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.
Today I want to talk about Offers. What’s an Offer? The main thing a fundraising piece says will happen when the person gives a gift.
A Good Offer Serves Your Donors
A good offer serves donors (and potential donors) by helping them understand, quickly, the difference they can make with a gift.
Always remember: the donors who are reading your mail and email are busy. They are sorting the mail or sorting email. Shoot, it’s even possible they are driving their car.
Your donor is scanning (not reading) your fundraising letter, wondering if your letter is about something she’d like to do today.
She doesn’t have time (or interest) for an organization that doesn’t describe what her gift will accomplish. Or worse, it describes what her gift will do in conceptual terms like “deliver hope” when she doesn’t know exactly what that means.
You know what she likes? Organizations that present understandable problems to her, in ways that are easy to understand. So that in just a few seconds, she can understand what the problem is and know how she can make a meaningful difference with a gift.
Reasons a Good Offer Works So Well
There are four main reasons a good offer work so well…
A good offer is easier to communicate quickly. A good offer can usually be summarized in a sentence or two. That clarity and brevity allows donors to know right away if they should keep reading or not. Donors love that.
A good offer requires the donor to understand less about your organization. Most nonprofits work under the assumption that a donor “must know all about all the things we do, and that we are good at it” before the donor can be asked to give a gift. For your mass donor communications, this could not be further from the truth.
A good offer is more emotionally powerful. Because your letter (or email or event or whatever) is not having to educate your donor about all the things you do, you can spend more time talking about the people or cause in need, the emotions of the beneficiaries, the emotion of the donor, etc.
A good offer tends to be specific. Good offers tend to have exact dollar amounts, so that all donors can see what it costs to make a meaningful difference. And they tend to include specific benefits or services that are provided for that amount. So rather than having to understand all of your programs and mission, the donor just needs to understand one small thing that makes a difference. Donors love that (even though experts don’t.)
Notice how all of those things “lighten the load” on your donors? Notice how a good offer makes it easier for them to understand what their gift will do? And how you’ll be able to tap into their emotions – which are the drivers of all giving?
So Much More to Say…
There’s so much more to say about Offers that we’ve put together an entire e-Book on the subject. Click here to download it for free – and keep telling donors how they can change the world!
Those tips really help people. They make a meaningful difference in fundraising results.
But tactics and details are not the most important things small and medium nonprofits can do to raise more money.
Keep It Simple
I’m a big fan of keeping things simple. Here’s a quote that perfectly describes fundraising success:
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” Dee Hock, Founder of VISA
So for the small nonprofits out there (and for new fundraisers), I propose three “simple, clear purposes” that create fundraising success…
#1 – Become great at Asking people to make donations
Your ability to know what your donors care about, and then Ask them in a way that makes them more likely to take action, is core to successful fundraising.
Super Simple Rules:
Ask with vulnerability, as if you actually need help today.
Be honest and clear about the bad thing that’s happening in the world today that your donor can help fix.
Show your donor how their gift will make a difference.
#2 – Become great at Thanking a person who makes a donation
Making a donor feel your gratitude and appreciation is the key to Thanking – and keeping – your donors.
No donor has ever given a donation and thought, “Gosh, I hope this organization sends me an impersonal, boring letter to ‘acknowledge’ my gift and tell me more about the organization!”
But that’s what organizations do ALL THE TIME in their receipt letters and Thank You notes.
Here are my Super Simple Guidelines for Thanking:
Make sure the letter in your receipt or thank-you feels like it is about the donor who gave the gift, not about the organization.
No matter what vehicle you use to thank her (card, phone, in person, etc.)…
Make sure she knows that her gift was needed.
Make sure she knows that her gift was appreciated.
Tell her how her gift is going to help (not what your organization has already done).
People! A great Thank You is about what the person did, not about what your organization is doing and how you do it!
#3 – Become great at Reporting to your donors on the impact of their gifts
Each donor gives a gift to you in faith that you are going to use it to make the world a better place.
Are you going to show her that she helped make the world a better place? Doesn’t she deserve that? Or are you going to just keep Asking her for more gifts?
