Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Questions?

Steven Screen | March 5, 2026March 4, 2026Ask

Do you have any questions for us?

Maybe there’s a new tactic you want to try, your boss isn’t likely to approve it, and you’d love to know how we would convince them. Maybe there’s a question you’ve just always wanted to ask. Maybe there’s a specific situation in your organization that you’d like feedback on.

We can keep you and your organization anonymous if you’d like. 🙂

We’re going to do a series of posts and videos asking questions like yours – and maybe yours if you’ll send it in!

If you’re reading this blog post in your email, you can hit “reply” and we’ll get your question. If you’re reading this on our website, fill out the form below to submit your question.

I look forward to hearing from you!

How to Make a Moment

Steven Screen | March 3, 2026March 3, 2026Ask

One of the most reliable reasons a letter, email or event resonates with donors is when it contains a moment that engages their emotions.

So I wondered, in the successful fundraising that Better Fundraising has created, what are the “ingredients” in the most powerful moments?

After reviewing a ton of top-performing fundraising, here are the ingredients that I noticed again and again…

Primarily about one “unit” of the nonprofit’s work. In other words, it was primarily about a child, not “the children.” It was about one acre, not entire ecosystems. It was about what needed to be done next month, not “the future of the community.”

There was real conflict. A person was in a brutal situation because they were unable to afford legal representation. The library had 50 children’s books, but 200 kids who need to learn how to read. The young man was struggling in college, but had aged out of the foster care system and didn’t have a trusted adult to help them.

There was real, obvious emotion. The piece of fundraising either highlights emotions of the people or situation, or brings emotion into the storytelling.

The stakes were meaningful. If the middle schooler didn’t catch up in math, their prospects for a good job were in real trouble. If the Missionary Kid doesn’t make friendships, they are likely to leave the church.

The donor can make a difference. It’s made clear to the donor that their gift will make a meaningful difference, and that difference was clearly described.

The gift needed isn’t large. The “cost to help one unit” was small, usually under $100. (If you read this and think that your organization doesn’t have anything meaningful that costs less than $100, you need to narrow your focus and “zoom in” a little further.)

The donor is asked to help. The letter or email doesn’t say things like “we value your partnership” or “please consider making a gift.” The donor is clearly asked to make a gift with language like, “Please, will you send in a gift today?”

There is a hopeful future. The letter talks about the change that will take place if the donor gives a gift. The donor knows and feels how the world will be better if they send in a gift today.

These ingredients, all used at the same time, create fundraising that causes donors to take action.

When combined, these ingredients create fundraising that’s full of emotion. And all that emotion can feel scary, which is why many nonprofits hide their emotion behind numbers, statistics, and qualifications.

But when creating your fundraising for individual donors, moments and emotions are more important than numbers. Why? Because information leads to conclusions, but emotions lead to action.

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PS — If you’re not sure how to do this for your organization, or not sure you have the right team in place to do it, get in touch!

Trust the Expertise

Steven Screen | February 26, 2026February 25, 2026Repeat

Want to know what “letting a Fundraiser do their job” looks like?

Here’s a quick story. I recently caught up with a longtime friend who is a “fundraising lifer” like me. He shared a story from earlier in his career when he was brought in as a Director of Development with a specific task of growing the organization.

A couple months in, he presented a fundraising campaign to the Executive Director for approval. The campaign was different than what the organization had done in the past. And in an example of leadership and trust, the ED said,

“This makes me deeply nervous. It is approved without any changes.”

It’s hard to express how much I love and admire that response: the ED acknowledged their feelings, then let my friend do the job he was hired to do.

The nonprofit fundraising world could use more leadership like this. It’s good to acknowledge our feelings, because feelings are real and strong. And it’s good to let Fundraisers do the jobs they were hired to do and live with the consequences.

When a boss regularly doesn’t let a Fundraiser try a new tactic or a new message, that boss dooms the nonprofit to underachievement. The organization never achieves its potential because any Fundraiser with talent and ambition will leave.

Let me put it this way: for a tiny bit of risk (trying something new), the organization has the chance to discover a way to raise more money AND increase the chance that a talented employee will stay.

And the campaign my friend put together? It was a remarkable success. It was the beginning of a four-year run that tripled the revenue of the organization. That growth would not be possible without the trust and leadership shown by the ED.

