Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Fundraising Success Story

Steven Screen | October 1, 2026September 23, 2026Repeat

Fun success story for you.

We’ve been working with a small nonprofit on the East coast for a little over a year.

Each year they do a summer appeal, and this summer the Better Fundraising team wrote and designed the appeal. In past years their summer appeal has raised around $5,000, and our appeal this year raised $22,000.

Another thing that’s happening for this organization is this year they’re receiving more unexpected major gifts through the mail. (This happens often to our clients during the first year we work with them.) One of them was a $10k check from a donor whose highest previous gift was $1,000.

In a nutshell, here’s what we’re doing for this organization:

We’re sending more fundraising to their donors. We’re making sure their donors are regularly being given opportunities to help (by making a donation), and are regularly hearing about the effects of their giving.
We’re being clearer about what happens when funds are not raised. We’re not sensational in the least, just speaking the truth about what happens when people are unable to receive the help they need.
We’ve added printed newsletters to their annual plan. Each newsletter raises twice what it costs to print and mail.

That’s it.

And this organization’s fundraising is WAY up! And hey, if you want to talk about how Better Fundraising can help your organization do the same thing, get in touch!

Hate the Need, But Don’t Hate Sharing the Need

Steven Screen | September 29, 2026September 22, 2026Ask

I’m always on the lookout for quick ways to say powerful things. So when someone in the webinar chat wrote the following sentence, I noticed immediately.

”I think the existence of hungry children is more offensive than learning about them.”

The context was a conversation about “sharing the need” in a piece of fundraising, and some readers being offended.

My two cents: don’t protect donors from reality; trust them with it.

Sharing the need doesn’t feel good for the person sharing it, or for the reader. But was the situation getting any better before your nonprofit got involved and started talking about it? No.

This is why we have so much respect for effective Fundraisers: they have the foresight to know that the occasional person is going to be offended by their fundraising, and the strength to continue. Because when more people know about the need, more people will help.

Hate the need. But don’t hate sharing the need.

Subject Lines, Teasers, and Headlines

Steven Screen | September 24, 2026September 22, 2026Ask

You can’t save souls… in an empty church.

Your fundraising can’t inspire anyone to give… if nobody reads it.

These ideas point towards the importance of email subject lines, teasers on direct mail letters, and story headlines on newsletters. Because those parts of your fundraising play a major role in whether your fundraising gets read… or not.

Always remember:

You spent money and time to send a donor a letter, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t open it
You sent an email to your whole list, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t open it
You wrote an amazing story for your newsletter, but it doesn’t matter if people see the headline and just move along

I know many professionals who spend more time on subject lines, teasers and headlines than they spend on the letter, email, or story itself. It’s that important. I reviewed a direct mail letter today – of the 30 minutes I spent with it, about 15 minutes were spent on the headline for the reply card.

If you’re interested in getting better, here are some simple teaser tips, and here’s a podcast I did about teasers with Jeff Brooks. And here’s some help with newsletter headlines.

But the first and biggest thing you can do is ask yourself: is your organization spending the appropriate amount of time on your subject lines, teasers, and headlines? If not, what reminder can you set for yourself to spend a few more minutes next time?

Quick ‘AI & Fundraising’ Thought

Steven Screen | September 22, 2026September 18, 2026Ask

Quick reminder: vanilla ChatGPT (or any AI platform) is not good at writing direct response fundraising. Here’s why…

ChatGPT learned from a massive amount of publicly- and digitally-available fundraising content, but does not know how well each piece of fundraising performed.

AI sees zero difference between the e-appeal that raised 3x what you expected and the e-appeal that generated 3 gifts and $57. It will draw from both appeals equally as it works on your appeal.

But sooner or later, someone in your organization or on your Board will say, “Hey, I ran your proposed appeal through AI and here are some improvements it suggests” or “Hey, can we have AI write our fundraising?”

Here’s what I want to say, but probably never would: “Thank you. We know that AI was trained on fundraising, but doesn’t know which pieces worked and which pieces didn’t. So, roughly half of the advice it’s giving is going to make our fundraising worse. Would you please figure out which half of the advice you’re passing along is going to cause us to raise less than we’re raising now, and let me know? Thank you!”

