At its simplest, I think you can boil “raising money from individual donors through the mail and email” down to two steps:
- Making an emotional connection with the humans reading your fundraising (which I wrote about on Tuesday), and
- Then giving people an easy, low-cost step they can take to make a meaningful difference.
This approach is easy to understand but hard to do. And it goes against the standard orthodoxy of “make a case and describe our work in an inspirational way.”
But in my now 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, this “two step” approach is at the heart of the fundraising that works the best. (And if you want evidence, just call me. Better Fundraising’s clients routinely see huge jumps in revenue as soon as we help them switch them from the standard approach to this approach.)
And it makes sense, right?!? If you “make a case and try to inspire people with your work” you have to teach them about your work and tell them why it’s inspiring. This means your reader has to learn something before your request for support makes sense. This is homework, not fundraising!
Or you could tell your reader an interesting story about something they care about. (And you know they care about your cause or your beneficiaries – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be on your list.)
Once your donor is emotionally engaged, you give them a low-cost way to make a meaningful difference. You lower the barrier to giving a gift. You describe something great that they can do or be a part of. You describe the meaningful difference it will make.
Get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a difference.I share how to do this in this post, this free eBook, and it’s what McKenzie is describing in this post.
Really, that’s it: get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a meaningful difference.
Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.
- Steven Screenhttps://betterfundraising.com/author/steven/
- Steven Screenhttps://betterfundraising.com/author/steven/
- Steven Screenhttps://betterfundraising.com/author/steven/
- Steven Screenhttps://betterfundraising.com/author/steven/
