Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Give Complaints the Attention They Deserve

Steven Screen | March 10, 2022March 10, 2022Ask

I’d like to suggest a process for how to give complaints the attention they deserve.

I suggest this because complaints, at smaller organizations, tend to be given outsized attention. And that outsized attention almost always guarantees that the organization won’t grow as fast as it could, and won’t achieve as much of its mission as it could.

In my experience, here’s how complaints are usually handled:

Vague information. No numbers are used, it’s always phrases like “so many” and “the front desk was bombarded with calls today” and “we had a scary number of unsubscribes.”
Super-emotional delivery. Complaints are reported breathlessly, or with trepidation.
Immediate escalation to leadership. Complaints don’t get reported through normal channels and departments, they are immediately shared far and wide.

Please don’t get me wrong: I think these responses to complaints are normal and understandable. Asking for money is hard, awkward work. It takes vulnerability. And vulnerability opens us up to being wounded by complaints.

All that said, these responses to complaints are unhelpful.

Here are my proposed guidelines for how smaller organizations handle complaints:

No vagueness allowed. Only hard numbers and actual counts, please. When someone says, “OMG so many complaints!” the appropriate response is, “Thank you, please tell me exactly how many, over what time period, and what they said. Then we’ll figure out how to respond.”

Share context about the Complainer. Are they a donor or non-donor? A major donor? A board member who we already know doesn’t like fundraising? Context matters; a complaint from a major donor is significantly different than a complaint from a non-donor who is on your email list.

Share context about the Campaign. When talking about complaints, the fundraising results of the piece of fundraising should also be shared. The complaint(s) and money raised are results of the same thing, and both need to be evaluated to understand the whole picture. If you’re told that 5 complaints came in, that sounds awful. If you’re told that the 5 complaints came in along with 500 gifts, the “5 complaints” is a completely different story.

Escalate appropriately. Complaints are reported to the Fundraising department or appropriate staff person – and no one else. Then trust the process from there.

Complaints are a fact of life for growing nonprofits as they communicate with more and more people. Complaints are a fee, not a fine.

Treat them appropriately and they come to be seen and felt as an unfortunate fee you have to pay – but a fee you willingly pay because the organization is raising so much more money and achieving more of its mission.

Complaints, Fees and Fines

Steven Screen | March 8, 2022March 8, 2022Repeat

There’s a difference between a fee and a fine:

A fee is what you pay in exchange for something. You pay a fee, and you get into Disneyland.
A fine is what you pay when you’ve done something wrong. You drive too fast, and you pay a fine for speeding.

Most nonprofits think of donor complaints as a fine for doing something wrong.

I want to you to think of donor complaints as a fee you pay in exchange for raising more money and retaining more of your donors.

Most complaints happen for two reasons:

When you send your fundraising to more and more people – somebody is going to complain… because people will complain about anything.
- Large nonprofits have whole departments of people that handle complaints. Why? Because they have so many donors that there will always be somebody who complains.
When you share the truth about what’s actually happening in the world – somebody is going to be uncomfortable, and they are going to complain.

Sending your fundraising to more people and sharing the truth about what’s happening in the world increases the amount of money you raise.

At the same time, it increases the number of complaints you receive.

The complaints are a “fee” you pay in order to do more of your mission.

Trying to grow your fundraising without increasing the number of complaints you get is like asking the kitchen staff of a small restaurant to feed a lot more people but have the same number of spills or drips as before.

You wouldn’t ever ask that! You know that spills and drips are a “cost of doing business” in a kitchen that’s working hard and growing.

But nonprofit fundraising staffs are expected to grow without increasing complaints. Instead, complaints should be seen like a “cost of doing business” for a fundraising program that’s working hard and growing.

Complaints are like “fees” to make the leap to the next level of fundraising. In exchange for raising more money, you have to deal with a few more complaints.

Complaints aren’t fun. But they’re not a sign that “a lot of people don’t like our fundraising.” They are just the occasional fee.

And isn’t paying a few fees worth it in order to raise more money, retain more of your donors, and do more of your mission?