All kidding aside, here’s the other true thing: AI is really helpful. AI will have a good suggestion or two. AI will complete a first draft for you, so you don’t have to face the empty document and blinking cursor.

AI, when expertly trained and well-prompted, can write a pretty great appeal.

But if you’re using vanilla, untrained AI to create or evaluate fundraising, half of what it’s telling you will make your fundraising worse. And it doesn’t know which half.

Book Recommendation

Steven Screen | September 17, 2026September 11, 2026Report

If you work at a nonprofit and raise money, there’s a book you should read.

It’s called Stories That Raise Money, and it’s written by Chris Davenport.

The book helps you know which stories to tell, and how to tell them. I won’t spoil anything else about it, other than give you a couple choice quotes to whet your appetite:

“You can write a clear, accurate, important message about your organization and still raise almost nothing.

The donor reads it, nods, and goes to make dinner.

Something has to happen in the donor before they’ll give” (emphasis added).

The “thing that has to happen in the donor” is that the donor has to care. So, much of the book is about how to make your donors care enough about what you do so that they want to fund your wok.

“A story can be true and still not make a donor care. True is the easy part. Caring is what you have to build.

These chapters give you the tools to build caring on purpose, so the donor feels what’s at stake and wants to do something about it.”

That’s a pretty good description of the main job of us Fundraisers – build caring on purpose so that donors feel what’s at stake and want to do something. This book will help you do your job even better than you’re already doing it.

If you buy the book now, you’ll also get a bunch of valuable add-ons because Chris is running a “book launch” special.

Check it out. Highly recommended.

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

Steven Screen | September 15, 2026September 11, 2026Repeat

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.

The Soft Skills and Leadership Needed to Acquire a Lot of New Donors

Steven Screen | September 10, 2026September 4, 2026Repeat

Earlier this week I shared how nonprofits acquire significant numbers of new donors every year through paid acquisition.

But to acquire new donors through paid acquisition, a nonprofit needs to demonstrate a high-level of what we might call “vision and steadfastness.”

Here’s what I mean, and I think you’ll see why a nonprofit needs some of those “softer skills” in order for paid acquisition to be a success:

The nonprofit must create a new line item in your budget specifically for donor acquisition.
- This is hard for a nonprofit that already feels low on money! This feels like a big new expense when you’re trying to run as lean as possible.
The acquisition program will lose money in year #1.
- You more than make up the loss in future years. But the people with the longer perspective will have to be just as vocal as the people who are fixated on short-term ROI and want to cancel the program.
Usually a nonprofit needs to do paid acquisition for at least a year before they get good at it.
- Because buying ads, creating offers, and creating acquisition ads is a skill you have to learn through practice, your results the first year will likely be low – but you have to keep going for the investment to be worth it.

It’s easy to see why not very many nonprofits sign up for this!

I say all this because for a smaller nonprofit to start an acquisition program is a real effort in leadership and faith.

So, How Do You Succeed?

Thankfully, tens of thousands of nonprofits have successfully gone down this path.

Here’s what their experience tells us is necessary to succeed…

The leader of the program, and often of the entire nonprofit, must talk about what the plan is, why it makes sense, and why it’s worth it. And because all the outward signs are negative, the leader has to talk about it a lot more than they expect to.
The organization must have an investment mindset. They must look past the short term; they must think in business growth terms like “cost per new donor” and “lifetime value.” If the Board or anyone else is overly focused on short-term ROI, the nonprofit will cancel the program too early, leaving itself with most of the expenses and almost none of the new donors.
Finally, the person leading the effort must get good advice. Talk to acquisition experts. Pick the brains of larger nonprofits who have established donor acquisition programs – they will happily share the lessons they’ve learned.

The chances of figuring out scalable donor acquisition on your own is unlikely, but thankfully it’s unnecessary. You are not alone – other organizations have been down this road before!

If You Really Want to Acquire More New Donors, Read This

Steven Screen | September 8, 2026September 4, 2026Repeat

We’ve been asked a LOT lately about acquiring new donors. (I don’t think this is a coincidence given that the number of individual donors in the U.S. decreased last year.)

