Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Three Tips for the Final Three Weeks

Steven Screen | December 11, 2025December 2, 2025Year-End

It’s December 11^th. By now you should already be seeing increased traffic to your website and increased gifts.

Here are three quick tips to help you make the most of the final three weeks of fundraising this year.

Tip #1

Make sure the description of what the donor’s gift will make possible is the same on your giving/landing page as it is in your year-end appeal letter and your year-end emails.

If our experience is any indication, making sure donors see the same language in your fundraising and on your giving page will increase the amount of money you raise.

Tip #2

Make sure the hero image / first slider on your website is a call to action to give a year-end gift. The link should take a user directly to your giving page.

Most nonprofits see a surge in web traffic during the final weeks of the year, and most of that traffic is arriving with an interest or intent to give you a gift. By making your call to action super obvious, you increase the number of people who make it to your giving page, and you’ll get more gifts.

Tip #3

If your web provider/platform allows it, set up a pop-up (also called a “popover” or a “light box”) with a call to action to give a year-end gift.

Again, a lot of people coming to your site this month are coming with the intent to give a gift. Pop-ups are proven to increase the number of visitors who actually give those gifts.

Good luck!

Want More People Interested in Your Organization?

Steven Screen | December 9, 2025December 2, 2025Ask

This is oversimplified, but still true…

At the beginning of a nonprofit’s fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“How can we describe our work to be as inspirational as possible?”

Farther along on their fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“What do humans tend to be motivated by, and how can we talk about our work in a way that taps in to what motivates people?”

The second question results in creating fundraising that’s more interesting and relevant to drastically more people, which increases the amount of money the organization can raise.

Why? Because there aren’t that many people interested in your work itself, no matter how inspirationally you describe it.

But there are millions of people who are engaged by emotions, who want to see justice done, who want to right wrongs, and who want their gift to make a meaningful difference. Focus your fundraising on how those elements are part of your work, and your organization becomes a lot more interesting to a lot more people.

Presence Implies Importance

Steven Screen | December 4, 2025December 3, 2025Repeat

If your cause and your nonprofit are always showing up in the lives of your donors, your donors come to believe that your organization is doing important work.

Think about this in your own life: it’s likely there’s a nonprofit that you “run into” all the time because you see their fundraising and regularly hear about the cause they are working on. And it’s likely that you, perhaps without even realizing it, come to believe that those nonprofits are doing important work.

Contrast this to the organizations that show up in their donors’ lives just once or twice a year. One of the messages “showing up a couple times a year” sends is that the work and the organization must not be that important. Because if it were important, they would show up more often, right?

I’m not saying this is fair. But it sure is true.

What does this mean for you? It means that if your nonprofit wants to grow, part of your job is to be present in donors’ lives, in a relevant way, often.

The Gift of Not Having to Know the Details

Steven Screen | December 2, 2025December 1, 2025Ask

When writing appeals, it’s a natural instinct to tell individual donors more about the organization itself.

This results in copy like:

Founded in 1971, we’ve been…
Our three pillars are…
Our program, Uplifting Kids, addresses the needs…

All of this is educating the donor under the belief that “if our donors knew more about us, and knew how competent we are, they would give more.”

However, in 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, what I’ve seen is that appeals raise more money when they educate less. (The two most successful appeal letters of my career don’t even mention the organization.)

Here’s my interpretation of the data: by eliminating the education, you remove content that is unimportant to a donor’s decision. This results in appeals where more of the content is relevant, which causes increased giving.

Put differently: when you remove the noise, the signal is stronger.

Reminder – I’m talking about communicating with individual donors and non-donors in the mail and email. Not at an event, not at lunch with a major donor, not a tour, etc.

Here’s how I advise nonprofits to think: “It’s a generous act to simplify our mail and email fundraising for individual donors. They don’t need to need to know the details – that’s what they have us for! If we get a chance to interact in person or at an event, they are showing interest so it’s appropriate to go into the details. And if they keep giving faithfully through the mail or email without ever interacting with us another way, that’s OK too.”