Take off your ‘fundraising hat’ for a second and put on your ‘donor hat.’ How would it feel to you if the organizations you support never took the time to show you what your gifts helped accomplish?
Listen, if you want to increase the chances your donor will give you another gift, you need to powerfully show her how her first gift made a difference. Make her feel it.
After all, if she never feels like her gift made a difference, what do you think her likelihood is of giving again?
My Super Simple Rules for Reporting:
Have a printed newsletter.
Do it at least four times per year.
Tell your donor what she did, not what your organization did
Show her impact by using stories of beneficiaries. (Keep statistics in your top desk drawer for when foundations and high Organizational-IQ major donors come to visit.)
Reporting is the least-understood part of effective long-term fundraising. And believe it or not, it can be done so well that your donors will send in money in response to your newsletters. The manual for this is Tom Ahern’s book. Or watch this free webinar.
Fundraising’s Virtuous Circle
If your organization does those three things well – Asking, Thanking and Reporting – all kinds of good things happen.
Revenue goes up. Donor retention goes up. You “close the loop” on fundraising’s Virtuous Circle.
Of Course There Are Other Things
Things like segmentation, your online fundraising strategy, donor surveys, donor engagement, etc.
But in my experience, doing your Asking, Thanking and Reporting well are the main things that make the biggest difference. So focus on becoming great at those things first.
For instance, if your organization doesn’t know how to Ask well, having a great online fundraising strategy is expensive and inefficient. If you can get 500 people in the ballroom for your event, great. But if you don’t know how to Ask well, you’ll raise far less than you could.
As an organization, make sure your organization is good at Asking, Thanking and Reporting, because you’ll raise more money and be able to help more people.
And as a Fundraiser, make sure you are good at Asking, Thanking and Reporting. Because if you can do those three things well you will rise in the nonprofit sector and make an even bigger difference than you’re making now.
You’ll probably also want to check out another eBook, Storytelling For Action, which is also a free download. It has the helpful “Story Type Matrix” that shows the research-based guidelines for what types of stories you should tell, and when you should tell them.
My friend, becoming great at Asking, Thanking and Reporting is a knowledge issue, not a talent issue. You can learn this stuff, raise more money, be more confident that your fundraising is going to be successful, and help more people!
This post was originally published on October 11, 2018.
Thinking that your donors would like to give only one gift a year is a fearful way to live.
Instead, imagine an abundance of caring donors and multiple gifts.
Imagining abundance – along with the gift of a fundraising habit of sending out relevant fundraising materials regularly – makes the sky the limit for your organization.
That doesn’t mean raising money will be easy. If it were easy, everyone would be raising millions of dollars and have six-pack abs.
It’s not easy. That’s why so few people and organizations do it.
But the path is knowable. It can be done. And you tend to make your own luck along the path.
Believing that a large percentage of your donors would love to make multiple gifts results in a fundraising plan that produces a large percentage of donors making multiple gifts.
Don’t live in fear. Donor generosity is astounding. Believe in abundance.
“ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film “Beginning Photography” students into two groups.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.”
The Lesson for Fundraisers
In my experience, the best way to raise more money via email and the mail isn’t to produce great fundraising, it’s to produce more fundraising.
Two pretty good appeal letters will usually result in more money for your mission than one “perfect” appeal letter.
(If you react negatively to the idea of asking more, please read the post I just linked to. It’s written especially for you.)
The “two is better than one” approach is so successful for smaller nonprofits because it forces us to push aside perfectionism and fundraise in the real world, where practice, experience and failure are the best teachers.
You Are Fundraising in a Golden Age
For small organizations, the only real cost to sending out another email is the time it takes to write, format, program and send the email.
This was not possible 20 years ago.
When I was beginning to practice all of this in the 90’s, it cost at least a couple thousand bucks to learn something because email wasn’t feasible for smaller orgs.
Think how much SLOWER the pace of learning was, and how much HIGHER the cost was to learn.
