Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

The Magic of ‘Specific and Low-Cost’

Steven Screen | September 30, 2025September 29, 2025Ask

You might have noticed how lots of nonprofits ask donors to donate to provide low-cost, specific things.

Here are a couple of examples:

A gift of just $37 will fund our website for a day, making all the stories from our independent news site available to everyone.
A complete Thanksgiving dinner and care costs just $5.15.
The cost of an hour of equine therapy for a child with autism is only $53.

Have you ever thought about why nonprofits use this tactic? Once you do, it’s obvious why so many nonprofits do this, and why it works to help organizations raise more money.

By focusing on something specific, with a specific price point, the nonprofit makes three things easier for individual donors:

By focusing on one action, it means the donor just needs to understand the value of that action. In other words, the donor does not need to understand the entire organization, what it does, etc. The donor just needs to understand one simple part.
By providing a specific dollar amount, the donor now knows how much they need to give to make a meaningful difference. Instead of donors asking questions like “Will my $50 do anything?” or “How much do I need to give to help somebody?” they know the answer.
By having the dollar amount be low (say, below $50), the organization communicates that almost anyone can make a meaningful difference. This approach makes the organization more inclusive and accessible, which increases the number of donors who give gifts.

I hope you’ll marvel with me for a moment at how much this tactic accomplishes for nonprofits. In just a couple of sentences, the nonprofit has reduced cognitive load for the donor, answered a question, and helped show than anyone can make a difference by giving to the organization.

No wonder this tactic works so well in individual donor fundraising.

If you feel like your organization doesn’t have something that’s low-cost and specific that your donors can fund, that’s just because no one has taught you how to find it. My next post will feature several examples that will show you how to find one for your organization.

And if you or someone on your team are worried that this tactic will cause your larger donors to give smaller gifts, don’t worry. I talk about this very thing on page 24 of this short, free eBook.

For right now, if this has sparked an idea for something specific that your donors would love to fund, start thinking about featuring it in your next piece of fundraising, or testing it in email sometime soon. I’ve seen many organizations identify something specific their donors love to fund and have their fundraising immediately accelerate to new heights…

Difficult and Joyful

Steven Screen | September 25, 2025September 23, 2025Repeat

Here’s the thing I wish more new Fundraisers heard right at the beginning of their fundraising journey…

Fundraising is hard and always will be. It’s also joyful.

Fundraisers need the emotional strength to ask people for help. You also have to figure out the right people to ask & the right time to ask them & the right way to ask them.

Additionally, you’re regularly exposed to the problem or situation your nonprofit was founded to address.

And yet… fundraising can bring incredible joy if you let it. The fundraising work you do helps fund the incredible programs your organization operates. Those programs cause the change that your organization exists to make.

And you know those donors you have? The ones who have no programs and no way of helping on their own? You make it possible for them to help in powerful ways, and they love to help.

And you get the satisfaction of doing the courageous, emotionally vulnerable hard work of asking for help.

I get deep joy in doing all the hard things to succeed in fundraising in order to fund programs and connect with donors, and I hope you do too.

Bad News is an Opportunity

Steven Screen | September 23, 2025September 17, 2025Report

File this under “counter-intuitive but we’ve seen it so many times it must be true.”

Any time you receive some bad news, it’s a great opportunity to raise money.

Problem in the field and you need more money to finish a project?

Shortfall at the end of your fiscal year?

“Special case” where more resources are needed to help a person?

Cash flow shortage?

Piece of equipment breaks?

Grant didn’t come through?

I can speak from experience and say that all these situations, when shared with donors, reliably raise more money than the nonprofit expects. And they raise that money quickly. (Email is incredible for this.)

So when a bad situation happens, there’s a choice you can make:

You can share the situation with your community of donors, be amazed by their generosity, and have more money to solve the problem. Or…
You can work on the situation yourself and have less money to solve the problem.

What I’m NOT Saying

I am absolutely not advocating sharing bad news all the time. You will burn out your donors and erode trust over time. Your fundraising must contain stories of success and triumph over the course of each year.