LIST of what to “repeat” to save time and raise more money

Steven Screen | March 3, 2022March 3, 2022Repeat

I know the idea of “repeating” fundraising you’ve done before doesn’t make sense at first. And it can feel weird.

That’s why I want to talk about the secret of “repeating” – just think of it as a tool that savvy fundraisers use to save time and (surprisingly) raise more money.

What We Mean By “Repeat”

When we say you can “repeat” something, here’s what we mean in a nutshell: do the same thing again, but slightly differently.

Send the same letter again, but slightly reword it
Send the same email again, but slightly reword it
Run the same event again, but with a different beneficiary speaker
Send the same letter again, but with a slightly different design

Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

And in some cases you can send the exact same thing. Same email. Same letter. We’ve done both of them and they’ve both worked:

My podcast partner Jeff Brooks tells a story about an organization that sent an appeal every month. One month it accidentally sent out the exact same appeal that it sent the previous month – and it raised more money the second time!
I think about an organization that took half their donors and sent them the same exact email the last four days of the year. Those donors gave more than the other half of their donors who received four unique emails.

Because remember:

Most of your donors aren’t paying that close attention
Many donors need to hear something twice (or more) before they pay attention and really think about it

When To Repeat Letters And Emails

Here’s how to repeat your appeal letters and your emails.

If you are doing something that you did the year before, you can repeat it.

Say you send out a Thanksgiving appeal last year, and you’re going to do another one this year. The first thing to do is to look at last year‘s Thanksgiving appeal and its results.

If the results were better than the previous year, repeat it. Don’t write a completely new email. Don’t design a completely new letter. Make only the minimal number of changes you need to make.

The same is true for anything you do each year. Here’s a list of things we’ve repeated to great success, and I’m sure there are more examples:

Year-end / Thanksgiving / Back-to-School / etc. – letters & emails
Facebook campaigns
Events
Giving Tuesday
Renewal
13^th Gift
Sponsorship/monthly giving upgrade campaigns
Monthly giving recruitment

You name it. If you do it every year, you should be repeating it and making slight tweaks to make it better, not reinventing the wheel.

When You Repeat, Watch Out For…

Here’s what to watch out for when you’ve decided to repeat a fundraising tactic…

Any detail that was true last year, but not this year. You need to update anything that’s not true. New ED? Update the name at the end of the letter. This year’s “Thanksgiving Meal” costs $1.93 instead of $1.92? Update the letter. Your organization now rescues Wombats? Add “wombats” to the list of animals you rescue.
Does the story need to be updated? Many letters contain a story about a person that illustrates the need. That story should be swapped out and replaced with a new story. But the rest of the letter doesn’t have to change.
- Note: this is true for events as well.
Doing too much. Don’t make too many changes just because you’re in there.

Story Time With Steven

I used to write appeal letters and emails for The Salvation Army. They are a fundraising machine who has all of this down to a science. (You might read that they are a “fundraising machine” and think, “Well, that would never work with my donors.” Please be open to the idea that it would work. Many of your donors also give to the Army.)

Most of the time I would receive the following instructions when it was time to write a letter:

“Here’s last year’s letter. It worked great. Update it for this year and change only what’s absolutely necessary. Do not mess this up.”

Inspiring!

No, not really. At least if you’re a ‘creative type’ like me.

But that’s how you build a mature fundraising program that raises the big bucks. You take something that works. You repeat it. You refine it. You look for little ways to make it better. You watch the results closely and look for what donors love, as told through their giving.

Over time you build a money-raising machine that allows you to do so much good in the world that people come to learn fundraising from you.

Listen, a lot of people don’t like hearing this. They want to be creative. They want to love the fundraising they send out.

I’m the same way. I get bored writing the same emails for the second (or tenth) year in a row.

But over time, if you look at the results, it becomes really obvious that if you repeat what worked before, you’re going to raise more money.

Please trust me – I’ve banged my head against that wall enough time to have a small dent in the middle of my forehead. (Well, actually that scar is from my sister throwing a Hot Wheel at me, but it’s a better story if it’s a fundraising scar.)

You are going to be tired of what you’ve been doing. So will your boss and your Board. You’re going to want to do it differently. You’re going to want to ‘come up with a new theme for this year’!

