Steven Screen

Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 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.

People Make Donations to Tell Ourselves…

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Self-talk.

You and I make donations in order to tell ourselves who we are.

Each donation we make is a small step to:

  • Become who we want to be
  • Continue to be who we want to be
  • Remake the world in the way we think it should be

Those are CORE motivations for individual donors.

Does your fundraising to individual donors speak to those core motivations?

Because doesn’t it seem obvious that, if you tap into those motivations, your organization would raise more money?

To tap into those motivations, your fundraising will need to tell donors that they’ll love giving to your organization. Your fundraising will need to tell them that your organization has the same values that your donor has. Your fundraising will need to communicate, “people like you give gifts to this organization.”

And then the donor’s intellect will find the facts it needs to justify the donation.

Fundraising that says those things feels very strange at first, because most organizations are used to talking about themselves, their organization, and what they do.

But it’s always good to remember that ineffective fundraising to individuals is about your organization and the services it provides. Effective fundraising to individuals is about your donor and their life.

Of course your fundraising should mention your organization. And even mention some of what you do. But your fundraising to individuals should not be ABOUT your organization or what it does – big difference.

Here’s an example:

Your gift to the Hospital Foundation allows us to provide top-notch healthcare to members of our community. Our leading cancer research team is diligently working to discover new treatments.

That’s about the organization.

Your giving to the Hospital Foundation shows that you’re a hometown hero. You care about people fighting cancer and want new treatments available as soon as possible.

That’s about the donor.

Make more of your fundraising to individual donors about the individual, and watch the magic happen.

Outline for newsletter stories

Steven Screen  |  Report
newsletter.

Here’s the outline we follow for newsletter stories.

It’s remarkably simple, and it does two powerful things:

  1. It makes your newsletter easier and faster to write, because you have a model to follow
  2. It makes sure each story helps you achieve the purpose of your newsletter

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Simple Newsletter Outline

PARAGRAPHS 1–2

  • Summarize the situation the beneficiary was in
  • Tell the donor the situation changed because of them
  • Summarize the positive situation the beneficiary is in today

PARAGRAPHS 3–5

  • Tell the beneficiary’s “story” as above, but go into more depth

FINAL PARAGRAPH

  • Thank the donor for making the transformation (from “before” to “after”) possible
  • Thank the donor for caring about the beneficiary enough to take action to help

Note: most newsletter stories are between 150 and 250 words. So the number of paragraphs will vary depending on the length of the story.

The Power of This Approach

When you use this approach, your donor doesn’t have to read more than the first paragraph to get your newsletter’s main message – that the donor’s gift made a meaningful difference in the life of one person or for your cause.

At Better Fundraising, we assume that 80% of the people who open your newsletter will only read the headlines, picture captions, and a paragraph or two. For those people (4 out of 5!), you want to do everything you can to ensure they still get your main message.

Other nonprofits will make their donors wade through tons of words to find out whether the donors’ gifts made a difference. Sometimes the donor will never find out. I’ve seen newsletters where the donor is never even mentioned.

But by following this model, you and your organization will communicate your main message to almost every person who opens your newsletter. That’s a huge win!

Repeat This Formula in Every Story

When a donor opens your newsletter, you don’t know which story (or stories) they’re going to read. So you want to use this formula for every story so – whatever they read – they get the message that their gift made a difference.

This approach will feel repetitive to you – since you see every story. But most of your donors won’t read every story.

It will feel repetitive to your staff and core stakeholders (like your board) because they’re far more likely than most donors to open every newsletter and read every story.

But Remember

Your newsletter is not for you, your staff, or your core stakeholders. It’s a communication vehicle to show the remaining 95% of your donors that their gift made a meaningful difference.

Why is showing donors that they made a meaningful difference so important?

So that they can trust that giving a gift to your organization makes a real difference

So that they’re more likely to give you a gift the next time you ask

So that they’re more likely to keep giving to you year after year

So that they’re more likely to become a major donor

So that they’re more likely to leave you a gift in their will

So no pressure… but make sure your newsletter shows each donor that their gift made a meaningful difference. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is to write the stories following this outline.

To learn LOTS more about how to make your newsletter as effective as possible, download our free e-book, “10 Steps to Create a Money-Raising, Donor-Delighting Print Newsletter”

This post was originally published on March 3, 2020.