In my experience, the upside of that trust and leadership is FAR greater than the downside.

‘Front Load’ Key Words

Steven Screen | February 24, 2026February 13, 2026Ask

When you think about how to capture donor attention when there are so many things competing for your donors’ attention, here’s a tactic for you: “front-load” the most important ideas for your readers or listeners.

Sketchplanations recently published the following graphic that does a brilliant job describing what “front-loading” is and how to do it. The author is talking about writing for the web, but it’s 100% applicable to any fundraising writing that’s going to individual donors, from a direct response email to a major donor proposal…

Our donors are moving quickly, and this is a great way to get your point across more quickly. Because it’s a non-starter to make people wade through a bunch of content to figure out what you’re talking about if you want to grow.

Front-loading applies to sentences, but it also applies to your fundraising in general. For example, front-load the ask in your appeals in the first few paragaphs. If you’re meeting with a major donor to thank them for their gift and report back to them, front-load the idea that you are not going to ask them for a gift today.

You’ll see the same idea expressed in my posts Three Editing Principles and Put The Most Important Information First, but it’s great to have the official name for this tactic.

Now, the next time someone asks you why you’re writing in this slightly strange way, you can tell them that you’re front-loading, that you’re placing the words with the most signal right at the start – instead of buried in the middle or at the end.

Your Donors ARE Different… When You’re Small

Steven Screen | February 19, 2026February 13, 2026Ask

Your donors are different when you are a small organization.

Why? Many of them know you, or someone on staff, personally. Or they’re one degree removed from you. Or they’re some of your first volunteers. Maybe they are intimately connected to the cause, saw what you were doing, and sought you out.

But this isn’t true when you get bigger.

Case in point: as you get more donors, you have a personal relationship with a smaller percentage of them.

This means that if you want to get bigger, you must learn to fundraise to donors who:

Don’t know you or anyone on your staff
Don’t know anything about your organization
Don’t know much about your cause or beneficiaries, other than that it touches their heart

So when a nonprofits says to me – “Steven, that tactic you want us to use, that won’t work for our donors. Our donors are different” – there are two things I want the nonprofit to know right away.

First, we want them to use the tactic because it’s proven to help them grow beyond their current group of donors.

Second, their donors are giving to several other organizations too, and many of those organizations are happily raking in the money with whatever tactic we’re suggesting.

So your donors are different – but only when you’re small, and only in relation to yourorganization. Your donors are completely, happily normal in relation to several other organizations. So when you use the data-driven tactics that are working great for those other organizations, they are bound to work well for you, too.

Hit Songs

Steven Screen | February 17, 2026February 13, 2026Repeat

You know the songs that were hits years ago, but you still love listening to?

Those old hit songs are what allow a band or artist to make a living making music. Because to have a career in popular music you need at least a couple hit songs that people still love years later.

The same thing is true in direct response fundraising for nonprofits – you need a couple hits, a couple fundraising offers or campaigns that people love.

The nonprofit equivalent of “hit songs that stand the test of time” are things like:

You can sponsor a child for $X
You can provide surgery to repair a cleft palate for $X
You can give a goat for a family for $X

Does your organization have a hit song you can rely on?

Are you doing the work of trying different things, paying close attention to your audience’s reaction, and looking for potential hits that people will listen to again and again?

Because your goal is not to do something “fresh and new” every time. Your goal is to experiment, find out what works well, and then get the most out of that “hit” that you can.

And later on, you might get tired of your fundraising “hit song,” but the people giving won’t.

What Should Your P.S. Do?

Steven Screen | February 12, 2026February 12, 2026Ask

A thoughtful reader recently wrote in with a question. I’ve edited it lightly for brevity:

“Talk to me about the use of postscripts in asks. We currently use the P.S. as an extension of the core ask – for example, in our next appeal the P.S. asks donors to consider becoming a monthly donor. One of your podcasts suggested the P.S. should be a reiteration of the core ask. I would love to hear more about this.”

This is a great question, and one that vexes many nonprofits.

At one level, our answer is really simple: we recommend that the P.S. repeat/reiterate the core ask because that is the approach that, according to all the head-to-head testing that I’ve done or seen, is most likely to increase the chance the reader sends in a gift. *

So the question becomes, “Well, why does the ‘reiterate approach’ tend to out-raise other approaches?”

