Years ago I served an organization that was raising about $350,000 per year from their individual donors.
They had a belief that they needed to share all of their programs, and show how those programs worked together to “solve the whole problem,” in order for donors to give gifts. Their belief resulted in fundraising that spent significant time describing their programs and how their programs worked together.
I advised them that they needed to keep things simpler. I suggested that they focus an e-appeal on one specific program.
They pushed back:
“We’re not a simple organization like one of those big national organizations you work with. What we do is complex.”
I explained to them the lesson I had learned over the years: that the big national organizations have sophisticated approaches and programs, but that they purposefully keep their fundraising simple and emotional in order to make their organization more accessible to more people.
Those big organizations want everybody to be able to donate, not just the people who are interested enough to learn about their programs.
The organization I was working with had assumed that because the fundraising to individual donors was simple, the organization and its programs must be simple.
But the lesson is that those big organizations appear simple because of a conscious messaging choice. In their fundraising to individual donors, they choose to focus on single programs or simple outcomes because doing so is proven to help them attract more new donors and raise more money from current donors.
Sophisticated fundraising looks simple on purpose.