Compare that to today. If you want, in the next three months you could learn what took me three years to learn at the beginning of my career.
You just need to practice. It’s available to you. An organization could start this afternoon, if they want to.
In my first job as a fundraising writer, my mentor regularly and rigorously edited my work.
It was painful.
But I’m forever grateful because he always explained the “why” behind the edits. And over time I became a more effective writer.
In an effort to “pass it on,” here are three edits I made in the last week. Hopefully seeing the “before” and the “after” – and knowing why the edit was made – will help you in the same way it helped me…
Start with the Most Important Info
Original copy: “Today, you have an incredible opportunity. Thanks to the generosity of [company name], your gift will be TRIPLED up to $40,000.”
Edited Copy: “Your gift will be TRIPLED up to $40,000! What an incredible opportunity to increase your impact, thanks to the generosity of [company name].”
Reasoning: Put the most important information first.
The example paragraph contains three ideas: the donor has an opportunity, the matching funds are provided by a company, and the donor’s gift will triple. Of those three, the most important idea *to the donor* is that their gift will triple. Arrange the ideas in the paragraph so that the most important idea is first.
You never want to put important information at the end of a paragraph. A significant percentage of people will scan your letter or email (instead of reading it). And “scanners” often don’t read more than the first few words of a paragraph.
“Don’t bury the lede” is in the Donor Communications Constitution for a reason.
Avoid Ambiguity
Original copy: “Her mom’s ability to work has been impacted by the pandemic.”
Edited Copy: “Her mom hasn’t been able to work as much because of the pandemic.”
Reasoning: Avoid words and phrases that can mean multiple things.
The phrase “ability to work has been impacted” is value neutral; the ‘impact’ could be either good or bad. But the job of this sentence (and the paragraph it resides in) is to provide evidence that a gift is needed today. The edited copy makes it clearer, faster, that the situation is a negative one.
Any time you require a reader to figure out exactly what you mean, you’ve increased the chances they will abandon your email or letter.
Make It About the Reader
Original copy: “We still need your help to reach our match goal.”
Edited Copy: “Your help is still needed, and your gift will be doubled.”
Reasoning: Donors are more interested in themselves than they are in organizations.
The sentence, “We still need your help to reach our match goal” is mostly about the organization. It’s the organization that needs help. It’s the organization’s goal.
But that sentence can be re-written to be about the reader. “Your help is needed, and your gift will be doubled.” And we’ve turned the slightly ambiguous phrase “match goal” into a donor benefit; their gift will be doubled.
Editing your direct response fundraising to make it more about your reader and their interests is a counter-intuitive but proven approach to raising more money.
It’s generous to cross the gap to your donor’s level of understanding instead of asking her to cross the gap to your level of understanding.
It’s generous to write and design your letter/email so that a reader doesn’t have to read the whole thing to get the point.
Both those choices are generous, and will increase how much revenue your fundraising brings in.
There’s another choice that will also increase how much revenue you bring in:
Choosing to make your fundraising about your beneficiaries and about your donors will help you raise more money and do more good.
Here’s why…
Size of Market
There are far more people who care about your beneficiaries than there are who care about your organization.
In other words, the “market” of people who would like to help your beneficiaries or cause is a LOT bigger than the “market” of people who would like to help your organization.
I tried to make this point in the following graphic (which I’ve never been completely satisfied with). But seeing it is still helpful:
So as you create your direct response fundraising, remember that it doesn’t have to focus on your organization.
Make the generous choice: create other-centered fundraising. And from a marketing perspective, it’s also the smarter choice.
Your organization will be just as effective at its work if you don’t talk about your organization in your fundraising.
If fact, you will likely be more effective because you’ll be raising more money and doing more good.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you understand that when donors open your appeal letters and e-appeals, they don’t read, they skim.
This means you have to make absolutely sure that whatever you’ve bolded or underlined is EASY for your reader to understand.
Now take a look at this highlighted copy from the first page of a letter that recently came across my desk …
“Your gift of as little as $44 can provide quality resources for a child at the children’s home.”
What the heck are “quality resources”?