If you want to learn about how bigger nonprofits acquire significant numbers of new donors every year, please take a look at the blog post below. I wrote it in 2018 and every word is still relevant.

Spoiler alert: there is no silver bullet. There’s a skill you have to learn. But the path is knowable. And the great news is that lots of nonprofits have gone on the path before and will gladly share what they’ve learned to help you.

Happy reading!

This post is about acquiring new donors.

But it’s for nonprofits at a very specific stage in their development.

Keep reading if the following three things are true for your organization:

You’re actively trying to grow
You realize that to achieve that growth you need more new donors each year than you’ve been acquiring
You know that your current ways of acquiring new donors won’t achieve your new goals

I’ll give you an example. We work with a handful of organizations that have between 500 and 4,000 donors. These organizations want to grow… but the ways they acquire new donors are labor-intensive and are hard to expand:

Tours of their facility
An event or two a year
Word of mouth
A major donor connects them to another major donor
Vision Meetings

All good things – but small nonprofits can only do so many of them each year.

So the organization is stuck: they want to grow, know they need more donors, but don’t have the staff to do more.

If That’s You, What Do You Do?

If that’s you, please know that you’re in good company. A LOT of organizations are in your shoes.

But your question remains: how do you begin to acquire significantly more new donors than you have in the past?

It starts with thinking differently about acquiring donors. The Big Idea is that there is a cost associated with acquiring new donors. You’re going to need to pay for the attention of potential donors via media like radio, the mail, Facebook ads, etc.

In my experience, most smaller nonprofits never make the leap from homegrown, labor-intensive methods of acquiring donors. These smaller nonprofits don’t want to pay (or don’t think they can’t afford) the costs needed to do this.

But if they really want to grow, they need to.

Making the Leap

Below are my tips for “making the leap” to a new way of acquiring new donors.

And I need to say right away that I’m not providing the solution to your donor acquisition problem. This is not “7 easy tricks to more donors than you can count!” (That post would probably get a lot of readers, but it wouldn’t hold water because there is no silver bullet.)

The Current Situation

Most small nonprofits have no line item in the budget for donor acquisition. They also really don’t know their current cost for every donor acquired, because those costs are buried in other expenses.

For example, they might spend $50,000 on an event that acquires 100 new donors. But the expenses are only looked at in relation to how much revenue came in, not how many new donors were acquired.

What’s needed is a dedicated budget for donor acquisition.

How to Grow

Smaller nonprofits basically have two options for growth. You can pursue either one, or both:

Start a scalable Donor Acquisition program. This means doing specific activities like buying radio spots and/or mailing lists, upping your online donor acquisition game, etc.
- For example: doing a radio share-a-thon for $15,000, getting 500 new donors, then doing that every year moving forward. And this is scalable because you could do two radio share-a-thons for $30,000 and acquire 1,000 new donors. Or 3 radio share-a-thons for $45,000 and acquire 1,500 new donors.
Do more of what you’re currently doing. (For clarity’s sake, I would define what most smaller orgs are doing in donor acquisition as not scalable. Could you expand your event and get 250 more donors? Maybe. Could you add three more events and get 750 new donors? Probably not.)

In my experience, “doing more of what you’re currently doing” almost never results in the type of growth a motivated organization is looking for.

So they have to bite the bullet. They have to pay the costs to start up a donor acquisition program.

Ask a Good Question

The most successful organization leaders, when they want to grow, are asking one of these questions:

“I have $XX,XXX to spend on getting new donors in 2018. How many new donors could we get for that?”
“I need X,XXX new donors in 2018. How much is it going to cost me?”
“By 2020 I need to have our income be 50% higher than 2017. How many new donors do we need to reach that level, and how much will it cost?”

If you know how much you have to spend, we can estimate how many new donors you can acquire.

If you know how many new donors you want to acquire, we can estimate how much it will cost you.

If you know how much you want to be raising 5 years from now, based on how your current donors are performing, we can tell you how many new donors you’ll need, to reach your goals.

