Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

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.

Two Letters at Year-End?

Steven Screen | June 16, 2026June 10, 2026Repeat

Here’s a question we get asked a lot at Better Fundraising: “should our nonprofit send two letters at year-end?”

Here’s what we’ve noticed over the years: a second letter between Thanksgiving and Christmas will reliably raise at least 1/3 of what your main letter raises.

So here’s an easy way to figure out if your nonprofit should send a second letter:

Figure out how much gross revenue your first letter raises in a normal year.
If 1/3 of your first letter’s gross revenue would more than pay to print and mail an additional letter, send an additional letter.

Let me give you a couple of examples and then give you one more helpful idea.

Say your primary letter raises $30,000 gross, and costs $5,000 to print and send. Then I would send a second letter. That’s because a second letter will reliably raise at least $10,000 gross (which is 1/3 of $30,000), and with a cost of only $5,000 you’ve raised an additional $5,000 in net revenue.

Important note: in addition to the extra revenue, you’ve also gotten gifts from all the people who donate to the second letter. Statistically speaking, this increases the likelihood those donors will give to you again next year.

But if your primary letter raises $15,000 gross and it costs $5,000 to print and send, I would not send a second letter. Reasoning; 1/3 of $15,000 is $5,000, so you’re raising an additional $5,000 gross with expenses of $5,000. You’re only breaking even. Instead of sending a second letter, I’d spend the time and budget on something with a higher ROI.

The Fear

When I’m walking a nonprofit through this exercise, and they see that sending a second letter will make sense for them, we then run into what is often the real barrier: even if the second letter is projected to make money, the nonprofit fears there will be some un-named and unknown negative consequence to asking again.

Getting past the fear of sending a second letter is a very real part of helping a nonprofit increase how much money they raise at year-end.

Here’s what I tell people: the negative consequences they fear do not come to pass:

There’s a fear that the “threshold for donor fatigue” will be reached by sending a second letter, and even though more money is raised this year fundraising for next year will go down. Doesn’t happen.
There’s fear that a significant number of major donors will react negatively to a second letter, and reduce their giving next year (or leave entirely). Doesn’t happen.
There’s fear that the second letter will “steal revenue” from the first letter. This does happen, but in such small amounts that it basically doesn’t matter. To give you a sense of scale: a second letter might “steal” $2,000 in revenue from a first letter, but raise an additional $10,000 in new revenue. So yes, the first letter raised $2,000 less. But you have $8,000 more in total net revenue to use to make the world a better place.

Every larger nonprofit I know sends at least two direct mail letters between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Many send three. It’s a tactic that works.

And now you know how to come to a first draft conclusion for whether it makes sense for your organization.

My suggestion: do the math, figure out whether it pencils out, and if it’s even close I would “assume abundance” and send it!

The Myth of ‘Engage 7 Times Before Making the Ask’

Steven Screen | June 11, 2026June 8, 2026Ask

There’s some advice going around out there that I’d like to debunk: you do not have to talk to a person seven times before asking them for a gift.

I say this because I have helped nonprofits acquire hundreds of thousands of new donors over my career, gifts from people the nonprofit had never contacted before the moment they made the gift.

Just last year we helped a nonprofit launch a brand new monthly giving program. They have acquired 3,300 new donors in the last year, and approximately 95% of those new donors had never heard of the organization prior to giving their first gift.

I have experience acquiring new donors for small to mid-size nonprofits who most donors have never heard of before, through email, direct mail, television, radio, telemarketing and face-to-face.

Just last Saturday I went to a small fundraiser for a person running for local office. (I had nothing to do with the event; I was in the audience.) There were about 40 people there. None of the potential donors had ever met the candidate before. Yet the campaign left with a meaningful number of donations and new donors.

This is not sorcery; it’s mostly being confident enough to ask. And some of it is knowing how to ask well.

I suspect that the myth of “you have to engage with a donor 7 times before asking them for a gift” hangs around because asking feels risky. And the idea that “we need to warm them up first” feels like good relationship-building. But the data doesn’t support it, and in the meantime, gifts are being left on the table.

