Author: Steven

Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 25 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.

Two Groups of Fundraisers

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Two groups.

Some people think all fundraising looks and sounds the same.

You’ve met and worked with these folks. They get kind of annoyed with fundraising materials because – to them – the letters and emails all seem to blend together. Ugh.

On the other hand…

There’s a second group of people who see and appreciate the differences in each piece of fundraising. They appreciate that no two pieces of fundraising are the same.

The people in the second group enjoy the details. The people in the second group have more fun.

By the way, it’s people in that second group who you want creating and evaluating your fundraising.

ABCD

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data

Always Be Collecting Data.

On your journey as a fundraiser, always be on the lookout for little bits of data to save.

Here are just a handful of data points I’ve collected over the years, all a result of head-to-head tests…

  • Thanking donors at the beginning of an e-appeal caused fewer of them to give.
  • Putting gift ask amounts in ascending order caused people to give more.
  • Removing distractions from a giving page caused increased conversion.
  • Adding a “faux reply card” to the back of a printed newsletter caused a 15% increase in net revenue.

Collect a bunch of little data points like these and you’ll develop what I’d call “fundraising intuition.” But it’s intuition trained with data, not personal opinions.

It helps you make decisions with high likelihood of success.

It makes you valuable because when people ask for your opinion they’ll receive evidence-based answers, not feelings.

Always Be Collecting Data.

A Little Visual Punch

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visual

Last week I wrote about how adding ”handmade” touches to the design of your appeal letter can increase the chances it will connect with a donor.

Here’s another tool you can use: add elements that catch their eye and add impact to your message.

Look at the following table included in a recent successful appeal letter:

This table does a GREAT job communicating the main point of the letter; that the cost of living has dramatically increased for the beneficiaries of this organization.

We created the table and put it in the letter because the paragraphs we’d written about the increased costs just didn’t seem to be making an impact. The letter lacked punch. Something more visual and powerful was needed.

As you think about doing something like this in your fundraising, here are four qualities I’m aiming for as I help create something like this…

Visual Surprise

It’s a visual surprise to see a table like this in the middle of the letter copy. It sticks out, and readers’ eyes are drawn to it. Visual interest at key areas leads to more readers, and more readers leads to more givers.

Easy to Understand

Even though there are a lot of numbers, the chart is easy to understand.

The items in the left column are something every donor understands. The “% INCREASE” header of the right-hand column is bold and makes it easy to know what the table is about. And the percentages in the right column are also easy to understand.

Easy to Understand FAST

Most readers will read the upper left corner (“RICE IN HAITI”) and then blip right over to “% INCREASE” and “40.07%.” I suspect most people then immediately a) understood the point the table was communicating, b) immediately knew that the rest of the table just gave them more examples, and then c) moved on to the rest of the letter without reading anything else in the table.

For something like this to be successful, the reader should not have to read the whole thing.

Higher Impact

The size and type in the table communicate importance. The table made the point more strongly than a sentence like, “prices are rising dramatically, as much as 40% in Haiti for rice and 140% of potatoes in India.”

As you create your fundraising, always be on the lookout for ways you can spice up your letter by communicating information in ways other than words. Get good at it and your fundraising will have higher impact, higher engagement, and higher revenue.

Connect With What Your Donors ALREADY Feel

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emotion

When organizations create their fundraising for individual donors, they usually have a goal that goes something like this:

Get donors emotionally connected to our work.

That’s a good goal – but it’s almost impossible to achieve in a letter or an email.

So I’d like to suggest a different goal for your mail and email:

Connect with the emotions that donors already feel.

Here’s why…

It’s easy to tap into a donor’s existing emotions. On the other hand, it’s hard work to teach donors about your work and then convince them to emotionally connect with it.

That’s too much to ask of a letter or email that most people will only spend a few seconds with.

So, construct your next letter or email to tap into the emotions about your beneficiaries or cause that you know your donors already have. You might know that they are angry about the injustice. Or that they are compassionate about the pain. Or that they get joy out of making the world a better place.

Whatever the emotions of your donors, name them for yourself and your team. Then build your fundraising to tap into them.

The result will be more engagement and more giving.

It’s the engagement and giving that will, over the years, result in your donors emotionally connecting with your work.

Handmade

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handmade

Your donors (and people in general) are looking for connection.