How to Choose What to Underline and Why

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Underlining your letters.

I’m going to teach you to raise more money by showing you what to emphasize in your fundraising letters.

Because if you underline or bold the right things, you’ll raise more money.

NOTE: for brevity, I’m going to lump all forms of visual emphasis as “underlining.” You might use underlining, or bolding, or highlighting, doesn’t matter. All of those are different tactics. I’m talking about the strategy of visually emphasizing small portions of your letters and e-appeals.

First, let me tell you why your underlining is so important.

Underlining has two purposes in fundraising writing. Almost nobody knows the second – and more important – purpose.

  1. Bolding or underlining signals that a sentence is important. This is true of almost any writing.
  2. But underlining also serves a second, more important purpose. The most effective fundraisers use underlining to choose for your donor which things they are most likely to read.

Because remember, most of your donors won’t read your letter from top to bottom. They will scan your letter – briefly running their eyes down the page. And as they scan, when they see a sentence that has been emphasized, they are likely to stop scanning and read.

It’s this second, more valuable purpose that most organizations don’t know about. So they underline the wrong things.

My Rule of Thumb

Here’s what I try to do. This doesn’t apply to every letter, but I try this approach first on every single letter I review or write:

  • The first thing underlined should be a statement of need, or a statement describing the problem that the organization is working on.
  • The second thing is a brief explanation of how the donor’s gift will help meet the need or solve the problem mentioned in the first underlined section.
  • The third thing is a bold call-to-action for the donor to give a gift to meet the need / solve the problem today.

If you do that, I can basically guarantee that your letter will do well. A MASSIVE number of fundraising letters don’t even have those elements, let alone emphasize them. If you have them, and you emphasize them, here’s what happens:

  • Donors know immediately what you’re writing to them about
  • Donors know immediately what they can do to help
  • Donors know immediately that they are needed!

Because of those things your donors are more likely to read more. And more likely to donate more.

There Are Some Sub-Rules

  1. No pronouns. Remember that it’s very likely that a person reading the underlined sentence has not read the prior sentences. So if you underline a sentence like “They need it now!” the donor does not know who “they” are and what “it” is. The sentence is basically meaningless to the donor. Their time has been wasted.
  2. Not too many. You’ve seen this before; there are four sentences that are bolded, five that are underlined, and the result is a visual mess that only a Board member would read. Be disciplined. I try to emphasize only three things per page, sometimes four.
  3. Emphasize what donors care about, not what your Org cares about. If you find yourself emphasizing a sentence like, “Our programs are the most effective in the county!” … de-emphasize it. Though it matters a lot to you, no donor is scanning your letter looking to hear how good your organization is at its job. But donors are scanning for things they are interested in. So emphasize things like, “Because of matching funds, the impact of your gift doubles!” or “I know you care about unicorns, and the local herd is in real danger.”
  4. Drama is interesting. If your organization is in a dramatic situation, or the story in the letter has real drama, underline it. Here are a couple of examples from letters we’ve worked on recently: “It was at the moment she saw the ultrasound that life in her belly stopped being a problem and became a baby” and “The enclosed Emergency Funding Program card outlines the emergency fundraising plan I’ve come up with.”

And now, I have to share that I got the idea for this post when I saw this clip from the TV show “Friends”. It turns out that Joey has never known what using ‘air quotes’ means – and he’s using them wrong (to hilarious effect). I saw it and thought, “That’s like a lot of nonprofits trying to use underlining effectively.”

If you’re offended by that, please forgive me. I see hundreds of appeal letters and e-appeals a year. I developed a sense of humor as a defense mechanism. 🙂

The good news is that learning how to use underlining is as easy as learning to use air quotes!

You can do this. Just remember that most of your donors are moving fast. Underline only what they need to know. That’s an incredible gift to a compassionate, generous, busy donor!

And if you’d like to know how Better Fundraising can create your appeals and newsletters (with very effective underlining!) take a look here.

This post was originally published on March 15, 2018.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Steven Screen  |  Tips
Curtain peek.

This post is not fundraising advice.

What’s worse, it starts with a boring topic – our mission. Whee! So you’re 110% forgiven if you don’t keep reading.