But most organizations think themselves into a position where they are scared to share any bad news at all.

What I’m advocating for is never being scared of sharing bad news when it happens. Because what you’ll see is the generosity of donors, over and over again.

Remember the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Each contestant had a “lifeline” they could call when they couldn’t solve the problem by themselves. The next time your organization is in a tough situation, think about your donors as a lifeline.

Two Conclusions

When you see donors generously respond to “bad news” again and again – two things become obvious over time.

Donors are more likely to respond when they feel needed.
You develop the strong belief that your donors can & will be a lot more generous, a lot more often, than you originally think.

If you “live in” to those two ideas – by creating fundraising that helps donors feel needed, and believing that they can give more and more often – over time you will unleash donor generosity and build a group of resilient donors.

And it starts when your organization has the strength to share the occasional piece of bad news with your donors.

Appeal vs Appealing

Steven Screen | September 18, 2025September 23, 2025Ask

If you feel like your appeal letters and e-appeals could be raising more money, let me ask you a question.

Are you appealing for help, or are you trying to make your nonprofit appealing?

I ask because, somewhere along the way, nonprofits stopped writing appeals that actually appeal for help.

Our industry calls these things “appeals” because that’s what they used to be — an “earnest request for aid” — a cry for help. They were letters about a negative situation and an “appeal” for the reader to send in a gift. (And later, in a newsletter, donors were given updates on what their gift accomplished.)

I see a LOT of appeals, and not many organizations follow the original model any longer. Instead of saying, “Right now, people are being trafficked through our local airport, and your gift will help put a stop to it,” they write, “Our holistic approach to training airport workers has successfully interrupted the trafficking of hundreds of people, please support this inspiring work!”

Which is a shame, because appeals that are cries for help raise materially more money.

So next time you’re sending out an appeal or e-appeal, read it out loud and ask yourself: would a stranger reading this letter know exactly who needs help and how their gift will provide that help?

If not, you’re probably trying to make your organization appealing instead of appealing for help.

Focus Donor Attention on the Near Future

Steven Screen | September 16, 2025September 16, 2025Ask

The graphic above has been sitting in a folder on my computer for months because I’m not quite happy with it.

But I’m following my own advice and “sending it out even if it isn’t perfect.” I think it can help you raise more money this fall, and a lot of organizations need all the help they can get right now.

Here’s the Big Idea; focus your appeals on the near future, not on the past.

To use the language I used in the graphic; you will raise more money if you focus your appeals on “work that needs to be done soon.” You will raise less money if you focus your appeals on “work your organization has already done.”

Weirdly, nonprofits tend to relentlessly focus their fundraising on the past. They share stories of people they have already helped. They share statistics and lots of numbers from their past work. They talk about the approach they’ve used.

I believe this comes from a good place – it’s an attempt to prove to donors that the organization knows what it’s doing and is effective.

But what I’ve seen from looking at fundraising results for 30 years is that individual donors send in more money when the focus of the appeal is on the near future, not on the past.

When you ask your individual donors to fund meaningful work that needs to be done soon, I think three things are happening:

Donors are thinking about something they can affect (the near future), versus something they cannot affect (the past).
Donors are thinking about the negative situation your beneficiaries are facing today, instead of a positive story of a person who has already been helped and no longer needs help.
Donors realize that their choice in this moment has consequences in the near term.

But really, even just those three bullet points overcomplicate things.

It’s as simple as this little story … put yourselves in the shoes of a busy individual donor. She’s at home, has a couple minutes, and is going through her mail or email. She feels like making a gift. Which appeal do you think she will give to:

“We’ve done work that’s important to you in the past, will you support us?”
“Work that’s important to you needs to happen two weeks from now, will you give a gift to help?”

Individual donors making quick decisions seem to be wired to support work that they care about that needs to be done soon.

