Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Hey, about your envelope…

Steven Screen | November 14, 2023November 13, 2023Ask

This blog post from Five Maples shares the results of a head-to-head test of the envelope on a direct mail appeal for a nonprofit.

Their donors were split into two equal groups. One group received a letter in an envelope that included the organization’s tagline. The other group received the exact same letter, but the envelope did not have the tagline on it.

The tagline on the envelope was the only difference.

The test showed that including the tagline on the envelope reduced the number of people who responded by 65%. Put another way, putting their tagline on the envelope reduced the number of people who sent in a gift by over half.

Let’s notice that this test isn’t about all taglines. It’s about that organization’s tagline, on that piece of direct mail.

But still, that is a massive impact.

You can take three lessons from this simple test that will make you a more effective fundraiser.

Lesson #1

If your organization is putting its tagline on your outer envelope, do you know if it’s helping or hurting?

If you don’t know, it’s time to ask questions instead of making assumptions.

(By the way, there is ZERO judgement here if you’ve been making assumptions. We all do it at the beginning of our fundraising journey.)

Lesson #2

A bigger lesson this data teaches is that what you put on your envelope matters. A lot.

There are very smart people who argue that what you put on the envelope matters more than what you put in the envelope. How’s that for a brain-breaker? Because if your recipient doesn’t open your envelope, what good does the incredible message inside do?

I don’t spend much time on that argument because I think it’s a chicken-or-egg situation – but it is fun to talk about with other Fundraising nerds over a drink.

Moving forward, you want your organization to be thoughtful about what’s on your envelopes and in your email subject lines (which are more-or-less equivalent). And if you want to know more about this right now, the blog post mentioned above is a great place to start.

Lesson #3

Data about fundraising will help you know what’s important and where to spend your time.

For instance, I spend a ton of time on outer envelopes, and on the description of what a donor’s gift will accomplish. I spend almost no time trying to make sure an appeal matches a nonprofit’s “voice.” I make those decisions because data shows how much envelopes and descriptions matter, and how using an organization’s voice in the mail usually causes them to raise less money, not more.

For what it’s worth, in my career I’ve tried to develop what I think of as an “evidence-based worldview” for how to be successful in fundraising. That worldview is made up of as many test results (like this one!) and facts that I can get my hands on.

If you can build a worldview like that, you’ll have a good idea of what path/tactic/approach will have the best chance of success, regardless of the situation.

And if you’re just beginning to build your worldview, this little test about a tagline on an envelope is a great place to start!

Response Rate Goals

Steven Screen | November 9, 2023November 8, 2023Ask

At last week’s Storytelling Conference, I was asked a really good question:

“My organization is new to direct mail. What kind of response rates should I be getting?”

In case it’s helpful to you, here’s my answer:

For printed appeals my goal is a 4% response rate

For printed newsletters my goal is a 3% response rate

Those are helpful benchmarks, and I hope they help you judge how your mail is performing.

But I have to mention, things start to get interesting right away. Take a look at these variables:

The more donors you have, the lower your response rates tend to be. For an organization with 40,000 donors, achieving 3% for an appeal and 2% or 2.2% for a newsletter might be success.
The fewer donors you have, the higher your response rates tend to be. If you have 500 donors, you might be getting a 6% response rate on appeals, and a 4% response rate on newsletters.
Finally, who you include on the mailing list is another big variable. If you include your monthly donors, your response rates tend to go up. If you include lapsed donors who haven’t made a gift in 36 months, your response rate will go down.

I hope this helps you or your team have benchmarks and goals to aim for. And that there are variables that need to be taken into account. What “success” looks like varies quite a bit from organization to organization – even from mailing to mailing.

The important thing is to measure your results so you know what works best for your organization, and then do more of that!

Trust Your Donors

Steven Screen | November 7, 2023November 6, 2023Ask

If you’re at an organization that has a hard time approving new ideas in fundraising, keep reading.

(And maybe you’ve just arrived home from last week’s Nonprofit Storytelling Conference with your head full of new ideas you’d like to try!)

To many people working in nonprofits, new fundraising messaging and tactics can feel deeply risky. And so, some of your team will push back against your new ideas.

To those people, when they push back, here’s what I want you to say…

“I want you to trust our donors. I want you to trust that they could be giving more, and that they are adults.”

“I want you to trust that their support is deeper than a new message, new tactic, or new appeal could shake.”

“Let’s trust that our fundraising right now is not the best it can ever be. And let’s trust that, like larger organizations, we can regularly try new things and improve over time.”

Will each donor say “yes” every time we try something new? Of course not.

Will every “something new” work better than the thing it replaces? Of course not.