Don’t give in. Keep doing what’s been working great. You’ll raise more money each year.

If you invent a new approach each year you’ll be causing two problems: #1, you’ll be raising less money; and #2, you’ll be taking a LOT of time you could be using to do something else. Like, you know, focusing on major donors, where 90% of your individual donations come from. Or acquiring new donors, who are the future of your organization.

But Whither Innovation?

I’m going to write a post later this month on ‘how to innovate when you’re in a culture of repeating what’s worked in the past.’ Because you have to innovate.

But you want to innovate in a way that minimizes your risk. And I’ll share how to do that. But here’s an analogy to tide you over…

If you’re Apple, do you decide to stop making the iPhone and replace it with something completely new? No. You keep on updating, tweaking the iPhone to make it better each year. And you keep releasing different versions of the iPhone to try out new ideas.

Sheesh

Enough rambling. I hope the concept of “repeating” is making sense. I know it’s not how normal nonprofits operate. But it’s one of the secrets that savvy fundraisers have discovered – and you should be using it. You’ll save time, and you’ll raise more money.

If you’d like to have me help your organization know what to repeat – or to tweak what you’re doing to make it even better – get in touch!

This post was originally published on June 7, 2018.

Two-Minute Survey

Steven Screen | March 1, 2022March 3, 2022Ask

Hey, would you do me a favor?

Would you please take this two-minute survey?

Your answers will be completely anonymous.

I’m trying to figure something out. So that more organizations can raise more money. And you can help.

The survey is about appeals. You know, those letters and emails that raise tons of money but “nobody likes”? Yeah, those. I’m trying to figure out why fundraisers like you, and organizations like yours, don’t send more appeals.

Because sending a couple more appeals is the single easiest way to raise more money – especially for smaller organizations.

If you’ll share your thoughts with me, that would really help us as we work to increase the fundraising capacity of small-to medium-sized organizations.

And again, your answers will be completely anonymous. You can be as blunt and as honest as you’d like.

Please take the survey, and thank you so much!

How (and Why) an Organization Goes from 3 Appeals to 9 Appeals

Steven Screen | February 24, 2022February 23, 2022Ask

Organizations that send out nine appeals a year weren’t born that way.

They started with one appeal per year, and grew from there.

Organizations that grow in this way tend to follow a process. I’ve put the following graphic together to help illustrate the process, and I’ll put the lessons from each year below the graphic.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Year 1

This nonprofit has three different programs. Each appeal talks about all three of their programs.

Year 2

The organization decides to focus their appeals more, so each appeal focuses only on one program. And they make the changes in wording needed so that the funds raised from each appeal are undesignated.

They notice that the appeal about one of the programs raises more money than any appeal they’ve ever sent. And they notice that, in total, they raise more through the mail than ever before.

Year 3

They replace the worst-performing appeal with a new version of their best-performing appeal.

Internal stakeholders are concerned that one program is no longer mentioned, and one program has two appeals about it. However, the organization raises more through the mail than ever before.

Year 4

Emboldened by how much money they are raising, they add two new appeals. One is focused on the program that raises the most, and one appeal is focused on the program that raises the second-most.

Internal stakeholders are convinced that “donor fatigue” is imminent. However, all appeals continue to do very well. The organization raises more through the mail than ever before, and notice that their overall donor retention rate has increased.

Year 5

They add two more appeals, for a total of seven.

They notice, for the first time, that one of the appeals for their most popular program did not raise as much as it had in previous years.

The organization is concerned about that particular appeal, but they are not concerned about their overall program because they are raising more than they ever have before, and donor retention continues to improve.

Year 6

They add two more appeals, for a total of nine appeals. Of the two new appeals, one is a completely new appeal and one is about their second-most popular program.

Additionally, they pay particular attention to the appeal that didn’t work well the previous year. They find that its message veered off-topic, so they revise it for this year and it works great again.

The Process

Going from one appeal to nine appeals is a process. The same is true for fundraising emails.

And of course, as an organization goes through this process it should also be Reporting to its donors, use segmentation, have a Major Donor program, etc.