Instead, please know that it happens every day. It’s happening right now. It’s probably happening to your donors right now.

Be confident. Assume abundance. Make the ask.

You’ll be glad you did.

***

P.S. Are there a couple vanishingly small contexts where the “7 times” advice holds? Sure. If you run into a potential major donor at the grocery store, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift. If you’re talking to the grants officer from a foundation for the very first time, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift. But don’t take those contexts and apply them to your event, or your email list, or the mail, etc.

Don’t Mail Your Newsletter to Non-Donors

Steven Screen | June 9, 2026June 8, 2026Report

Let me save you some time and money: don’t mail your printed newsletter to non-donors.

The return on that investment is not worth it.

I have tested this five or six times over the course of my career. Each time, the nonprofit has lost money sending their newsletter to non-donors (even though the very same newsletter makes money from their current donors).

Does a non-donor or two give a gift? Sure. But it’s along the lines of ‘we mailed the newsletter to 850 non-donors and 3 of them gave a gift. Put another way, it’s spending $1,200 to mail them and raising $170. Even if you were to make an argument about lifetime value of those 3 new donors, it doesn’t pencil out.

If you’re interested, test it yourself. Break your mailing list into two segments, one for current donors and one for non-donors. Determine the Cost Per Piece, measure the response for each segment, and then look at the results for each segment. You’ll quickly see how few (if any) non-donors reply to newsletters – even if your donors are responding in droves.

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned over the years: in the context of direct response fundraising, when you are trying to turn a non-donor into a donor, sharing successes from the past (which is what a newsletter focuses on) does not work well. What works better at acquiring new donors is sharing something compelling that needs to happen soon and appealing to the donor to help by making a gift.

So if you’re currently mailing your newsletter to non-donors, I’d stop it. Save the money. Instead, send them an appeal letter. It will cost less and acquire you more news donors than the newsletter currently is.

A Skill Needed to Scale

Steven Screen | June 4, 2026June 4, 2026Repeat

I was talking the other day with a smaller nonprofit who really wants to grow.

They have a few hundred donors, and are doing good work, but they want to increase their impact.

They currently do one main event a year, do a couple of mailings, and a handful of emails. They’re thinking about doing “vision meetings” to meet new people, and community events to increase awareness of their organization.

I told them that both of those things are good, but neither are likely to help them grow at the rate they want to grow.

That’s because all of the ways this organization currently fundraises and wants to grow require personal interaction with a potential donor.

But a leader or nonprofit can only have so many personal interactions. Say you meet 10 new people a day for every day of a month, including weekends. That’s 300 people, which is a lot.

But that’s dwarfed by purchasing a mailing list of 20,000 people in your community. Or doing a targeted online campaign to 10,000 people who care about what your organization is working on.

The organization I was speaking to needs to go through a transition that all larger organizations have gone through at some point: moving from most donor acquisition being through personal interaction to a system that acquires a meaningful number of donors solely through communications.

You can only meet so many people.

Yet there are thousands, or tens of thousands of people out there who would love to support what you’re doing who you’ll never be able to meet. That’s a larger market. And it requires a different set of skills to tap into and fundraise from.

This is why every large nonprofit has a thriving direct mail and email fundraising department. They know that there are millions to be raised from people that they will never meet in person. (And as an added benefit, the mail and email will keep the organization in better touch with the donors that they know in person, too. You know that an event donor’s average lifetime value goes up when they give to the mail or email too, right?)

So just remember: there are more donors out there than you can meet in person. If you want to grow to your potential, you need to learn the skills to be able to “meet” thousands of potential donors.

You’ve learned scads of other skills along your journey. I’m sure you can learn this one, too.

The ‘Good Bad Idea’ That Raised $9,000

Steven Screen | May 28, 2026May 27, 2026Ask

I just returned from the always-excellent GiveCon with a fun story to tell you. It’s a great example of how small nonprofits often underestimate their donors.