But until you trust your donors enough to regularly try new things, to ask for support more often, and try new messages, you’ll never tap into all the giving available to you.

Don’t let internal worries and fears put boundaries around your donors’ generosity. It’s your donors’ job to set their boundaries, not yours.

Trust your donors. Their generosity will astound you.

‘Pre-Existing Condition’

Steven Screen | November 2, 2023October 31, 2023Ask

Your donors have what’s called a “pre-existing condition”…

They cared about your beneficiaries or cause before your organization came into their life.

Three examples:

Say your organization is a library. Your donors cared about books, literacy and your community before they had even heard of your library.
Say your organization helps a tiny village in Ethiopia. Your donors cared about kids, and people having enough food & an education before they had even heard of your organization or the village.
Say your organization provides access to activities for people with disabilities in the Tri-state area. Your donors cared about people with disabilities, and about everyone being able to participate, before they heard about your organization.

Knowing this, what should your fundraising to individual donors primarily be about?

Should it primarily be about your organization? Should it focus on your programs? Should it be about what the organization has accomplished in the past?

No! Your fundraising should focus on the values and interests that caused your individual donors to pay attention to your organization in the first place. (Note that I’m not talking about your comms to Foundations and other donors for whom your programs and your effectiveness are core necessities for them to donate.)

If you look at your appeals and e-appeals and find that they talk primarily about your organization… for instance, if you’re sharing the names of your programs and how they work… you could be raising more money from individual donors.

When we help organizations see their donors’ pre-existing conditions – and then change the organization’s fundraising to talk about what the donors cared about before they met the organization – the organization raises more money.

When you create your fundraising, don’t think, “We need to inspire our donors to give to our organization.”

Instead, think, “Let’s talk about what our donors already care about, and the difference their gift will make.”

What Small-Shop Fundraisers Should Do at Year-End

Steven Screen | October 31, 2023October 24, 2023Year-End

You Don’t Have Time to Do Everything

Those silly consultants. They give you a list of fifty-four things to do, but you only have time to do four of them.

I get it. (And I am guilty of it at times.)

But if you only have time to do four things … do you know which four are the most important?

My List for Small-Shop Fundraisers

If I were doing the fundraising for a small organization with limited resources (and time!) here’s what I’d do, and the order I’d do them in:

Manage your major donors. Don’t just hope that they give a gift before the end of the year, manage them toward doing it! Know who your top donors are. Be in touch with them. Know exactly who hasn’t given a gift yet this year. Ask them to give a gift to help your beneficiaries or your cause (not to give a gift to your organization). Tell them their gift is needed now, and tell them their gift will make a difference.
Write and send your year-end letter. Make sure you send out a great year-end letter that powerfully asks donors to give a special gift before the end of the year.
Write and prep your year-end emails. Be sure to have at least three emails prepped for the last three days of the year. Remember that they can be very similar; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.
Update your website to ask for a year-end gift. It’s been true of every organization I’ve ever worked with: a LOT of people will go to your website in December with the express purpose of making a gift. If the first thing they see on your home page is a clear call-to-action and a large button, you will raise more money than you expect.

That’s it! If you can only do four things, do those four.

Make sure you do a great job on each of those before doing anything else.

If you can only do three things, do the top three.

And so on.

Just remember that year-end is the easiest time of the year to raise more money than you expect. And your donors are wonderful but busy people! So communicate to them as much as you can. You’ll love how much money you raise!

5 Tips For Your Most Successful Digital Year-End Campaign

Steven Screen | October 26, 2023October 23, 2023Ask

Are you ready?

According to Network for Good, most nonprofits raise about 1/3 of their revenue in December. And 11% of their annual total during the last three days of the year.

Year-end is the easiest time to raise more money online! Think about it this way:

Your donors are more likely to give during the last weeks of the year than any other time of the entire year.

And because year-end is such an important time for digital fundraising, we want to give you 5 tips that will ensure a successful year-end for your fundraising.

# 1: Use the same message in every channel

Some of your donors are online, some aren’t. Pick your strongest message, then repeat it through direct mail, email, your website, and social media. It’s more powerful for your donors to see the same message in different media channels than it is for them to see two different messages. Repetition is your friend!

# 2: Ask early and often

You’ve been talking to your donors all year about what your organization does, you’ve told them how they can help. So this time of year, don’t Thank them. Or Report to them. It might feel counterintuitive, but our testing showed that Thanking and Reporting this time of year will cause you to raise less money than you could. Follow the advice below and just Ask well!

# 3: Emphasize the deadline

A deadline communicates urgency. December 31 is a natural deadline — for the tax year and for your organization. Tell donors your deadline and repeat it multiple times in your messages.