And the organization itself changes – the Development Department gets bigger, maybe an agency gets hired.

But it’s just step-by-step growth. This is a well-known, proven path.

And the results are clear. Look at how many more dollar signs there are in Year 6 than in Year 1. That organization has meaningfully increased how much good it can do.

It’s also made the organization safer; if one appeal doesn’t work well, it’s insulated by several other appeals.

And it made the organization stronger – the increased volume of communication led to increased donor retention. They keep more of their donors year-over-year than they used to.

I’d call that a big win!

Fast, Bad and Wrong

Steven Screen | February 22, 2022February 16, 2022Tips

I learned this writing tactic from a podcast, and hope it’s as helpful to you as it has been to me:

If you can’t get started writing something – or if you get stuck – just concentrate on writing fast, bad, and wrong.

The acronym for this is “FBR.” Even the acronym is wrong!

From the podcast:

“Write fast, write bad, and write wrong. Terrible style, terrible grammar, terrible word choice, wrong facts, and that liberates you. And don’t stop and backtrack, because every time you stop, it’s like a car going down the highway – it’s easy to stop, but then you have to spend all this fuel to get back up to speed, and you might not get there.”

Here’s what I do: just start writing, and then just keep going.

You can describe what you are trying to write. You can get a few stray thoughts out of your head. You can write the end before the middle.

But don’t edit now. Just keep going. The magic happens after you’ve been writing for a moment or three.

All the sudden, a helpful thought occurs. Then a sentence arrives. Before you know it, a pretty good paragraph just happened.

That will happen a few more times.

Then you have enough of those to where you know the rough structure of whatever you’re writing.

And once you know the main ideas and the structure, the rest is connective tissue.

Then go back and edit out the junk that helped you get there.

FBR works for emails to co-workers, too.

Here’s something crazy; it works for making plans. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down with teammates and clients to figure something out. If we’re not getting anywhere, and I have a vaguest sense of an idea, I just say that I have an FBR plan to throw out to get us started. More often than you’d think, a great plan gets iterated out of the mud I threw on the wall.

The FBR approach removes the fear from taking the first step because it lowers the stakes. And the second and third steps are always easier than the first.

The next time you’re writing a piece of fundraising and you’re stuck, think FBR, get started, and keep going. You, your beneficiaries, and your donors will be glad you did!

“Donor Pointer”

Steven Screen | February 17, 2022February 17, 2022Repeat

Someone called me a “donor-whisperer” last week.

While I was complimented, that term has always felt a little… off… and I finally figured out why.

A “whisperer” sounds like it’s an innate skill. It sounds like a talent that a person was born with, that they probably can’t teach, for something that very few people can do.

Being a “whisperer” also seems a little manipulative, like you’re using a talent to make people do something they didn’t want to do.

None of those things are true.

What I do in fundraising is teachable, and almost anyone can do it.

Instead of “whisperer,” the term I’d use is “pointer.”

Because what I do is point out things and let donors react.

I help organizations point out things that are happening in the world. I help organizations point out the concrete ways a donor can change the world by giving to them. I help organizations point out the concrete ways the donor has changed the world by giving to them.

There’s no manipulation. Everything is true. There’s no secret skill. It’s just a series of choices for what to point at.

Your fundraising can point at what donors are most interested in… or not. How donors react is up to them. (Because remember: fundraising doesn’t create tension in donors, it reveals tension they already hold.)

Ultimately, every post on this blog is an attempt to share what we’ve learned about what to point your donors’ attention towards if you’d like to raise more money and do more good. It’s a learnable skill and you can do it.

How to Write As If You’re Talking to One Person

Steven Screen | February 15, 2022February 14, 2022Ask

Experienced copywriters say things like this all the time:

“The best fundraising sounds like it’s from one person to one person.”

But how do you write fundraising and make it sound like you’re talking to one person?

Here’s how. The following are the ideas I have in my head as I create fundraising materials. One or all of them should help you!

Have One Person in Mind

Most of your donors will have several common traits. You can create a fictional person, imbue them with the traits your donors have, and write your letters/emails/newsletters to that person.