But if you continue, you’ll see why we give away all of our fundraising knowledge. And you’ll get to celebrate a meaningful achievement with us.

Jim and I both come from “big nonprofit” backgrounds. And our mission when we started working together was to “radically increase the fundraising capacity of smaller nonprofits.”

That’s why our original name was “Better Fundraising For All.”

But small nonprofits have very small budgets… and we had mortgages to pay.

So we started serving organizations who had the budget to hire a coach or an agency. That led to Better Fundraising, an insightful team of 11, and we’re thrilled.

But!

There was a massive swath of smaller nonprofits that we weren’t helping.

So we started this blog in 2016. Here we can pass on – for free – all the knowledge we’ve been gifted and earned on our own. That led to thousands of subscribers, real-life breakthroughs (the stories are so fun!) and we’re honored to have you as a reader.

But!

Blogs are great… but they don’t “radically” help nonprofits raise more money.

Small nonprofits and new fundraisers still face the “blank page problem.” They can read all the most helpful blog posts, even take all of the standard fundraising training, and are still confronted with an implacable blank page and the difficulty of figuring out how to make it work for them.

Sometimes with real consequences – even lives – hanging the balance.

So what would cause radical improvement? “Radical increase” for a smaller nonprofit would happen if we could create a new form of training where Fundraisers were never faced with a blank page. And then I could walk them through every step to creating an effective appeal letter… or donor reporting letter… or year-end emails… or creating an annual plan… you get it.

Which brings us to Work Less Raise More and why launching it was such a dream come true for us. Work Less Raise More radically increases the capacity of smaller nonprofits to raise money.

First, it’s priced it so that any nonprofit can join long enough to get what they need.

It’s not $4,000 a month. It’s $40 a month.

You could join for just one month and easily produce this during the month:

  • The rest of the appeals you need for this year
  • All the email chasers
  • All the e-stories and donor reporting letters
  • Your entire year-end campaign

Your co-workers would be astonished. They wouldn’t believe it.

And doing it would be So. Much. Easier than what you’d normally go through.

Plus I could walk you through creating an annual plan (and give you a tool that estimates revenue and calculates production schedules for each project). And Jim could walk you through creating a major donor system that increases major donor giving & major donor retention AND makes knowing what to do next a snap.

And it’s working great for the hundreds of Fundraisers and organizations who are diving in. Chris Davenport – founder of the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference and our co-conspirator – says it’s the best training he’s ever seen. And that’s saying something.

So I hope can see why we’re so excited about Work LessRaise More. It’s the culmination of a dream. To use a spiritual term, it’s an “outward expression” of all the work to achieve our mission to “radically increase the fundraising capacity of smaller nonprofits.”

If you’re at a smaller nonprofit and could use a helping hand to get great fundraising out the door quickly, I hope you’ll check it out. And if you know a small shop or a Founder that’s just getting started, I hope you’ll pass it along.

Thanks for reading, thanks for being on this journey with us, and thanks most of all for being a Fundraiser. Like you, we believe that fundraising is about so much more than raising money!

How to Avoid the “What does that mean?” Offramp

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Off ramp.

I have a rule I follow when creating fundraising:

Avoid any statements that could cause a reader to think, “What does that mean?”

It seems like a simple rule, no? But it gets broken all the time – and most damagingly in a specific, important part of fundraising: phrases or sentences that are emphasized with underlining or bolding.

Here are several real-life examples of emphasized copy that have come across my desk in the last couple of weeks.

All of these were the first sentence in the appeal that was emphasized. Because most readers scan before they read, that means that for a large percentage of readers, these sentences were the first thing donors read in the letter.

Ask yourself as you read these: did this immediately make sense to the donor?

“One thing led to another… but you took care of that!”

“Your investment will make a real, lasting impact in the lives of those who are struggling in silence.”

“I wish for a good night’s sleep.”

“That is why I’m reaching out to you for a donation today.”

None of those sentences are easy to understand without additional context.

Which means that each of them was an “offramp” – an opportunity for the reader to delete or put down the appeal.

Good Examples

If you visually emphasize any words in your appeals, make sure they can be easily understood on their own. Here are some examples of first emphasized sentences that were effective:

“Today kicks off [ORGANIZATION NAME]’s fundraising campaign to launch our Comedy Bootcamp classes in San Diego and Indianapolis later this year.”

