe it or not, this is a very frequent error.

Did you find these text-to-give best practices useful? As always, we’re happy to help you every step of your fundraising campaign. If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a comment!

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Last modified: December 5, 2019