Consequences
Does bolding or underlining a phrase that’s not easy to understand torpedo the letter and cause no one to donate?
No way.
Because if a person reads the whole letter that this sentence was part of, they can figure out what “quality resources” are. And some readers will know what the organization is referring to.
But does bolding or underlining anything that’s not immediately crystal clear make the reader have to work harder to understand?
Yes.
And the harder you make your reader work, the fewer donations you’re going to get.
Make Generous Choices
Keep your reader in mind when you write and design your fundraising.
Make these two generous choices:
Use words and phrases that your reader will immediately understand. It’s generous to cross the gap to your reader’s level of understanding (as opposed to making your reader cross the gap to your level of understanding).
Use your bolding and underlining (and other forms of visual emphasis) to emphasize text that summarizes your whole letter. In other words, a reader should be able to read just the emphasized text and know what your letter/email is about and what’s being asked of them. It’s a generous act to write and design your letter/email so that a reader doesn’t have to read the whole thing to get the point.
So… does your organization have any phrases that are equivalent to “quality resources”? Any phrases that you use often, even though they are a bit of barrier because most donors don’t quite know what they mean?
What’s a clearer way your organization could phrase them to be more generous to your readers and donors?
After all, your donors are extraordinarily generous to your organization. How could your organization’s writing and fundraising be a little more generous to donors?
Your organization has people and programs and processes that make you effective. They make your organization a force for good. They make your organization a great place for a donor to give a gift.
However, your organization is also far more than your people, your processes and your programs:
Your organization is also a vehicle that donors use to make the world a better place
Your organization is also a way for donors and not-yet-donors to be reminded of the injustices in the world
Your organization is also a way for donors to self-actualize by acting out their own personal story of giving
Your organization is also a way to donors to fight back against evil
Your organization is also a way for donors to make themselves feel good (by giving you a gift)
Your organization is also a way for donors to exert a measure of control over the world.
Here’s why this is important. In our experience, those additional things – all those “also’s” – are the primary drivers of why most donors give.
And when you focus your fundraising on the primary drivers of why donors give, you’ll raise more money.
So instead of making the easy choice to make your fundraising about the reasons your organization is effective, make the generous choice to make your fundraising about the reasons your donors give to your organization.
It’s a generous choice because you’ll be communicating to donors about why they support your organization, instead of communicating with them about why your organization would support your organization.
Don’t mistake what makes your organization effective for the reasons donors like to have you in their lives.
Concern for “asking too much” holds back a surprising number of nonprofits from raising more money and doing more good.
This (very long) post is an attempt to show that of course you can ask too much. And that being concerned about “asking too much” is honorable.
But it will also show that, in all likelihood, a smaller nonprofit doesn’t need to fear asking more.
This post is long for a reason. Here’s why. In my experience, the belief that “we are on the edge of asking too much right now” is a core belief at many organizations. The assertion than an organization can and should be asking more often challenges that core belief.
People and organizations don’t change their minds like flipping a light switch, when it comes to core beliefs. It takes time to change a worldview.
This post gives you that time. It lets the idea sink in. It shares a couple of stories. It looks at the situation from a couple of angles.
So let’s get started. Because thinking a little differently about this one issue can help a nonprofit do a lot more good…
Who Is This Post For?
This post is for smaller organizations.
This is for organizations who mail fewer than ten pieces of direct response fundraising (appeals, newsletters) per year, and fewer than twenty-five fundraising emails per year.
This is for smaller organizations with staff or board members who have concerns about donor fatigue.
If your organization fits any of those criteria – and you’d like to raise more money – keep reading.
Story Time
Let me tell you a quick story. I’m telling you this to begin the process of expanding your idea of what’s possible for smaller organizations.
I work with a handful of organizations that send out between twelve and sixteen printed appeals each year, along with between three and six printed newsletters. They also have strong email fundraising programs.
That’s a lot, no? It might even seem like their experience doesn’t apply to your organization and your donors.
But it does. Because they’re concerned about asking too often, too.