“The seal pup has several stingray barbs lodged in its face.”

“You can follow in the footsteps of your faith and feed needy children and their families by making a gift today.”

“There is still a $14,000 shortfall to reach our fiscal year fundraising goal.”

Each of those sentences is easy to understand. If a donor wants to know more, they can keep reading.

But they don’t need to read more to understand.

Here’s What to Do

If this is a new idea for your organization, here’s a roadmap for what to do:

  1. Create your direct response fundraising with the assumption that donors will scan your fundraising, not read it.
  2. Think of your emphasized copy as the parts of your letter or email that people are likely to read.
  3. Make sure that everything that’s emphasized is understandable on its own.
  4. Taken together, all the emphasized words and phrases should provide a summary of the piece of fundraising.

Follow that roadmap and you’ll create what we call “two letters in one.” Your letter will be effective both for people who are moving fast, and for people who read every word.

And that, my friend, is effective direct response fundraising!

Four Accidental Barriers to Connection with Your Donors

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Traffic cones.

I see four main ways that organizations accidentally place barriers between their organization and their donors…

Design/Type Size

Here’s the situation in a nutshell: if your fundraising materials use small, hard-to-read type, you’re making it harder for older donors to read your fundraising. Fewer people reading your fundraising means you’ll raise less money.

Jargon

Any time an organization finds itself using words and phrases that it uses when communicating with other professionals in your domain, that’s probably jargon.

Examples include phrases like, “provide quality resources” and “food insecure.” An example of a jargon-filled ask is, “Will you provide transition out of poverty case management support?”

Any time jargon enters your mass donor fundraising, it’s probably causing you to raise a little less money because it asks your readers to figure out exactly what you mean. Asking your readers to figure out what you mean is a sure path to fewer people reading your fundraising.

By the way, using jargon is usually a symptom of not differentiating who the audience is. When you’re submitting a grant application, of course you should use jargon because it’s a shared language with the grantor.

But jargon is not shared with the vast majority of individual donors. Don’t ask them to understand your vocabulary, make the generous act of “crossing the gap” to your readers by using language that they would use.

Too Much Organization

You’ve seen these before: fundraising materials that are overly focused on the organization itself. Organizations are in danger of this any time they talk about what their programs are, how those programs work, and how or what the organization thinks about their work.

But it’s a safe bet that individual donors care far more about what their gift will accomplish – what change will take place if they give – than they care about how the organization will make the change.

This barrier, too, tends to come from a lack of differentiation. Foundations and partner organizations are rightfully interested in programs and exactly how an organization will use their money and/or time. To that audience, content about the organization is appropriate. But individual donors are more interested in the change itself.

Going Conceptual

The final barrier is a sneaky one (even more sneaky than jargon). It’s using a concept or an abstraction as a primary description of what the donor’s gift will do/has done.

Here are some examples:

  • “Will you provide a special day?” instead of, “Will you send a child to summer camp for one day?”
  • “Your gift made Evelyn’s story possible” instead of, “Your gift made Evelyn’s recovery from child abuse possible.”
  • “Jamie found freedom, thanks to you!” instead of, “Jamie’s new wheelchair lets him go anywhere, thanks to you!”

Notice above that I said “primary description.” Concepts like the ones above are fine – helpful, even – when used to give your donor a fuller picture of what their gift will accomplish. But keep the concepts in the body of your fundraising message, and stay specific in places like the emphasized copy, the subject line, the reply card headline, the reply card action copy, and the Johnson box.

This advice is based on sending thousands of appeals, e-appeals and newsletters and noticing that the most effective communications to individual donors tend to have concrete, specific descriptions of what the donor’s gift will do or has done.

What’s Next?

Look through your organization’s fundraising materials to individual donors. Is your organization accidentally put up any barriers?

If you can identify and eliminate barriers like these, our experience is that you’ll immediately begin raising more money and be able to do more of your organization’s important work.

You’ll also know that you’re doing the right thing.

When you make the generous choice to create fundraising that’s more accessible to more people – making it easier to read, easier to understand, about what the donor cares about instead of about what the organization cares about – you’ve made your fundraising communications more inclusive to more people.

Quick Note on Type Size

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Using larger type in your fundraising materials is both smart and the right thing to do.