# 4: Set a goal

How much do you want or need to raise? What would it take for you to meet your budget? Feed everyone you want to feed by year-end? Shelter abandoned pets through the end of the year? Overcome a financial shortfall? Tell your donors the goal.

We need to raise $XX,XXX by midnight, December 31.

# 5: Communicate consequences

What will happen if you don’t meet the goal? Connect the donor right to the heart of your work.

We need to raise $XX,XXX by midnight, December 31 or we will have to cut back on the number of pets in our shelter in the coming year.

We need to raise $XX,XXX by midnight, December 31 or we will not be able to advocate for the arts as effectively next year.

Whatever your organization does, if having less money means you would be able to do less next year, say so!

Most important tip? Start now!

The 1 Thing to Know for Year-End Fundraising

Steven Screen | October 24, 2023October 23, 2023Year-End

The reason your organization raises so much money at year-end has little to do with your organization.

But it has a LOT to do with your donors.

Please, let me tell you how you can use this information to help your donors give even more. This is a big idea.

People aren’t more generous in November and December because they suddenly wake up and want to help nonprofits. Your donors are more generous because this is time of year they celebrate thankfulness and generosity. This is when they celebrate the gifts they’ve been given (personally, financially, spiritually), and focus on the things that matter most to them.

A natural outcome of your donors’ celebrations — and of thinking more about what they care about — makes them more likely to give gifts. They put their money where their heart is.

Here’s why I’m telling you this . . .

Focus your message at year-end on what your donors care about and you’ll raise more money.

But most nonprofits don’t do this! Instead, they focus their messaging on the organization itself. They talk about what the organization did during the year. They talk about the programs of the organization.

Here’s a super-simple example of why focusing on what the donor cares about is so effective. Imagine you’re an arts organization. Here’s what your donors care about, in order of importance:

The arts
Promoting and/or preserving the arts
Organizations that promote or preserve the arts

Remember, the organizations that raise the most money tend to focus on what donors care about most.

So, this arts organization would focus their messaging on the arts themselves, and how the donor’s gift will promote or preserve them.

But most organizations write about themselves. They are focusing their messaging on the least important of the three things their donor cares about! Their letter will be all about what their organization is doing to promote and preserve the arts. Then they’ll ask the donor to “support the organization” or to “help us continue this good work.”

Here’s what works far better: talking less about the organization, and asking the donor to ‘support the arts.’

In practice, this means making your year-end letters, emails and website features more about your cause and your beneficiaries than about your organization.

I know this works. Our clients usually see their biggest gains working with us at year-end, mostly because we help them communicate more about what their donors care more about! We even sell samples of year-end appeal letters that are proven to work – and if you look at the samples you’ll notice that they talk very little about the organization that sent the letter. They talk to the donor about the cause or the beneficiaries, and about how the donor can help.

So this year more than ever, make your donor communications about what your donors care about most!

How you can use the 80/20 rule to raise more money

Steven Screen | October 12, 2023September 19, 2023Ask

At Better Fundraising we see a LOT of examples of the 80/20 principle in fundraising.

Shoot, they even use an example from fundraising as the graphic on the Wikipedia page! (A great summary of the 80/20 principle is to say that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.)

A couple of common examples:

80% of a company’s sales usually come from 20% of its customers
80% of a country’s land is often owned by 20% of its people

What follows are three examples of this principle in fundraising, along with how you can use them to raise more money for your organization.

The 80/20 Rule in Major Donor Fundraising

About 80% of your individual donor revenue will come from 20% of those donors. (And in recent years it’s been closer to 90% of revenue coming from 10% of donors).

The organizations that make the most of this reality (especially this year) are the ones who intentionally prioritize those donors with how they spend their fundraising time and budget.

The 80/20 Rule in Direct Mail

If you look at eye-tracking studies, you’ll notice donors only read about 20% of appeals or newsletters.

To be great at raising money through the mail, you need to know what portions of your letters or newsletters are most likely to be read. Then you put the content that’s most likely to drive action in those locations.

The 80/20 Rule for Small Shops

For organizations that only send out a couple of fundraising pieces a year, 20% of their communications typically raise 80% of their individual donations.

In our experience, those organizations can always raise more money immediately. All they must do is isolate the types of communications that raise the most money, send out more of those, and send out fewer of the type that raise less money.

That’s such a radically simple idea that most small shops believe it can’t be true. But it IS true. We’ve done it so many times I can give three examples off the top of my head:

Annual reports
Most e-news
Appeals that are general calls for support

We cancelled those by the bushel and never – not once – saw a drop in revenue.