Here are the core ideas that are helpful to know:

According to eye-tracking studies, when most people first look at a direct mail letter, they do not read it. They scan the whole thing first.
Often, after they finish their scan at the end of the letter, the P.S. is the first part of the letter they actually read. When I started doing direct mail in 1993, I was taught that for the majority of readers, the P.S. is the first part of the letter that’s read.
So if the P.S. is about one idea, and the person goes back to the top and starts reading the letter and finds that the letter is about a different idea, we’ve immediately caused confusion in the reader’s mind.
- In the example where the P.S. is about becoming a monthly donor, and the rest of the letter is about whatever the need is for a single gift, then the donor might think, “Wait, I thought this was about becoming a monthly donor, but that’s not what this letter is about at all.” Confusion increases abandonment, abandonment reduces readership, reduced readership = lower giving.
Finally, a good P.S. taps into the power of repetition. Brain science shows us that when something is repeated often, we become more familiar with it and we’re more likely to believe that it’s true. This is why the best-performing direct response fundraising is often a little repetitive – and why you want to use the P.S. to repeat the core ask that’s in the letter.

In a nutshell, you never want to give your reader a second thing to consider doing before they have fully committed to doing the first thing.

So, keep the whole letter about whatever the letter is focused on. Keep the headline of the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on. Keep the action copy on the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on. Keep the descriptions behind each giving amount about whatever the letter is focused on.

Then, only after the reader has decided to give a gift and has ticked the check box next to the amount they are going to donate, then you can give them an option to do something additional – like make their gift monthly, or send in a prayer request, or contact you about an estate gift.

To borrow from the Dos Equis advertising campaign, Stay focused, my friend.

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* I have both written and seen P.S.’s that take other approaches, and suspect that some of them have worked great. That’s because there are contextually dependent times when a different type of P.S. is called for. But those times are few and far between. The model is the model for a good reason.

How to Improve

Steven Screen | February 10, 2026January 29, 2026Repeat

The path to improving your fundraising in the mail & email is the same as it is to improve at anything:

Make lots of attempts
Have a tight feedback loop with good data

In tennis, want to get better at your backhand? Hit lots of balls and pay attention to where they land. In writing, want to get better at dialogue? Write lots of dialog-heavy scenes, have other people read them and give you feedback.

In fundraising, want to get better at the mail & email? Send lots of appeals and reports, then review your response rates, your net revenue, and your retention rates.

Remember, your fundraising is just as important as your programs. Your nonprofit has two jobs, and both must be done or you don’t have a nonprofit any longer:

Deliver programs that solve a societal problem
Inspire and retain supporters to fund the programs

If you want to scale past a few hundred donors, it’s highly likely you need to get good at using the mail & email. Which means your best bet is to make lots of attempts with a tight feedback loop.

Script for Getting Matching Funds

Steven Screen | February 5, 2026January 29, 2026Ask

After a month of big-picture, more thought-provoking posts, let’s get tactical.

If you’ve ever had to ask major donors to provide matching or challenge funds, I have something for you today that I think you’ll like.

Here’s the brief “case” to make to your major donors. After you ask them if they’ll provide a gift to be used as challenge funds, tell them the following:

It’s well–documented that challenge funds increase how much a fundraising campaign will raise, so by doing this your gift will have a greater impact than it normally does.
Here’s how that happens. When a fundraising campaign has challenge funds, more people give to the campaign than if the campaign didn’t have them. So your gift will cause more people to give.
Additionally, when a fundraising campaign has challenge funds, people give larger gifts than they do when campaigns don’t have them. So your gift will cause people to give more.
So by making a leadership gift and allowing us to use it as challenge funds to inspire other donors to give, you’ll have more of an impact, and you’re helping our organization and beneficiaries more than you normally do.
And, if you give your gift now and allow us to use it as challenge funds, you also get to enjoy watching the campaign unfold while knowing that your generosity is inspiring more giving to happen than would have happened without you!

Combine the “script” above with the info in this post (one of our most popular posts ever) and you’re on your way to having multiple campaigns with matching or challenge funds this year!