If you’re going to be a very effective Fundraiser, you have to constantly be aware of context.
The two main contexts to be aware of in your email and mail fundraising are Audience and Channel.
Audience
“Audience” is who you’re talking to. For instance…
- Individual donors care about different things than institutional donors
- Institutional donors care about different things than Program Staff and Organization Insiders
- Longtime major donors care about different things than First Time Email Donors
If you’re not constantly thinking, “Who am I talking to right now and what do they value,” you’re constantly missing opportunities to connect. Because if your voice or message is perfect for one of your audiences, it’s not close to perfect for your other audiences.
Channel
“Channel” is the method you’re using to communicate to your audience. For instance…
- In the mail and email, you have a different amount of time than you have over lunch with a donor, so you communicate differently
- At an event, what you tell a donor is different than what you’d say over lunch
- In a grant application, what you tell an institutional funder is different than what you tell an individual donor.
If you’re not constantly thinking, “What channel am I communicating with the audience right now and what works best in this method,” you’re probably making one method work well and causing the other methods to be ineffective. (By the way, the most common phase of this for smaller nonprofits is to be effective in person 1-on-1, but not effective in the mail and email – which is why we at Better Fundraising have jobs 🙂 )
The clearest example I’ve come across to illustrate this is the following:
| Audience | Channel | Knowledge Level | Time Spent Reading | |
| Grant Application | Institutional funders | Multi-page Grant application | Likely knowledgeable about your sector and work | Several minutes |
| Email appeal | Individual donors | 300-word email | Unlikely to be knowledgeable about your sector and work | Several seconds |
At the foundation, a subject-matter expert is paid to read your application. On the individual donor’s phone, a non-expert is more likely to flick through your email than to read it.
Just given that context, of course the two pieces of fundraising should be written differently.
So as you think about your fundraising for this year, may this year be one of increased awareness at your nonprofit for which audience you’re talking to and which channel it’s taking place in.
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.