Remember, you’re already removing lots of details about your organization from your mail and email fundraising. You don’t talk to donors about your accounting practices, or whether you own or rent your office space, or your approach to HR.

So, just remove a few more details about your organization.

When you make the generous act of not requiring donors to know your organization’s details, you unlock more generosity from more donors.

Giving Thanks for You

Steven Screen | November 27, 2025November 20, 2025Thank

We are thankful to be Fundraisers. We get great joy from creating connections and funding good work – and hope that you do, too.

One of our favorite quotes is Dr. Martin Luther King’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And I like to think that you and I have ‘bent the arc’ a little bit towards justice this year.

The work you do matters. And it makes a difference.

So Happy Thanksgiving, thanks for letting Better Fundraising be a part of your journey, and thanks for being a Fundraiser!

The ‘Sequel Approach’ to Successful Fundraising

Steven Screen | November 25, 2025November 20, 2025Repeat

Two weeks ago at the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference, I shared an idea that’s challenging to some fundraisers and organizations:

Many effective appeals & campaigns are “sequels” of previous successful appeals or campaigns.

Here’s what I mean…

Say you send an appeal in March and it works great. When it’s time to make next year’s March appeal, you make a “sequel” of the successful appeal. You do that by looking at last year’s package. You make any copy improvements you can, maybe replace the story with a new one, perhaps make the design a little cleaner.

Now you have a “sequel” to a successful appeal. And the sequel is highly likely to raise just as much money as the first appeal, if not more.

Then the following year you make another sequel, making it better yet again, and raising even more money. And you keep making sequels until your results start to decline, or there’s some other good reason to stop (the program ends, you discover a better idea in another appeal, etc.).

I used AI to generate an image to illustrate the concept. This is meant to be a nonprofit with their original March appeal on the left, and the two sequels they’ve made…

As you move from left to right (in other words, as you make more sequels), they get better and more interesting than the original successful appeal. Each year’s appeal raises a bit more money than the previous year’s. This is what getting really good at fundraising in the mail and email looks like.

Now, let’s compare that approach with the standard approach of, “We have to come up with a new theme for every appeal.” Here’s what that looks like…

Here we’ve got three totally unique appeals, and each year’s revenue is a bit of a guessing game.

Large organizations and agencies follow the “sequel approach” because it has all sorts of advantages over the standard approach:

Revenue tends to grow each year
Revenue is more predictable
Lessons are learned faster
Sequels take less time and effort to create

And of course, when an appeal or campaign doesn’t work, there’s no sequel. Plus it’s important to experiment every once in a while.

The thing I don’t like about the “sequel” analogy is that in movies, the sequel usually isn’t as good as the original. The seventh sequel of an original movie you loved probably isn’t very good.

But the opposite is true in fundraising: the seventh “March appeal” raises tons more money than the original, because you’re so much better at it and have learned so many lessons.

Let me really bring home the benefits of this approach for you: if you have a small handful of successful sequels to use every year, it means you have a steady stream of increasing revenue plus the time to work on other things.

As you look at your fundraising calendar for 2026, what appeal or campaign can be a sequel of a successful appeal or campaign you did this year?

Two TED Talks

Steven Screen | November 20, 2025November 19, 2025Tips

Today I’d like to share two videos with you. Both are easy watches and contain “ideas worth spreading.”

The first is Dan Pallotta’s TED talk from a few years ago. (It has 1.1 million views, but it should have a lot more, in my opinion.)

It’s called “The way we think about charity is dead wrong.” Essentially, Dan argues that by focusing so much on “revenue to expense ratios” we end up kneecapping our growth and impact.

Second, here’s a helpful video from Kara Logan Berlin. She helps people see the importance of fundraising, and provides plenty of fundraising advice that jives with what we’ve seen to be successful.