Here’s what Health.gov says about type size:

“Choose a font that’s at least 16 pixels, or 12 points. If many of your users are older adults, consider using an even larger font size — 19 pixels or 14 points. A small font size is more difficult to read, especially for users with limited literacy skills and older adults.”

Smart

Using larger type is smart because it’s proven to be more readable (especially for older adults). 

When your fundraising is more readable, more of it gets read.

When more of your fundraising gets read, you raise more money.

So using large, easy-to-read type is smart fundraising because you’ll raise more money for your cause.

The Right Thing to Do

Using larger type is also the right thing to do.  It makes your fundraising more accessible to more people. 

In the same way that having a strong mass donor fundraising program is good for your organization’s DEI efforts, so is using easy-to-read type.

Use larger type – don’t accidentally put up a barrier between your organization and older adults!

Female Founders on Fire

Steven Screen  |  Tips
Tips

This is a brief ode to Female Founders on Fire.

We love serving them because they are a joy to work for, and such a force for good in the world. 

And all of us Fundraisers have things to learn from them. So with great thanks and admiration, here are Five Reasons that Female Founders on Fire make such effective Fundraisers:

  1. They are courageous.  Like everyone else, they feel fear when asking for support. But their courage allows them to push through the fear and bravely ask for support.
  2. Selective pride.  They are justifiably proud of what they’ve built, but are always on the lookout for better ways of doing things.
  3. They give the credit away.  They express profound gratitude to donors because the founder remembers what she was able to accomplish when she was an “army of one”… and she knows how much more the organization accomplishes today thanks to the generosity of donors. 
  4. They boldly share why help is needed today.  In my experience, Female Founders on Fire almost always have first-hand experience with their cause.  They know what the suffering is/was like, and they know that hearing about that suffering moves people to action.  After all, it was the founder’s own suffering, or the suffering of someone close to her, that caused her to take the action of starting the organization.
  5. They humanize beneficiaries.  They create organizations and fundraising materials that show beneficiaries as more than just the problem they had or negative situation they were in. 

To finish, I want to say something about those Female Founders on Fire who have first-hand experience with their cause.

The fact that they’ve transformed their own suffering into an organization that does good – and their willingness to relive their own suffering for the good of others – is a GIFT to the world that I don’t have the words to describe. It’s so full of good it just sort of… knocks me sideways.

If you know one of these founders, figure out how to say “thank you” to them.  Soon.

And if you are one of these founders, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

What To Do When Your Fundraising Results Are Flat

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
results

If the growth of your fundraising has flattened out, it’s most likely a result of a belief that’s holding you back. 

So, if your results are flat, it’s time to take a critical look at your organization’s beliefs about fundraising.

Here’s a list of beliefs that often prevent organizations from reaching the next level:

  • “Our donors can’t give any more”
  • “We don’t work with people or animals, so we can’t raise much”
  • “Not very many people care about our issue”
  • “We can’t ask our donors again this year”
  • “Asking our donors in a different way would cause us to raise less”
  • “We need much younger donors”
  • “[Media channel] would not work for our donors”
  • “No one on that side of the city would care about what we do on this side of the city”
  • “Our work is too complex for us to have many donors”
  • “Our donors wouldn’t like that type of fundraising”
  • “That type of fundraising might be successful in [that] country, but it wouldn’t work in our country.”

Organizations trust their beliefs to be true because believing in them brought the organization the success it currently enjoys.

The problem is that many of these “beliefs” are actually “blind spots.”  (And that’s completely understandable: most people in fundraising positions at smaller nonprofits didn’t receive much training, and most people in leadership positions aren’t that enthusiastic about fundraising in the first place.)

And so we arrive at the problem: to see what’s hiding in our blind spots, we need to alter one of our fundamental beliefs about how the world works.  But our pride causes us to have a deep, natural aversion to learning that our fundamental beliefs have been wrong.

So the question becomes, “Is your organization’s hunger to do more of your mission strong enough to cause you to listen to things you’d rather not hear?”

If your organization’s hunger is strong enough, time to examine your beliefs. Your beliefs got you to where you are, but often won’t take you to the next level.

Which of your beliefs should you examine?  Which of your beliefs should you warmly thank for getting you this far… and then set aside?