Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Feelings, Not Fact

Steven Screen | July 16, 2026July 10, 2026Ask

Here’s a bit of fundraising copywriting advice for you:

When you find yourself sharing a fact, instead, share a feeling.

As we create fundraising and make the case for a donor to give a gift, it makes logical sense that we tend to reach for facts:

15% of local Moms face homelessness at some point
There are over 5,400 unspayed and un-neutered pets in our county!
We helped 377 people last month

But facts don’t move the needle in direct response fundraising – feelings do.

So the next time you’re about to share a fact, share a feeling or emotion instead:

It’s not fair that so many moms face homelessness.
Seeing so many local pets have babies makes my heart hurt, and I know it bothers you, too.
You’ll love knowing that you came to the aid a person who needed a helping hand.

Feelings, not facts, are the way into your individual donors’ hearts.

‘Reducer’

Steven Screen | July 14, 2026July 9, 2026Repeat

Have you ever heard of a “Reducer”?

That’s what legendary music producer Rick Rubin calls himself:

From Johhny Cash to Jay Z, Rick calls himself a “reducer” because he “strips away all non-essential sounds to find a song’s core.”

This is similar to how the most successful direct response fundraising tends to get created: you strip away all non-essential ideas, trimming a letter or email down to being entirely about one main message/offer.

Note that I’m writing specifically about direct response fundraising here. Direct response is different than an event when you have the room’s attention for 45 minutes. Direct response is different than a lunch with a major donor.

In the mail, email and online, you only have people’s attention for a few seconds. You reduce the information you share with your readers in order to communicate one important thing clearly.

That’s what helps you cut through the clutter.

This is also why effective letters and emails are so rarely created when more than two or three people can speak into a project: each person adds what they think is important, which increases the number of ideas instead of reducing the number of ideas.

Stay focused. Be a “reducer.” Create small, easy steps for your donors to take. You’ll be amazed at how many respond with gifts, and how many more donors you end up with over time.

Lots of Small Steps

Steven Screen | July 9, 2026July 9, 2026Ask

The more distinct ideas a letter or email includes, the less likely it is to succeed.

Let me tell you what I mean, first with a concept and then with an example.

100% Important, or 33% Important?

If I send you an email that has one main idea, you know that that idea is important.

To use numbers, if I send you a message with one main idea, that idea is 100% important. And if I send you a message with three distinct ideas, each idea is only 33% important.

We all intuitively understand this idea. When we have an important message to send, we communicate only about that one message because any additional ideas are distractions from the main message.

Case in point: nonprofit e-newsletters. E-newsletters have abysmal open rates because they are updates on everything to everyone. They talk about this, and there’s a story about that, and they update on the other thing. You know how low the open rates on your e-newsletter are, and you know they cause almost zero action and have almost zero effect on fundraising results.

What Does Focus Look Like?

First, a letter or e-appeal focuses on part of what the organization does, not all of what the organization does. This focus makes it easier for donors to understand what is needed and what their gift will do. It’s usually expressed in an offer, like “$55 provides an hour of equine therapy for a child” or “$37 provides supplies for one classroom.”

(By the way, even if you feel like your organization doesn’t “just do one thing like that,” you can still focus your fundraising on just one thing. This is a messaging choice, not something that’s driven by your programs. Additionally, you can do this and still raise undesignated funds.)

Second, every idea in the letter or email provides reasons for the donor to give a gift to “do the offer.”

Here’s what this looks like in practice. For this example, say you’re a maritime history museum, you run fun classes for children in August, and you’re doing an appeal in July. Every piece of content in the letter should be about why it’s such a good idea for the donor to send in a gift to send a kid to one of your August classes.

Here are a handful of messages you could include in the letter:

You know how important the maritime industry has been (and still is!) to our part of the world, and you know what a tragedy it would be if that history fades away. The student you help send will learn about their history!
You and I both know there’s no substitute for time on the water for a person to learn about the sea. So the students spend time on a boat each day.
A week on the water in the summer is often the only time a child from an underprivileged background has the chance to be on the water.
During their class, a young person will learn (IMPORTANT THING 1), and (IMPORTANT THING 2), and (IMPORTANT THING 3).
You’ll love knowing that while on our ship, the children are connecting with nature, not the internet. Sails, not screens!
The local maritime industry is struggling right now to find tomorrow’s workers, and you know that an introduction to the industry through a fun summer class is a great way to introduce a person into a rewarding line of work.

