5 Free Design Tools To Elevate Your Fundraising Campaign

Posted by Ben Crook on 2 June 2017

Its not easy to create amazing, engaging content over and over again; but its vital to keep donors returning to your site, interested in your emails and inspired by your offline marketing collateral. If your company has a graphic designer or even a whole design team, they might be busy working on large campaigns and your one image to be edited may fall into a long line of work.

When you need a quick turnaround, know you have options. Most people would shudder at the thought of having to create a short video or campaign poster, I mean who has the time to learn a new program? Don’t think that you couldn’t possibly do it yourself, because with these easy to use and free design tools, you can elevate your fundraising campaign.

1. PicMonkey

PicMonkey gives you the freedom to edit your photos to a high standard; add filters, borders, text, overlays, create collages the opportunities are quite possibly endless. It gives you the most regularly used tools in Photoshop but in a simpler format, meaning you can get to work and have your image finished in minutes.

People remember 80% of what they see and do, compared with just 20% of what they read.

2. Unsplash

Are you looking for high-quality images to use on your site or social channels? Unsplash’s images are free to use for commercial purposes this means you are free to use the images as you would like, without having to gain permission from the original photographer. The easy to use search box helps you filter down and find exactly what you’re looking for, hit download and there you go! iStock photos are instantly becoming recognisable as the same images are overused within the industry, so stand out from the crowd with these artistic images and you’ll be sure to see your Instagram likes increase. (Tip to takeaway: Make sure to use powerful, relevant hashtags to increase your reach!)

3.Canva

Canva is the saving grace if you don’t have access to a graphic designer! You can create professional, sleek infographics, Facebook banners, posters, presentations, invites just about anything! This site has templates you can use, which you can easily edit to your brand colours and fonts! You can create infographics to your own specific dimensions, upload your own imagery and download your finished design in multiple formats to ensure its optimised for web or print! The Givergy office cant recommend this site enough!

An infographic is 30 time more likely to be read than a text article.

4. PlaceIt

Not a Photoshop pro? Not a problem! PlaceIt allows you to easily pop your own images into the screens of tablets, phones and laptops. If you’re holding a fundraising event where your attendees can bid on your auction online, you might want to create an image to illustrate this and what better way to do so than with an image of a user bidding on their phone. Simply pick a photo to be used as the background, upload your image or screenshot and PlaceIt will automatically fit it in the space.

5.Giphy

GIFs are everywhere, and are especially popular on Twitter. They are short videos that play on loop and have become hugely trendy over the past few years. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and are made up of a number of images which are played continually or you can have them repeat a number of times and then stop. They are very easy to make via Giphy; simply create your images, make sure they are all the same dimensions (Tip: try using Canva to do so), then upload your images to Giphy, decide which speed the images should change at and then download your finished GIF! You can use these on your site, social channels or in email campaigns as they have a very low file size, so wont slow down the opening of the page.

Adding alt-text to your images can dramatically strengthen your position in search engines!

These tools will help you create beautiful content, engaging posts and collateral that will help educate your donors and encourage them to support your cause. Each tool is free and easy to use, saving you time and money, so get creative and improve impact with these design tools! And remember, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text, which means you could project your whole campaign story in a 10 second GIF Well, possibly!

*Stats from the Search Engine Journal

Ben Crook

Chief Operating Officer

Ben is at the forefront of every project in Givergy, listing and actioning constant improvements across the business. With over a decade of experience in the charity and events sector he brings a deep understanding of what the fundraising industry needs to operate effectively and efficiently.