Speaking to nonprofits, Kara says, “We have to be as committed to the art of funding our work as we are to the art of doing our work.” [emphasis added]

Both of these videos lead a person to a deeper understanding of fundraising. And in my experience, if you have a deeper understanding of fundraising itself, and the role of fundraising, you’ll be more likely to create fundraising that works.

‘Papa, we HAVE to get you an eyebrow pencil!’

Steven Screen | November 18, 2025November 7, 2025Repeat

Last year, a few days before I was travelling to speak at a conference, my kids asked me what it was it was going to be like when I gave my speech.

I told them there would be several hundred people in the room, I’d be on a stage, that my face would be on a couple big video screens to that people in the back could see me, and that I was thankful that I don’t really get nervous for these things any more.

My (amazing) 15-year-old daughter’s immediate reply was as follows:

“Ohmygosh, Papa, we have to get you an eyebrow pencil!”

She said this because, as my hair has gone grey, my eyebrows have more or less disappeared. They’re there, just super faint.

So I’m sitting at our dinner table getting fervent advice – from a person who genuinely cares about me and wants me to succeed – that boils down to “for your speech to be successful, people need to be able to see your eyebrows.”

And you probably already know this, but similar situations happen in fundraising all the time…

Fundraisers who have taken the time to write an effective piece of fundraising get feedback from a caring stakeholder who wants the fundraising to succeed. But the person giving the feedback doesn’t know the discipline of direct response fundraising, or the behavioral science at play, or the difference between institutional and individual donors.

So the feedback is usually based on personal preference, rooted in a general nervousness about fundraising, and presented with logic.

And through no fault of their own, the feedback is about as helpful as me hearing that I “have to” get an eyebrow pencil:

“You know, we have to mention the name of the program.”

“This doesn’t have any stats in it, we have to include some stats so people know how effective we are.”

“We have to phrase it like this because that’s the term experts use.”

“Well, we have to make it shorter because nobody reads long letters.”

Yet each of these “have-tos” make the letter or email raise less money, not more.

Of course, you and I pay attention to feedback because we want to be team players. The feedback is coming from bosses and key stakeholders, and it’s vital to remember that they are all trying to make the fundraising work better.

So what’s a Fundraiser to do? Socialize the idea that there’s a science and profession of direct response fundraising. Share drops of knowledge from this blog and other data-driven experts (Jeff Brooks, Julie and Brett Cooper, Lisa Sargent, John Lepp, Kristin Steele & Samantha Swaim, Tom Ahern, Clay Buck, Erica Waasdorp). Slowly, but surely, we’ll spread the knowledge and science around.

In the meantime, be kind. Educate your team on the actual, proven “have-tos” for success in the mail and email.

And by the way, I gave my keynote at the conference without using an eyebrow pencil. The presentation was still a success. 🙂

The Path is not Hard to Find – But it is Hard to Start Walking It

Steven Screen | November 13, 2025November 7, 2025Repeat

If your nonprofit wants to raise $1 million three years from now, ask nonprofits who are currently raising $1 million what they did three years ago.

Here’s what you’ll find: the path to where you want to go is knowable and has been travelled before.

There are outliers of course, but for instance…

There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will install a major donor management system
There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will say, “Our email and direct mail fundraising could use some help, we’re going to bring in an expert” (this is what we primarily do here at Better Fundraising)
There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will add a line in their budget for “Donor Acquisition”

There are a small handful of strategies that we’ve seen work again and again. They can often feel awkward for smaller organizations because they don’t have personal experience with the systems or approaches.

But again, the path is knowable and has been traveled before.

Don’t look at the Big Organizations and say, “Oh, they can only do those things because they are big.” Those Big Organizations used those strategies to become big.

So the first question a nonprofit needs to ask is, “What does the path look like?” The second (and often harder) question is, “What changes and sacrifices do we need to make to get on the path?”