A man named Jon and I were chatting, and we got to talking about the small nonprofit he serves (they have about 160 active donors). Jon mentioned that they’d recently made a large payment to one of their local partners, and were short on cash.

I said, “Jon, I hesitate to say this, but I have a good bad idea.”

“If you would be willing to write the first draft of an email about this, I’ll edit it for you. If you send it out tonight, I bet we’ll raise a bunch of money. My goal is to raise at least as much as it cost for you to come to the conference.”

Jon was game. It was on!

Before he left the Better Fundraising booth, he and I talked about what the ask should be for. He was thinking it would be to “refill our coffers after this large payment.” I encouraged him to not make it about their cash flow, and instead make it about the services the money would eventually provide.

Their organization helps women in Africa who are victims of kidnapping and sexual slavery, and the money would eventually be used to help women recover.

I asked him for some program specifics, and we came up with the following: your gift of $250 will help a woman recover for a month by providing a box of food, assistance paying her rent, and 2 visits from a licensed psychotherapist from her own community. And we included language to make the funds undesignated in case they raised more than they needed.

Jon sent the email late morning of Day 2 of GiveCon.

After lunch Jon came up to me with a huge grin on his face. “We’ve raised $2,500 thus far!”

A few minutes after the last session of the day, Jon came back. “We’ve raised $4,500!”

The next morning, Jon came to a session I was giving. Near the end I asked him if he would share the current total with the people in the room, and he shared that it was over $9,000.

This is a meaningful amount of money for their organization. And it all came in because they had the courage to ask.

I share this story because it’s a perfect illustration of two things you’ve heard me say if you’ve read this blog for any length of time:

If you have a need, share it with your donors! You can do this far more often than you think, donors will love helping, and donors will feel more connected to what’s going on at your organization.
Make it easy for donors to know what their gift will make possible. Jon could have explained the “inside baseball” context of partner payments and cash flow. And that might have been appropriate in a conversation with a major donor. But this was a quick email, so instead he talked about what the money would do in the field, using specifics that everyone would understand.

I’m proud of Jon and his organization for sending out the email. And I’m not the least bit surprised that it raised far more than they thought it would.

At Better Fundraising, we find donor generosity to be both amazing and predictable when donors are given acute, understandable reasons that their support today will make a difference.

Jon’s donors were ready. Yours are, too.

Donor Fatigue: The Most Misdiagnosed Problem in Nonprofit Fundraising

Steven Screen | May 26, 2026May 26, 2026Repeat

Sometimes when an organization isn’t raising as much as they used to, or they’re sending out a bunch of fundraising and it’s not working as well as they hoped, the specter of “donor fatigue” creeps out like a layer of cold air at everyone’s feet.

Everyone suddenly feels a little less comfortable.

“We may be experiencing donor fatigue,” the nonprofit tells itself. And there’s this kind of unsaid belief that “well, we raised as much as we could from them, but we did our best.”

This would be like a chef who loves his own cooking, and then if most of the restaurant’s tables are empty, blames the customers. That’s what “donor fatigue” often is: an assumption that the fundraising itself is great, so the donors must be the problem.

But we have to remember that there are two parties involved in every fundraising interaction: the people receiving the fundraising and the fundraising itself.

Unless an organization also gives its fundraising a critical look, allegations of “donor fatigue” are effectively blaming the donors while letting the fundraising off the hook.

Don’t get me wrong, “Are our donors fatigued?” is a perfectly good question. But it should always be accompanied by another question: “What if the problem was something about our fundraising materials?”

In my experience, a good amount of poor performance gets misdiagnosed as “donor fatigue.” I say this from experience because Better Fundraising is regularly hired by organizations that want to grow but are fearful of donor fatigue, or have declining results and are blaming donor fatigue. And what generally happens is that we help the organization immediately start raising more money from the same group of donors.

You can’t change your donors. But you can change your fundraising.