So focus your appeals on the near future – usually between the day you send it and about 8 weeks from then. Focus on meaningful work/service/help your organization plans/hopes to do in the next month or so. Ask your donors to send in a gift to help fund that work.

Save the focus on the past for when you are reporting back to donors. Or when you are making a case to a Foundation for why they should give you a grant.

If our experience is any indication, you’ll be so pleased at how much money your appeals raise that you’ll never go back to focusing your appeals on the past.

‘But We Don’t Actually Do the Work’

Steven Screen | September 11, 2025September 9, 2025Ask

Earlier this week I wrote about focusing your fundraising to individual donors on what their gift will make possible, not on how your organization does its work.

This advice immediately causes consternation for some organizations, particularly community foundations and what we might call “middleman organizations” that raise funds primarily to help other organizations.

For instance, I recently emailed with a woman who works for a local nonprofit that a) raises money to pay for the admin costs and staffing of a national program that runs in her state, and b) that national program engages the local community to c) utilize support provided by other nonprofits.

Local foundations and organizations like the one above will say things like, “Well, we can’t tell donors that their gift will do anything specific because we don’t do the work. We just make it possible for other nonprofits to provide their services.”

However, I believe community foundations and middleman organizations can absolutely tell donors that their gift will make specific services happen.

I think what happens is that these nonprofits get too caught up in the difference between “what we do” and “what we make possible.”

As I wrote last week, individual donors are much more interested in what your organization makes happen than they are in exactly how your organization makes it happen.

There are lots of instances of this being true and completely above board. For instance, international relief & development organizations usually have local/indigenous partners who “do the work” of feeding children, providing education, digging wells, etc.

Medical research charities often outsource significant portions of their work, from bloodwork to testing to actually working with patients.

My recommendation: don’t artificially limit what you say in your fundraising based on a belief that donors only fund your activities (how you do your work). In our experience, donors tend to be more motivated by the outcomes your organization creates – what your work makes possible.

Your organization can absolutely make clear asks around providing specific services, even if those services are provided by another nonprofit/entity, as long as the donor’s gift provides funding that makes those services possible.

What, Not How

Steven Screen | September 9, 2025September 5, 2025Ask

Here’s a principle I live by when creating fundraising:

“Ask individual donors to fund what your organization makes happen, not how your organization makes it happen.”

Most nonprofits tend to focus their fundraising on “how their organization makes things happen.” This means their fundraising tends to be full of three things:

Their Programs. You see this in sentences like, “Our program Uplifting Kids takes children from 3-5 and….”
Their Approach. “We have a holistic approach that preserves the dignity…”
Their Analogy. “What we really do is provide hope at the end of the road.”

That’s how the organization does its work. It’s how the organization makes the change it makes.

It’s 100% true that institutional funders are very interested in how organizations do their work. Institutional funders are often experts in the field, so when you tell them your programs & approach, the Grantmaking Officer has the knowledge & context to immediately understand why your programs & approach are valuable and worth supporting.

In fact, a grants officer might have proposals from five similar organizations on their desk on any given day. In that context, how the organization does its work is vitally important.

On the other hand, individual donors are usually not experts in the field. They don’t have the knowledge or context that helps them understand why your programs and approach are valuable. And these non-experts tend to value different things about your work than institutional funders value.

So the question, “What do individual donors value about our work?” is one that every nonprofit should be asking itself.

And for what it’s worth, in our experience individual donors are more interested in funding what you make happen. They are interested in the results of your approach. They want to fund the change you make.

For example, a nonprofit that provides preschool to underserved families should say, “Will you give a gift to send one child to preschool” instead of saying “Will you support Uplifting Kids, our program that takes children from 3-5 and…”

Share results like “13 underprivileged women graduated from college because of you” and “the fall theatre season was a smashing success thanks to you.”

Share specifics like, “You can help a child in outer Mongolia get the medical care they need” instead of “You can give a child hope at the end of the road.”

You get it.

Is there room to mention your programs, approach, and analogies in your fundraising? Sure. They are a small part of what makes up your brand.