Recently, for an organization that sends out twelve appeals a year, we had a meeting to create the fundraising calendar for the year. I noticed there was a gap between two appeals where we could squeeze in another printed appeal.
They wondered if it was the right thing to do. They thought they were on the edge of asking too much.
I asked them, “Have you ever regretted adding another appeal?”
“No,” they replied.
I said, “We’ve analyzed the results of your appeals, we constantly look at your donor retention rates. Have the positives of adding another appeal always far, far outweighed the negatives?”
“Yes,” they replied.
There was a brief period of silence. Then they said…
“OK, let’s do it. When should this drop? Which donors should we send this to?” And off we went.
Even the big organizations are concerned about asking too much.
But – and this is an important “but” – they analyze the performance of their fundraising and they see that asking more often helps them raise more money and keep more of their donors.
And here’s the mind-expanding thing: it’s a statistical certainty that your organization’s donors are also giving to some of those big organizations.
If you think that asking your donors so often would never work for your donors, please know that it works all the time. It’s working right now.
Comes from a Good Place
The concern about “asking too much” comes from a good place.
It comes from a healthy desire to keep your donors. It comes from getting feedback from a couple of important donors like, “you guys are sending me too much stuff.” It comes from wanting to emphasize the positive aspects of their beneficiaries and de-emphasize needs.
Those are good and honorable impulses.
However, if you base your fundraising strategy on only those reasons, you’ll raise less than you could be in the short term and in the long term. And you’ll do less good.
Because you also need to base your fundraising strategy on a tactic that other organizations have found allows them to raise more and do more good.
Your organization should ask itself two questions:
“If other organizations are being successful asking more, why can’t we?”
“If asking more often is an established way to help us do more good, don’t we owe it to our beneficiaries to try it a couple of times?”
A Vestigial Value
There’s another reason “asking less” is perceived to be a positive value.
This reason is a holdover, a memory of when you were a smaller organization. You knew all of the donors. You knew that they were likely to read everything you sent out.
You had a personal connection with them. You didn’t want to bother them with too many asks.
But as an organization grows, donors like that are a smaller and smaller percentage of who you communicate with.
A communication strategy of asking twice a year when you have 150 donors and know most of them can work great. But asking twice a year when you have 1,000 donors and know 150 of them will not work well.
Make sure you aren’t applying a lesson from when you were smaller to your current stage of growth.
Isn’t It Weird That “Too Many” is Always “One More” than They’re Currently Sending?
When I first started talking with organizations about this I noticed a pattern:
Orgs that send one annual appeal believed they could never send two appeals
Orgs that send two appeals believed they could never send three appeals
Orgs that send three appeals believed they could never send four appeals…
You get it.
My recommendation: don’t base your understanding of “how many appeals we can send” off of how many appeals you’re sending now. Instead, base your answer on how many appeals high-performing organizations are sending.
The time and money to write, design, and purchase postage for appeals can be a real barrier (which I’ll talk about later).
But the belief that you can’t ask more shouldn’t be a barrier.
It might make your organization uncomfortable to try it. But isn’t a little discomfort worth it for the ability to raise more money and do more good?
Beware Inapplicable Information
As you think about asking more often, you’ll get some pushback. Here are some common examples:
A Board member that says we can’t ask more than we currently are
A blog post (like this one or this one) that says to stop abusing donors with so many Asks
A Major donor that says she doesn’t like appeal letters
When this happens, check to make sure the lesson applies to your organization. For instance:
That Board member who says you can’t ask more likely doesn’t know much about direct response fundraising and hasn’t done it at scale. He doesn’t know what more sophisticated organizations are doing, and his opinion shouldn’t determine your approach.
The linked blog posts above are mainly aimed at super-large organizations. They aren’t written for organizations with two-person development teams who send out three appeals. (And nothing at all against the Agitator – I love them and kind of want to be them when I grow up.) Smart advice for an organization with 200,000 donors is not necessarily smart for an organization with 2,000 donors.
A Major Donor’s communication preferences should be honored for her, but her preferences should not determine your organization’s policy. If she doesn’t like appeal letters, use segmentation to take her out of most of your appeal letters.