Helpful Big Ideas

For organizations who want to begin scalable donor acquisition, there’s a set of ideas that more-or-less must be present in your organization for it to work:

If your organization is serious about acquiring new donors, you’ll have a line item in your budget for Donor Acquisition.
Measuring the Cost Per New Donor is a sign of maturity for an organization. It means you’re running the thing like a business, with known (and measured) inputs and known (and predictable) outcomes.
Scalable methods of donor acquisition require an investment mindset. Usually in donor acquisition you lose money in the short term, but you make money in the long term. For example, you might spend $1,000 and get 10 donors who each give you $50. So you spent $1,000 to raise $500. BUT, if you do a good job retaining those 10 donors they’ll give you $3,000 over the course of their time with you. So you actually spent $1,000 to raise $3,000.
There’s no way to know exactly how much a new donor will cost for an organization without testing. But there are industry standards and deep experience for every media channel – even Instagram, believe it or not. Find somebody or some organization who is doing a lot of donor acquisition, and ask them. In my experience, people will help you.
The Cost Per New Donor is always higher when you first start scalable acquisition methods. That’s because you do not know what will work best. Over time, you figure out which messages and mediums work best, and the cost per new donor comes down over time. (This is another reason it’s so important to have an investment mindset when you start to scale your acquisition.)
There is a “minimum level of investment” to start a donor acquisition program. For instance, if a radio share-a-thon costs $20k and gets you 200 donors, you can’t buy half a share-a-thon for $10,000 and get 100 donors. And by the way, Dear Reader, I don’t think you need to hear this. But I share it because there’s always someone on a Board that says, “Could we just buy seven commercials and see if that works?” What you want to do is figure out what the “minimum effective test” is, and do that. Not half of that.

Moving to this type of donor acquisition is a great sign of growth and maturity for an organization. It’s almost always a sign of a nonprofit being run like a business – and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s being a great steward of the resources given to us by donors to maximize their impact.

Good luck out there – and get in touch if you’d like to talk about donor acquisition!

This post was originally published on September 13, 2018.

Hollow Highlights and Pronoun Problems: Never Emphasize a Word That Can’t Stand Alone

Steven Screen | September 3, 2026August 31, 2026Ask

As a sort of “companion piece” to my recent post on highlighting too many things, here’s more hard-won advice about underlining and bolding in your fundraising:

The words you highlight should be understandable without reading the whole piece.

Here’s what I mean. The following is a screenshot of a story I recently reviewed for a print newsletter. Focus on the bolded copy:

If you only reading the headline, subhead and emphasized copy (which is all than an estimated 80% of people read), you will receive the following message:

You have given her a better future
Because of you, Sovanna is learning, growing and becoming more confident
But that all changed with your gift

What does the last sentence mean? What all changed? I thought Sovanna was doing great, but I guess she’s not doing great any longer? And I caused that?

The reader doesn’t know what the sentence means, and it possibly changes the meaning of the whole story. That is a big problem if the emphasized copy is the only thing a donor reads – which is true for most donors!

Now, contrast that to my edited version:

Now look at the three things a “scanner” would take away:

You have given her a better future
Sovanna’s Mom is going to tell you how much you improved her daughter’s life
You provided a backpack, notebooks and other school supplies that Sovanna needed.

I made a handful of changes, but the change I want to focus your attention on is the bolded sentence in the middle of the story. We went from a sentence the donor doesn’t understand (she doesn’t know what the word “that” refers to), and the donor doesn’t know if the change was good or bad – to a sentence that clearly tells the donor the concrete things that happened because she gave.

When you’re choosing what to bold or underline, always check for two things:

The words or sentence must be understandable even if the donor hasn’t read the rest of the piece. Watch out for pronouns that reference sentences that the donor likely hasn’t seen! The word “that” in the original is a perfect example of this.
The bolded or underlined copy, taken together, should tell a coherent story.

Always always always remember that most donors will scan before they read. And many donors will only scan and never read.

Learn to write and emphasize your fundraising to make sense to scanners. When you do, you dramatically increase the number of people who will receive the message you’re trying to send.