But your fundraising to individual donors will immediately start working much better if you start to focus on what your donor’s gift will do instead of how your organization will do it.

Three Core Functions

Steven Screen | September 4, 2025September 1, 2025Repeat

The following is from my friend Richard Perry, and it’s too good not to share:

There are three core functions of a nonprofit:

Deliver programs to solve a societal problem.
Inspire and retain supporters to fund it.
Build internal systems that support both.

That is so clear, and so true.

What I like about what Richard says, and why I want to see it spread, is that this thinking convincingly makes the case that Fundraising (“inspiring and retaining supporters”) is equally important to Program. And it specifically calls nonprofits to “build internal systems that support both.”

But if your experience is anything like mine, you feel that most nonprofits do not treat Fundraising equally to Program.

That happens for lots of legitimate reasons: most Founders are program-oriented and naturally focus their time & effort in that area, plus fundraising is by nature uncomfortable to most people. Additionally, fundraising education has not kept up with the explosion of nonprofits in the U.S.

Fine.

But the shift to “treating Fundraising equally to Program” is one that immediately helps the organization. The “flywheel effect” is obvious: the fundraising becomes more effective, the organization is better at retaining fundraising talent, the organization retains more donors each year, and the organization raises more money.

The mature, national organizations I served at the beginning of my career had all made this shift. I think that tells you something.

If you’re a leader of an organization that hasn’t made this shift, it’s worth exploring what’s stopping you.

If you’re working at an organization that hasn’t made this shift, it’s worth sharing this thinking and having a conversation.

The Amount of the Match

Steven Screen | September 2, 2025August 27, 2025Ask

Here’s a super tactical, deep-cut of a post for you. Save or bookmark this for the next time you have a matching grant to use in email or the mail.

Specifically, this post is about how to communicate the amount of matching funds you have.

Most pieces of fundraising always mention “there is a match” and the “amount of the match” in the same breath throughout the letter. You don’t want to do that.

The fact that you have a match, and the amount of the match, are two distinct pieces of information. And one of them is far more important than the other.

Here are the rules of thumb that we try to live by…

Guiding Principles

It’s the match itself that makes people respond, not the amount of the match. Therefore, the amount of the match is not a piece of information we want to over-communicate or over-emphasize.
The amount of the matching funds only needs to be mentioned once in the email or letter. Sharing the amount honors the provider of the match, and lets donors know that the funds are limited.
Include the amount of the match on the landing page and/or the reply card. Do this so that donors who don’t have the letter or email will still see that the funds are limited. But remember that other copy points like “the donor’s gift doubles” and “what the gift will do/fund” and “the deadline” are more important for creating a response than the amount itself.

Specific Guidelines

Even though you should mention the match itself early and often, mention the amount of the match just once in the email or letter.
Specifically, mention the amount of the match the second time the match is mentioned in the body of the email or letter.
- For example, in the context of a letter I will highlight that there is a match on the outer envelope, in the upper right corner/johnson box, and in the first three or four paragraphs of the letter. Then, the second time the match is mentioned in the letter, I include the amount of the match. (This usually happens 1/2 or 3/4 the way down the first page of the letter.)
If you want to mention the amount again on the second page, fine. But do it at least three paragraphs before the end of the letter. Don’t mention the amount in the PS.

Edge Cases

If the amount of the match is so large that it’s almost a news item of its own, mention the amount of the match more often. For instance, say you’re a small organization and you’re given $500,000 in matching funds. By all means, mention it more than once.
- But remember – for the donors reading your letter or email, it’s still usually more important that “their gift will be doubled” than “how big your match is.”
When using email or social to promote a match, mention the amount more often when the matching funds are almost gone. As in, “There are only $570 in matching funds left, give now to have your gift doubled!”
Sometimes the amount of the match is very important to the person / Foundation / Organization that has given it. If you need to mention that amount more often for them, no problem.

I hope these rules of thumb help you raise even more money the next time you have a matching grant!