Can you feel the focus? Can you see how all the messages are about how important it is for a child to take a class this August?

This approach works so much better than letters and emails that are about many distinct things.

The big idea here is to think of the letter as “convincing the reader to do this one thing” instead of “convincing the reader to support our organization.”

You might say, “wait, but we want donors to support our whole organization!”

Here’s what I’ve learned from looking at the results of campaigns on donor files for over 30 years: give donors lots of small, easy to take, affordable steps. When you do that, more people will arrive at “supporting your organization” than if you ask them to make the whole journey in one large step.

How Many Times a Year Can You Use Matching Funds?

Steven Screen | July 7, 2026June 30, 2026Repeat

It’s one of the questions we get asked most often:

How many times a year can we use matching funds?

There’s a real fear that donors will “catch on and stop giving” or that the matches will somehow tarnish the organization’s brand.

But in our experience, you can use matches almost as often as you’d like. I think my personal “record” is 8 matching grant appeals in one year. (And they all worked GREAT.)

There’s another fear that organizations have: that if they use matches too often, the matches will stop working. This fear does not come true – and if you look at the data you see something interesting: You notice that the 8^th match does not work as well as the 1^st or 2^nd match, but the 8^th match still works better than an average appeal.

In other words, matching grant appeals are so effective that, even when they don’t work at full strength, they work better than average appeals.

We aren’t the only fundraising agency to come to the conclusion that nonprofits can use more matches than they think they can. You can read the same thing in this post from TrueSense. Also, Jeff Brooks has had the same experience.

Both of those posts make a recommendation about how to maximize the boost that using many matches give you: vary the approach. For example, your organization could have a spring match, a fall match, and a year-end match. You could use a unique design for each of your matching campaigns. You can vary the multiplier. You can release the match over time. You get it.

The big lesson here for growing nonprofits is twofold: don’t be afraid of using a match too often, and redouble your efforts to source matching funds.

Matches are a reliable, proven way to make your current fundraising raise more money.

It doesn’t happen very often, but every once in a while something in fundraising is easy. “Adding a match and raising a little more” is one of those things.

The Best Latte in Town

Steven Screen | July 2, 2026June 30, 2026Repeat

Say you run a coffee shop. And over the years, through trial and error and iteration, you’ve figured out how to make a latte that people LOVE.

More people start coming to your coffee shop. You’re making more money. You get voted “Best Latte in Town.” You now have a steady stream of new and repeat customers, you’re selling more pastries, things are growing.

Here’s what no one tells you: pretty soon you’re going to be bored to tears making that latte in that way.

And because you’re human, you’re going to be tempted to change the way you make your latte.

So you’re faced with this choice: to keep making the latte the same way (which reliably delivers revenue and growth) or try something new and see what happens.

This situation plays out in Fundraising all the time.

Through trial and error and iteration, a nonprofit creates a fundraising offer or message that reliably brings in more donations than any other offer or message… then after a while the staff get tired of that fundraising offer or approach, or they believe that if donors knew more about the organization they would give more… and pretty soon the organization is on a path to replace the proven performer with something new.

Here’s what a smart coffeeshop owner does (and it’s the same thing a smart nonprofit should do). They would never just “stop making the famous latte and replace it with something they think would work better.” Instead, they would maximize that latte’s effect while simultaneously developing new products.

So, they would put a big sign in the window that says “home of the best latte in town,” and feature large posters of the latte in the store, all while using the reliable flow of customers and revenue to fuel the business.

And at the same time they would regularly try little experiments with boundaried consequences. They’d make a latte in a new way and add it as a “special” for a month. They’d try a tea drink on a random Tuesday and see how many customers buy it. In other words, a nonprofit would try out a new offer or message in a new appeal they’ve never sent before. Or they’d try it out in a mini email campaign.

For nonprofits, the principle is that if you’ve spent all the time and money to develop a fundraising message that you know worked really well – and your beneficiaries or cause are counting on you – don’t change it because you’re bored with it. There’s too much at stake!

It is absolutely OK to change offers or messaging (that’s how organizations learn and grow!), but when you have a proven, reliably successful offer or message, you only change it when you’ve tested a new offer or message and have evidence that it will work as well or better than the current offer or message.

And here’s a little note for people who don’t like or are bored with fundraising that works well for your organization: just as it’s OK for the famous latte to not be the favorite thing on the menu for the owner of the coffee shop, it’s OK for a nonprofit’s most successful fundraising offer or message to not be the favorite message of the staff or leadership. The latte isn’t made for the owner, and the fundraising isn’t made for the staff.