They tend to be more interested in hearing from a human, and less interested in hearing from an organization.

So make your fundraising look like it was made by a human, not an organization.

You can add hand-written copy at the top of your letter, like this…

Put hand-drawn brackets at the edges of an important paragraph, like so…

Or even something slightly silly – but thematically on target – like this…

You can jot a note next to the P.S., like this…

These human design touches can cause discomfort for people who prioritize “looking professional.”

But your mass donors are not deciding whether to give a gift based on how professional a letter looks. If our experience is any indication, the donors on your mailing list are deciding based on whether they connect with the letter. And little human, hand-drawn touches like these make your letter feel like it was made by a human. They increase your chances of connecting.

Nobody

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first

I have a message for all the young Fundraisers and smaller organizations out there.

Nobody gets their fundraising right the first time.

I say that because it’s easy to get discouraged.

As you start – as an organization starts – there is SO MUCH that you’re having to figure out. Not to mention, nobody got into this business because they desperately wanted to send letters and emails to people. 🙂

So, please know three powerful things…

  1. You’ve begun! That’s a LOT farther than most people get. Maybe they look the other way. Maybe they refuse. Who knows. But you started. From my perspective 30 years in, that’s a bigger deal than you think it is.
  2. Becoming effective is an iterative process. You start. You pay attention. You add another skill. You get better. You notice something else. You get a little better every month. That too is a bigger deal than you think it is.
  3. The whole way, you’re helping your cause and you’re helping your donors. You’re helping the cause by raising awareness, and raising money, so that more good gets done. You’re helping donors because they care – but they don’t have programs like you do, so they can’t do much by themselves.

That’s a lot of good. You could be spending your time marketing bags of chips. Instead you’re helping make change.

It’s not easy. (If it were easy, we’d all be raising tens of millions of dollars and have six-pack abs.)

So keep going. Keep iterating. Keep practicing.

And thanks for being a Fundraiser!

Maybe the Donor Said “No” Because…

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Maybe the donor said no because it’s finally a nice day, so they went outside instead.

Maybe the donor said no because their spouse had already recycled the mail that day.

Maybe the donor said no because their taxes were a little higher than expected last month.

Maybe the donor said no because their passions are elsewhere right now.

Maybe the donor said no because they also received an unexpected bill that day.

Maybe the donor said no because they are on vacation and haven’t looked at email in a week.

***

You already know I’m a big believer in taking extreme responsibility for the success or failure of any piece of fundraising. But I also believe there’s a LOT that’s out of the Fundraiser’s control.

So… pay close attention… but don’t take the “no’s” personally.

Feedback Loops

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experiment

Every time you send out of piece of fundraising, you’ve sent out a little experiment into the world.

Is your organization reviewing the results of your experiments?

For instance, your organization has done a lot of experimenting with email subject lines (whether you’ve thought about it that way or not). Have you looked at your open rates to see what types of subject lines generate the highest open rates? After all, the more people who open your email, the more people who read your email, the more people who are likely to give to your email.

Bigger picture – every time your organization completes a year’s worth of fundraising, that’s like sending out a slightly larger experiment into the world.

Are you measuring your “overall donor retention rate”? How about your “major donor retention rate”? Or – I love this one – your “major donor revenue retention rate”? (That one tells you whether your major donor management system is keeping and lifting your current major donors, or if you’re reliant on new major donors to hit your goal each year. Big difference.)

So… you’ve done a lot of experiments.

Is your organization looking at the results of your experiments? Is your organization learning from them? Is your organization getting better with each email, each letter, and each year?

Ready for Download: Free eBook on Donor Complaints

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Are complaints – or the fear of complaints – stopping your organization from connecting with more donors and raising more money?

Read the free eBook that will help your organization make “the leap” to the next level of fundraising by:

  • Showing the different types of complaints (and what they mean)
  • Giving you a script for how to respond to a Complainer
  • Giving you a simple system for handling all complaints (even internal complaints)

It’s called, “The Sanity-Saving Magic of Understanding Donor Complaints” and you can get it free right here.

Don’t let the fear of complaints hold you back! This eBook demystifies complaints, shows how complaints can hold an organization’s fundraising hostage, and gives your organization the tools to develop a healthy understanding and relationship with complaints.

Just released today – download it now!