At my first fundraising job, there was a cardboard cutout of an older woman right inside the front door. We were instructed to write all our letters to her.

The fancy marketing word for this is “persona.” Large nonprofits with lots of donors have multiple personas; personas for online donors, personas for major donors, personas for event participants, etc.

The point is the same: visualize who you are writing to and then write to that one person.

Watch Your Plurals

If you’re writing to one person, you don’t use the plural to refer to him or her.

So don’t use plurals like these in your fundraising writing:

“Dear Friends,”
“All of your gifts…” (which doesn’t make sense for a donor who has only given one gift)
“Thank you to everyone who…”

What you want to watch out for is anything that makes the reader think, “Oh, I thought this thing I’m reading was to me, but it turns out it’s to everybody.”

Use the Donor’s Name

Merge in the donor’s name. It’s commonplace to merge the donor’s name in the salutation, and it’s a pro move to merge their name in the letter itself.

For instance, if there’s a paragraph I particularly want the donor to read, I often use the donor’s name as the first word in a paragraph.

People are trained from birth to pay attention to what’s said immediately after their name. Use that to your advantage!

Use the Word ‘You’

This is the obvious one. Second only to a person’s name, the word “you” gets people’s attention.

But there’s another reason “you” is so helpful: it transforms a truth about your organization into a personal truth for the donor.

You can FEEL the emotional difference between, “A gift to our organization will fight cancer” and, “your gift will fight cancer.”

I have a general rule of thumb for when I edit fundraising: whenever I see the organization’s name, I try to delete it and replace it with the word “you.” It’s not the right thing to do in all cases, but it’s the right thing to do in most cases.

Use the Language a Donor Would Use

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who has a stellar vocabulary and kind of shows it off? Or talked to a person who’s an expert in their field and is constantly using jargon and you’re not quite sure what it means?

What’s the result when people like that talk to you? It makes you feel like the person isn’t really talking to you. It makes you feel like they are kind of talking to themselves and people “just like them.”

By using language that insiders value and appreciate, a lot of nonprofits accidentally make their donors feel like outsiders.

But using language that a donor would use crosses the gap to donors, instead of widening the gap.

Think of It This Way

Donors are looking for organizations that make it easy for them to understand what’s going on in the world and how their gift will help.

If you follow these rules, you’ll create fundraising that makes each of your donors think, “Hey, this organization is writing to me.” She’s more likely to feel known, and you’ll make it easy for her to understand what you’re writing about.

And you’ll notice that your fundraising results will tick up meaningfully.

The Dreaded SASA LELE!

Steven Screen | February 10, 2022February 10, 2022Ask

Posting this because it’s fun. And it’s a perfect way to end the recent mini-series of posts about heat maps and first sentences.

I hope it rings true that all of us occasionally write and/or design things that make perfect sense to us… but causes our audience to give a quizzical, “huh?”

I’d describe a SASA LELE as any time internal folks think the writing/design/messaging is communicating well, when it’s actually causing confusion and lowering fundraising results.

Here are two “fundraising SASA LELEs” that I see all the time.

The positive appeal letter that communicates that everything is going great. There are pictures of happy, healthy people. There’s a story about someone who is doing great.

There’s 4 pictures and 500 words communicating that things are going very well… and two sentences asking for support.

SASA LELE! The message most donors receive is that everything is going great and their support is not needed right now.

The other example is the appeal letter that starts off with a Thank You and assumes the donor will keep reading.

But you know from the heat maps that a significant percentage of donors will only read the first part… think the letter is some sort of thank you note… remember that they have a bunch of other mail and bills to go through… and put the letter in the recycling.

SASA LELE!

And here’s a “hot take” for you – SASA LELE does more actual damage to organizations’ fundraising than the mythical “donor fatigue” ever has.

In your direct response fundraising, every word you write and every design choice you make needs to be with the purpose of helping that piece of communication do its one job.

So be clear. Get right to the point. Don’t be conceptual.

Any time you find yourself working on a piece of fundraising where donors need to understand the gist of it at a glance, work like crazy to make it clear, and beware SASA LELE!