Imagine you’re me. You like black coffee, the Bill Simmons podcast, and you spend a lot of time looking at campaign results for your direct response digital clients, trying to figure out what the best tactics are to help nonprofits raise money as efficiently as they can.

And everywhere you look, in campaign after campaign, sector after sector, one element consistently has sensational ROI: lightboxes.

It’s not hard to see why. Lightboxes are website pop-ups that appear on top of a webpage upon loading. They’re literally interrupting—whether on a homepage or in the middle of a transaction—in order to grab your attention. But more importantly, they’re to the point, they’re inexpensive to produce, and they’re the best way to make use of your website—where you can reach an already engaged audience free from the mercy of the algorithm.

Here are some examples of great campaigns you should use a lightbox for, and what our clients have achieved using the humble pop-up. (You can stop imagining you’re me now).

Membership Acquisition

Many of our clients use spring and fall to promote membership, pushing the offer to a wide audience through direct and digital touchpoints throughout the season.

It just makes sense to support that work with a lightbox:

We’ve seen clients raise $10k-$40k from lightboxes strategically timed to align with email and mail touches in acquisition.

Major Appeal Campaigns

If you have a multi-part email series, a matching gift or are doing a big year-end push, put up a lightbox on your homepage! It’s a great way to get your appeal out there to the folks who really care about your organization’s success.

We’ve seen clients raise $20k-$60k from homepage lightboxes during the year-end giving season with a 38x ROI!

Best Practices & Tips

For starters, you’ll need a lightbox plug-in for your website—there are many available depending on your CMS. But from there, your first lightbox should be easy to set up:

• Use an eye-catching, intriguing image related to your campaign.
• Write a short call-to-action—no more than a sentence—to quickly and clearly communicate what you want people to do.
• Ensure the tone and language aligns with your other ongoing efforts. Lightboxes work best when they support a larger campaign in mail or email.
• Having a lightbox up for a bit shorter than the duration of your campaign is a good starting point. If it’s a few weeks long, try 10 days of a lightbox at first. If it’s a season-long acquisition campaign, we would recommend breaking up your run into multiple 1-2 week long phases throughout.

Of course, lightboxes lose their effectiveness if you do them constantly. People get frustrated if the pop-up is difficult to close or appears too frequently.

We’ve all been there! But there are things you can do to still make great use of this tactic:

• Set a limit on the number of times a lightbox appears for a given user.
• You can elect to not display the lightbox on mobile.
• Restrict the lightbox appearances to the homepage or another high-traffic page.
• Ensure the button to close the lightbox is clearly visible.
• If people visit your website in search of health or social services, be mindful of their experience.

If you’re interested in implementing a lightbox for your next campaign, or you want help getting your digital fundraising to the next level, feel free to reach out. We’re always happy to talk about how we can help your nonprofit thrive.