The Double Benefit

Here’s the great thing about applying the 80/20 rule: you get a double benefit. You save the time and money from not doing an inefficient activity. And you get that time and money to do more of an efficient activity.

The Questions for You

Look at your organization’s fundraising activities. What activities don’t produce measurable results, and you should cancel them?

What activities drive the most revenue, so you should do more of those with your freed-up time and budget?

In your mailed communications, are you putting the most important content in the 20% of your letter your donors are likely to read?

Savvy organizations are constantly measuring their fundraising results, so they know what should be jettisoned and what should be done more often. Because there’s always a way to raise more by doing less.

This post was originally published on September 29, 2020.

Top 5 Appeal Tips

Steven Screen | October 10, 2023September 19, 2023Ask

I’ve reviewed a LOT of appeal letters.

Recently someone thought to ask, “What’s the advice you give most often?”

What a great question! I immediately wanted to know because it seemed like the top 5 pieces of feedback would make a great “checklist” to share with organizations who want their appeals to raise more money. So we did the research.

From hundreds of reviews, here are the Top 5 pieces of advice I give most often when reviewing an appeal or e-appeal…

#5 – Avoid using pronouns in underlined or bolded copy

The main reason to highlight specific sentences and sentence fragments in appeals is to pre-select what you want most people to read.

Here’s what I mean by “pre-select.” Most people will scan, not read, an appeal letter. As they scan, their eyes are most likely to stop on emphasized copy. So by bolding and underlining, you are in effect choosing for the scanner the parts of your appeal they are more likely to read.

And if you’re going to take the time to choose a sentence for a person to read, make sure they can understand that sentence without having read the rest of the letter. Which brings us to underlining pronouns and why not to do it.

If you underline a sentence that reads, “He needs it today” the person scanning your letter does not know who “he” is and doesn’t know what “it” is. The person’s limited attention has just been taken by something they can’t understand. Not good.

Whatever you highlight in your letter should be able to be easily understood without the context provided by the rest of the letter. It needs to make sense if it’s the only thing the person reads.

#4 – Ask donors to help one beneficiary, not to help all the beneficiaries

Appeals and e-appeals tend to work better when the donor is asked to help one person – one beneficiary – instead of asked to help all the beneficiaries.

To give you an example, a foundation that supports a hospital would likely write, “Your gift today will help cancer patients.” But the appeal or e-appeal would raise more money if the ask was, “Your gift today will help a cancer patient.”

Why? Because when a donor is asked to help just one beneficiary, it’s easier for her to say “yes” then when she’s asked to help an unknown, larger number of beneficiaries.

Additionally, it’s more believable. Say I’m a $1,000 donor to an organization that helps kids. Do I really believe them when they say, “Your gift will help all the children we serve”? I know the organization helps thousands of children, and I’m pretty sure my gift isn’t going to help all of them.

There’s a rule I have in mind as I create or review any piece of fundraising: I need to convince the donor to help one person before they will be interested in helping more than one person.

#3 – Include no more than 1 or 2 numbers in an appeal

Most numbers in appeals need context and thought before the donor recognizes why those numbers are important.

But because most donors don’t have the context, and are unlikely to put in the thought, the numbers become a part of the appeal that the donor doesn’t really understand.

Think about that for a second; the organization is using numbers to establish credibility and expertise… but is pushing donors away. The numbers have the opposite effect than the organization intends.

The numbers can be GREAT for Foundations, Partner organizations, Government grants, etc. But not for mass donor appeal letters and e-appeals.

And of course there are some numbers that are good to have in your appeals – you can read about those here.

#2 – Avoid “we” and “our” language

Your fundraising appeals and e-appeals should sound as if they were written by one person, for one person.

It should not sound as if an organization is writing a donor. It should sound as if a person is writing a donor.

Are there times with the editorial “we” makes sense? Sure. Some parts of annual reports come to mind. Your website. Blog posts, too.

But in your direct response fundraising, sounding 1-to1 is the way to go.

#1 – The only good news in an appeal should be that the donor’s gift today will help

Here’s something we see again and again – it’s like clockwork.

We’ll start working with an organization. Their previous approach to appeals was to “share a story of something they’ve already done, then ask the donor to do more of that thing.”

We change their approach to appeals that “share what’s needed today and how the donor can help.”

Their appeals begin to raise more money immediately.

Note: you should absolutely share past successes. That’s how your donors see that their gift to your organization was a good decision. But share the successes in separate publications; your newsletters, your blog posts, stories on your website, in e-stories, and your annual report.

Focus your appeals on something the donor cares about but that needs help, and the fantastic news that she can make a difference with her gift today.

This is hard because it’s counter-intuitive. But it works like crazy.

This post was originally published on October 19, 2021.