Use Graphics, But Not Too Many

Steven Screen | June 30, 2026June 29, 2026Ask

Here’s a question that one of our clients asked recently, and I think it’ll be helpful to you to know what we’ve seen over the years.

“Do graphics (like a visual of a meal in an appeal for meals) actually help?”

The answer is “usually, and up to a point.”

I’ll explain both parts of that answer…

Usually

Graphics are easier to understand more quickly than words, which is why you see them so often. And when you embrace the idea that people are moving fast when they look at your mail or email, you can see why graphics are so helpful for donors.

An image of a plate with food instantly means the appeal is about providing food
A image of a diving board, a s’more and a bunkbed communicates “summer camp” quickly
A large “2X” instantly means the donor’s gift doubles

Think of these graphics as a service to your donors, to make your appeals easier to understand quickly. They make your appeals more accessible to more people.

I’ve seen some people who will push back against using graphics because “they are not professional and we want our image to be professional.” I ask those people if they’ve ever been grocery shopping – because when you enter a grocery store (even high-end stores like Whole Foods)

there are graphics that immediately point your attention toward sale items – and shoppers don’t think, “oh man, this grocery story isn’t professional.” Shoppers value graphics because they’re helpful.

As Jeff Brooks says, any time you can help a donor picture what their gift will help provide, you’re closer to getting a gift.

Up to a Point

You can absolutely use too many graphics and put emphasis on too many things. We’ve all seen marketing materials that are so visually busy that you don’t know where to look.

There’s an old maxim that says, “when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.” You’ve seen this in appeal letters where roughly half of the letter is bolded and/or underlined. At that point it’s no longer helpful – it’s just noise.

So don’t use too many.

But… there’s a reason you keep seeing graphics on appeal letters and in emails: they reliably increase how much money comes in. And they increase how much money comes in because they are helpful to donors.

Get To Know Your Segments!

Steven Screen | June 25, 2026June 24, 2026Repeat

I wrote earlier this week about why you shouldn’t mail your ‘reports’ (newsletters or donor reporting letters) to your lapsed or non-donors because it’s not worth the money to do so.

There’s a core idea in that post that I want to name, and then go deeper on.

The core idea is that your database is made up of different groups of people with different characteristics, and each group responds at a different (but predictable) rate to your fundraising.

The professional name for this is called “audience segmentation,” and if you already report fundraising results by audience segment, you can skip the rest of this post. But if not, let me give you an easy example:

If you mail an appeal to 100 people who have given your organization a gift in the last year or so, perhaps 5 people will respond with a gift.
If you mail that same exact appeal to 100 people who have volunteered at your organization in the last year or so, perhaps 1 person will respond with a gift.

Knowing that different groups respond differently (and predictably) has obvious implications for your fundraising plan. And I hope you’ll walk with me through an example from one of the nonprofits Better Fundraising serves.

The nonprofit is a Christian missionary-sending organization. If you’re not familiar with the model, there are two layers of fundraising. Each missionary raises their own financial support from friends and family, people who give because they know and believe in that specific missionary. The organization itself has donors too, but these are people who support the cause or the institution itself as opposed to any specific missionary. The money the “organizational” donors give to the organization funds things individual missionaries can’t provide for themselves: training, emergency care, recruiting the next generation of missionaries, etc.

When sending out fundraising, the organization used to lump the results of the two groups together. Here are the results for their June appeal a couple of years ago:

When reviewing these results, you’d think something like the following: “This appeal did OK but not great. We drove $17k in net revenue with an ROI of 2.36.” But that’s from over 9,000 donors, and our response rate was only 1.91%, which isn’t great for an appeal to current donors.

However, because we know that the 9,000 people who received this appeal are made up of two distinct groups (missionary supporters and organizational supporters) we should review results from this appeal broken out for each group. Now here’s what we see:

Look at the difference in performance for the two groups!

Breaking out the results like this, we see two completely different stories that were hidden when the results were lumped together:

For organizational donors, the appeal was a huge success. It resulted in almost $20k in net revenue with an ROI of 6.8 and a response rate of 6.06%. That’s a win that we’d take every time.
For missionary supporters, the appeal was not a win when judged by conventional cultivation metrics: it lost over $2,000, had an ROI less than 1, and a response rate of just .62%. Ouch.
- However, it did result in 44 new organizational donors at a cost of $215 per new donor (the “cost per response”) which is an acceptable cost per new donor for this organization.