The fundraising world is full of good advice, opinions and research. Just make sure it applies to your organization at your stage of growth.
Don’t Fear the Bogeyman
I’ve noticed that when organizations consider asking more, they have outsized fears around the possible negative consequences.
They fear a significant number of major donors will never give agai
They fear a massive number of unsubscribes from the email list
They fear donors will give a gift now but won’t give at the end of the year
We can tell you from experience that these fears don’t materialize.
Three quick real-life examples:
A client sent four printed appeal letters in four weeks, with no greater opt-outs or complaints than normal;
A client sent twenty-four e-appeals over nineteen days, with fewer unsubscribes than normal
A client went from four appeals to seven a year with zero negative feedback.
Will you get a complaint, an opt-out or two? Of course. But they’ll be minimal. And held up in direct comparison to the additional gifts and higher retention rates, it’s a “trade” most organizations would make every day.
Step by Step, Not Overnight
The organizations that are sending out ten successful appeals per year weren’t born that way.
They probably started at two. Then they added a third. Then a fourth. Years later, they were up to eight. And so on. They measure their results. And they keep adding appeals until their data (not one person’s opinion) shows them that they should stop.
If you’re sending three appeals a year, I don’t recommend jumping to eight. But I sure recommend jumping to four or five.
It’s a multi-year process to get to that many appeals. You figure out what types of letters and subjects your donors are most likely to respond to, and add appeals step by step.
The process often looks like the following chart. In “year 1.” the organization is sending three appeals. By year six they are sending out nine appeals and raising a LOT more money:
So if you’re worried that you and your team have to immediately triple or quadruple the amount of fundraising you send out, you can relax.
It really is a multi-year process. You add a couple of appeals. You raise more money. You do more good, and you hire another Development person. Then you’re able to do a couple more appeals. Then you raise more… step by step.
If you’re becoming more comfortable with the idea, “hey, maybe we could send one more,” then I’m thrilled for you. Because for smaller organizations who are only asking their donors a couple of times a year, the ability to ask more often is the easiest way to raise more money.
Don’t Send Everything to Everybody
Please know that most organizations that send ten appeals per year don’t send all ten to everyone.
Segmentation is your friend.
To give you an example, here are some super-simple segmentation recommendations for an organization that sends out ten appeals:
To your mass donors, send all ten of your appeals.
To the major donors you’re actively in relationship with, send two appeals.
To the major donors you’re not in active relationship with, send six appeals
To your monthly donors, send three appeals and be sure to customize them to acknowledge their faithful monthly giving.
For every appeal, feel free to pull any single donor or any small group of people out. Examples: your Board, a major donor you’re preparing a major ask for, or a person who just notified you that they’ve put your organization in their will.
Knowing that you don’t send all ten of those appeals to everyone is often tension-reducing, shoulder-lowering news for smaller organizations!
Add Functionality and Skills as You Grow
As organizations Ask more often, they tend to add new skills to their fundraising repertoire. These are skills and processes like:
Setting up their CRM to automatically send a printed receipt within 24 to 48 hours
Using segmentation (as mentioned above)
“Reporting” to their donors so donors know their gift made a difference
Use more direct response fundraising best-practices, then regularly measure and analyze results.
Do you need to do all those things if you’re moving from two appeals a year to three? No.
But do savvy nonprofits add those functions over time because they are proven to work?
Yes.
More Practice = More Money
Just “asking more” isn’t a magic bullet.
If you send eight appeals full of organizational-centric fundraising that “sounds like us” and tells stories of people you’ve already helped… it’s not going to go well. (You’ll still raise more money than you were before, but you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.)
So for smaller organizations to send more appeals, they also need to get better at appeals.
If you’re a small organization, you have three incredible things going for you:
Pent-up giving. If you’ve only been asking a couple of times a year, you have what we call pent-up giving. The next appeal you send will raise money almost regardless of what’s in it. Why? Your donors have been wanting to do more but you haven’t asked them to.