We try to have an attitude/approach that goes something like this: we can’t control our donors, but we can control our fundraising. So if a piece of fundraising doesn’t work, assume it is the fundraising and go to work on that.

This takes real strength for a nonprofit to do. Not every organization is willing to say, “Hey, hold on, maybe the problem is what we’re saying.”

But when you do, you start working on what you can control. And when you’re working on what you can control, it gives you more agency, responsibility and power.

It’s OK to Ask for a Smaller Approval Team

Steven Screen | May 21, 2026May 14, 2026Ask

If you’re a fundraiser whose appeals have to wind their way through four (or six, or eight) reviewers before they go out the door, you’re allowed to push back. In fact, you should. Here’s the case to make.

You were hired to do two things (well you were probably hired to do lots of things but there are two main things you were hired to do in regard to this): understand donors & what motivates them, and understand how direct response fundraising actually works. That’s your job, and is one of the main ways you add value to your organization.

But a long approval chain takes those exact skills out of your hands. Every reviewer who can change your copy is, in effect, overriding your expertise. By the time a piece survives six approvers, it doesn’t sound like a fundraiser wrote it. It sounds like a committee wrote it. Because a committee did.

Let me acknowledge something up front: the heavy approval process doesn’t exist because anyone is being unreasonable. Boards want to protect the brand. Leaders want to make sure nothing embarrassing goes out under their signature. Program staff want their work represented accurately. Marketing wants the language consistent. All of those instincts come from a good place.

Let me give you an analogy: the best performing appeals are like a screwdriver; they do one thing and they do it perfectly. A large approval process tends to turn the screwdriver into a Swiss Army Knife that does a lot more things – but none of them well.

I’ve watched this scenario at hundreds of organizations. And I’ve noticed that the orgs that grow their individual donor revenue the fastest have a few things in common, and one of them is this – they keep their approval teams small, and one person, not a group, makes the final decision.

When committees decide, fundraising gets compromised in predictable ways. The bold ask gets softened. The emotional language gets neutralized. The specific gets generalized. The urgent gets diluted. Nobody in the room is trying to make the piece less effective, but the cumulative effect of “let’s also add…” and “could we soften…” and “I’d feel better if we mentioned…” is fundraising that doesn’t work.

It’s also slower. Every reviewer adds days. Every round of revisions adds more. Every piece that takes a month to clear is a piece you didn’t send while you waited. The hidden cost isn’t just the quality of the pieces – it’s the volume. The orgs that send more, raise more. Approval bottlenecks suppress volume.

Here’s a small structural change worth proposing to your leadership:

A small group reviews each piece – three or four people, max.
Reviewers can suggest changes, but not make them.
One person – ideally someone who knows direct response – makes the final call on what gets changed.
After a piece goes out, anyone in the org can comment on it. Those comments go to the person in charge of fundraising, who decides whether to take them into account for next time.

That’s it. Same care. Same brand protection. But the fundraiser gets to do their job, the pieces stay sharp, and the volume goes up.

If this is something you want to bring up, here are three things to say, in this order:

“You hired me to understand donors and to understand how fundraising through the mail and email works. The current approval process makes it hard for me to do what you hired me for. I’d like to propose a small change that keeps everyone involved but lets me move faster and keep the pieces effective.”

“It’s a well-known truth that fundraising written by a committee performs worse than fundraising an experienced person. That’s not a criticism of anyone on the team – it’s just how committee decision-making works. The pieces get smoothed out, and smoothed-out fundraising raises less money.”

“What I’m proposing isn’t ‘no review.’ It’s right-sized review. Reviewers can suggest. One person decides. After the piece goes out, everyone can give feedback for the next one.”

And one note for any leader reading this: the trade-off is real. You can have careful fundraising, or you can have effective fundraising. The organizations I see grow the fastest have learned to choose the second – by trusting the person they hired to do the job they were hired for.

Importantly, when the person doing the job feels trusted, they will tend to stay in the job longer.

You hired a fundraiser. Let them be one.