The organization learned a handful of lessons from this exercise that has helped them grow since this mailing was sent two years ago. For instance:

They used to think their appeals were only working OK. Now they know that their appeals are working great for organizational donors. This makes the organization feel much more confident in their fundraising.
They now know the tradeoffs of sending mailings to Missionary donors. Today, for most mailings, they include few or no Missionary donors, which saves the organization tens of thousands of dollars a year.
And when they do send a mailing to Missionary donors, they judge the mailing’s success by the number of new organizational donors acquired.
There’s also a political reason for all of this: now, whenever a stakeholder or Board member says something like, “Hey, why are we mailing missionary donors” or “Hey, why are we not mailing missionary donors” the person in charge of fundraising points to the spreadsheets, says “this is what happens when we do, this is what happens when we don’t, and here’s why.” The stakeholder or Board member usually walks away impressed.

So, what different groups is your database made up of? And can you start analyzing your fundraising results by group (“by segment” is the technical term) so that you can make your fundraising operation more efficient and effective?

For instance, many nonprofits that we start working with have been sending their appeals to basically everyone: anyone who has given a gift in the last 5 years, plus their volunteers, plus the non-donors that are on their list. But when we evaluate the performance for each group, the organization usually discovers they’ve been losing money by mailing to some of their groups.

So they “tighten up” the groups they’ve been mailing to, start saving meaningful amounts of money, and then use that money to either raise more money or do more mission work.

My advice to you, if you don’t already, is to start getting to know your segments!

Don’t Mail ‘Reports’ to Lapsed Donors and Non-Donors

Steven Screen | June 23, 2026June 19, 2026Report

A lot of questions have been coming in lately and I love it. Each one is a chance to share lessons that previous nonprofits have learned. This way, your nonprofit can “skip a step” and move immediately to more efficient fundraising so you can have more impact.

Here’s today’s question:

“Why shouldn’t we mail ‘Reports’ (newsletters, donor reporting letters) to everyone in our database, instead of just sending them to recent donors?”

The short answer is, “Because it’s not worth your money.”

Here’s the deal. When you send “Reports” to lapsed donors and non-donors and track results you will find two things:

If you measure results of the mailing, you will find that it costs more money to print and send the Reports to lapsed donors and non-donors than you will receive in return. In other words, you’re losing money.
- Note: to measure this, you’ll need to be able to track the response to the mailing by segment. This can seem daunting to small nonprofits, but it turns out to be relatively easy.
If you measure the long-term results of mailing your Reports to lapsed donors and non-donors, you will find that sending them Reports has little to no effect on whether they ever give in the future.

I cannot tell you how many organizations I’ve helped stop sending their newsletter to non-donors. Hundreds?

The organization saves real money because they stop paying for printing and postage to that group every year. And they start using that budget to pay for things that generate a better return.

That, by itself, is reason enough to do it.

But it’s not even the most powerful effect, because making this change is like a “gateway” to a set of knowledge that really helps the Fundraiser.

The measuring of results, and seeing that a particular tactic or message doesn’t work to a particular group of people, leads to all sorts of other learnings like:

“Hey, we’ve noticed that sending printed copies of our annual report makes zero difference to our fundraising except for this one small group of folks.” And then they save a ton of money the following year by printing and sending fewer annual reports. Or…
“Hey, we notice that major donors are some of the biggest responders to our direct mail appeals. Maybe when someone says “don’t mail appeals to your major donors” we should question that advice.” And then they don’t make the ill-advised move of removing major donors from the mail stream. Or…
“Hey, we notice that when we don’t do our e-newsletter there is no change in our fundraising results. Maybe we don’t have to do our e-newsletter any longer.” And they save time by stopping their e-newsletter, or maybe they do half as many issues as they used to.

You get it.

So, if you’re sending printed Reports to your lapsed and non-donors, I recommend that you measure the performance, or stop. You’ll be so pleased at the money you save, and on how you can use that money for something that’s more productive for your organization.

***

If someone in your organization says, “Oh no, we definitely have to send Reports to lapsed and non-donors because the Reports will inspire giving, I’ve seen it,” please ask two questions:

“What was the ROI on the mailing to that segment?” In other words, what was the revenue that resulted from the printing and postage cost to the lapsed and non-donors? You want to ask this because of course some non-donors will give – you often get a couple or even a few. But the question is not “did any donors give?” The question is, “was the result worth it for the cost?”
Then, ask the person if they also tested sending strong appeals to lapsed and non-donors. And if so, how did the results compare to when they sent Reports to those groups? You want to ask this question because, in the experience of Better Fundraising and other professional agencies, sending a strong appeal to lapsed and non-donors has a much higher ROI than sending a Report.