You get better at appeals the more you practice. Creating effective appeals is a learned behavior, and you’ll absolutely get better with practice.
You’re living in a golden age for learning fundraising. There’s so much free, high-quality information out there. Subscribe to our blog. Follow Jeff Brooks. Read The Agitator. Follow Lisa Sargent, Tom Ahern, Mark Phillips and T. Clay Buck. Read Erica Waasdorp’s book. Follow Next After. Look up the Agents of Good. I’ve been doing this stuff for twenty-seven years and regularly get better at it thanks to these fine people.
But You CAN Ask Too Much
The way to tell whether your organization is asking too much is to do some math. And I’ll give you the two main ideas below.
It’s good to note that sophisticated organizations use a host of tools and analysis to know when they’re asking too much. But as we’ve made clear, this post is not for them.
So here’s how to know if your organization is asking too much…
The first idea is to do a Cost/Benefit Analysis to see how much of the additional revenue from an additional appeal is “new revenue” – or is revenue that’s “stolen” from the appeal that mails right before it or after it. Once you calculate the new revenue, you figure out the relative cost of that new revenue compared to other appeals and to all of your other fundraising options.
In my experience, you don’t have to worry about this until you get to at least ten printed appeals and newsletters (total).
The second is to measure and monitor the retention rates for your donors. Each different segment of your donors (New Donors, Monthly Donors, Major Donors, etc.) has known strong/acceptable/weak retention rates. If you find that a particular segment’s retention rate is dropping, one of the culprits can be asking them too often.
If you’re at a nonprofit that is small enough that you’re not measuring retention rates by segment, you almost certainly can (and should) be mailing more.
Most small organizations don’t need analysis to know whether they can add another appeal or two. In my experience, I start to pay attention to the analysis when reaching ten appeals per year. And then really start digging into the details at about twelve or fourteen appeals per year.
If you’re mailing less than eight appeals per year, my recommendation is that you can add two appeals without thinking twice.
Quick story to provide context. I once served an organization where we ran a test. We started increasing the number of mailings (appeals and newsletters) to a group of their donors. We measured the results rigorously.
We got to the point where we were mailing those donors twenty-four appeal letters and twelve newsletters each year before the data told us that we were mailing too much.
24 printed appeal letters and 12 printed newsletters!
Do I recommend you send that many mailings? Of course not.
But doesn’t hearing that make you think you could be asking your donors a couple more times each year?
Human Resources Matter
Hopefully you are now open to the idea that your organization could be asking more.
It’s entirely another thing to write, design, print and send or email the additional asks. These things take real time, energy and money.
If you’re a small shop and working at max capacity, what do you do?
This issue must be addressed, but it’s not what this particular post is about. But here are some quick ideas to help you see how it’s possible:
You can repeat your strongest appeals and e-appeals. If last year’s year-end appeal worked great, you can use it again this year with only the slightest modification. If you run a spring campaign that works well, you can likely run a fall campaign that uses the same words, phrases and paragraphs. Don’t feel like you have to re-invent the wheel each time. Savvy Fundraisers purposefully repeat things that work. Assets, not art projects.
Sign up for the program at Work Less, Raise More. The trainings there (more being added each month) will help you produce effective fundraising very quickly.
Steal like an artist. There are no new ideas in fundraising. Take an idea or tactic that another organization uses successfully, revise it to fit your organization and your context, and you’ve made a new thing.
I want you to be free of the “donor fatigue” bogeyman. (Actual sightings happen about as often as actual sightings of a Sasquatch.)
The organizations that we’ve helped communicate more have never regretted it:
They found they were overestimating the negative consequences of communicating too much
And they found they were underestimating the generosity of their donors
So if you’re an organization that is wrestling with whether to ask more, you could be asking more.
You have pent-up giving waiting to be unleashed.
You could be doing more good!
Acknowledge your concerns – they come from a good place.
Show me a smaller organization that moves past their fears about asking too much and I’ll show you an organization that is about to raise more money, keep more of its donors, and make “the leap” to the next level of growth and impact.
