You’re Not Fundraising to a Pond, You’re Fundraising to a River

Here’s a quick tip, borrowed from the world of advertising, that will help you with your direct response fundraising:

You’re not sending your fundraising to a pond, you’re sending it to a river.

A pond holds the same water year after year.  A river doesn’t.  The water going past you today is not the water that went past you last spring.

Here’s what that looks like in your donor file.  Say your organization has a 60% donor retention rate and a stable overall number of donors.  That means 4 out of every 10 donors on your file right now were not there for last year’s Fall campaign or last year’s year-end letter.  They didn’t see it.

Now turn it around.  Of the donors who did see last year’s Fall campaign, 4 out of 10 of them have left the building.

So the group of people receiving your fundraising is not a fixed, static audience.  It’s a constantly changing group.  To add even more uncertainty, you don’t know which donor saw which pieces of your fundraising.  Maybe they were out of town during last year’s Fall campaign and never saw it.

This means that, the next time someone in a meeting says, “But we’ve already said that to our donors,” you have an accurate answer: “No, we didn’t.  We said it to about half of our donors.  And we don’t know which ones.”

Why ‘keeping it fresh’ isn’t as helpful as it feels

The desire to keep your fundraising fresh assumes your donors are a pond.  The same people, sitting in the same place, hearing the same message over and over.  (And there’s usually a fear that the donor’s finger is hovering over the “unsubscribe” or “complain” button.)

But a large share of the people who read your Fall campaign this year have never seen it before.  For them, the campaign that you are tired of is brand new to them.

Worth noticing: your staff and Board receive more of your fundraising than your donors do.  You saw all of it.  Donors saw some of it, and sometimes while busy doing other things at the same time.

You might feel tired of a message or campaign, but the feeling isn’t shared.

Instead

Find something that works and repeat it each year.

Put a higher value on finding something that works great – then updating it as needed – than on keeping things fresh each year.  The river keeps bringing you new people every year who haven’t heard it.  And the people who gave last year will likely give again.