A Thorough, Complete Argument for Why You Should Include a Reply Card

Steven Screen | June 18, 2026June 10, 2026Ask

A nonprofit recently asked me if they should include a physical reply card with their mailers. They asked, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we just had everyone go online to give their gifts?”

I’m going to give you a short answer, and then a long, annoyingly detailed answer.

The Short Answer

The nonprofit is correct that it would be cheaper, but there’s a hidden consequence: they would get fewer gifts overall and would end up raising less money.

Because of this, at Better Fundraising we recommend always including a reply card and a reply envelope in your direct mail packages. Yes, it’s a tiny bit more expensive to do so, but it’s proven to result in more net revenue for your mission.

Here’s why this happens: in today’s world, statistically speaking, most recipients of a direct mail package want to use the mail to send their gift back to you. (This seems like a good place to remind ourselves that the average age of a donor in North America is at least 20 years older than the average age of a Fundraiser in North America.)

This means, if you don’t include a reply card and a reply envelope, you are asking a majority of the people who want to give you a gift to do it in a way they don’t prefer. Not all of them will do it your way, and you’ll lose some gifts.

The Long Answer

Say you send out a great piece of direct mail and, after scanning and reading your letter, there are 100 people who would like to give you a gift.

In other words, you have 100 people holding your letter in their hands with intent to give.

Based on the donor behavior that Better Fundraising sees across several nonprofit sectors, we estimate that of those 100 people, approximately 75 of them would prefer to give their gift to you through the mail, and 25 would prefer to give you a gift online.

Using this donor behavior as a baseline, let’s think through what will happen.

First, let’s assume that of the 25 folks who prefer to give online, all 25 of them scan your QR code, arrive at your landing page, and 20 of them give you a gift. That’s an exceedingly generous assumption, because I’ve never seen a giving page or mobile form with has an 80% conversion rate, but let’s go with it for argument’s sake. (And if you don’t know the conversion rates of your giving/donate page, that’s something to add to your list to measure and manage.)

Now, the other 75 people holding your letter will all go looking for the reply card, and will experience a moment of friction when they can’t find one. They can’t give their gift to your nonprofit in the way they would like to.

Let’s say 5 of them put your letter in the recycling at that moment. I’m thinking about my mom here. She’s a fantastic donor to several organizations. But there’s no way in the world she’s ever going to give a gift online that involves her typing in a url or scanning a QR code.

So now you have 70 people left who have an intent to give, but must “switch media channels” (from direct mail to online) in order to give you a gift. More friction.

Of those 70, maybe 35 will find their phone, open up the camera app, scan the QR code, and go to your giving page. Great. Let’s assume your giving page is great and your conversion rate is 50% for visitors arriving with intent to give, so of those 35 donors, 18 will give you a gift.

For the other 35 donors who don’t use QR codes, they will pull out their phone or laptop, hopefully not get distracted by text messages or email or their home page, and enter your website address by hand. The standard rule of thumb is that for every click that users must make to reach a destination on the web, half of the audience is lost. So our 35 visitors who arrive at your site, 18 make it to your giving page. And we know that the giving page’s conversion rate is 50%, so from those 18 visitors we will get 9 gifts.

Whew. Let’s look at the totals…

The Results

We had 100 people with intent to give after reading your letter.

In the scenario where there was no reply device, you received 47 total gifts:

20 from the people who prefer to give online
18 from the people who use QR codes
9 from the people who had to enter your website manually

Now let’s quickly look at what would have happened if the 100 people with intent to give had a reply card and reply envelope in their hands along with your letter.

I predict that you’d receive about 90 gifts:

20 from the people who went online of their own volition, and
70 from people sending back the reply card with a check or credit card number. (I’m accounting for some “loss” due to people being unable to find their checkbook, some wouldn’t have stamps, some would forget to mail the letter, etc.)

That’s 90 gifts versus 47 gifts.

Now, your numbers might be a little different. Your assumptions might be a little different. Your giving page conversion rates might be a little different. But I think you’ll see that, if you’re counting your pennies and trying to get the most bang for your buck, you’ll include a reply card and a reply envelope.