Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Why are you writing about the organization?

Steven Screen | June 3, 2021June 2, 2021Report

This is the second post in our series on donor-centered-newsletters – the kind of newsletters that delight donors and raise more money for your nonprofit.

The first post was about the purpose of your newsletter. This post is the second and final Big Idea you need to succeed.

And after this – I promise – the posts will get tactical.

But if you don’t know this one idea, all the tactics in the world won’t help very much.

A Powerful, Unexpected Question

It’s 1994. I’m less than a year out of college working at a fundraising agency that specializes in helping large nonprofits raise money. And I’m writing my first newsletter.

I handed my draft to my boss – an accomplished and brilliant fundraiser.

He read the first story, scanned the rest of the stories, and handed the stack of paper back to me.

Then he asked me a powerful but unexpected question:

“Why Are You Writing about the Organization?”

I didn’t know it at the moment, but that was one of the most powerful lessons I ever learned about effective fundraising.

At the time, all I could do was say, “What do you mean? It’s the organization’s newsletter.”

“Sure.” My boss said, “but most donors aren’t reading a newsletter to find out anything about the organization. They’re reading it to find out if their gift made a difference.

“The most effective newsletters are written to show donors what their gift accomplished. And the best way to do that is through stories about beneficiaries.

“So stop talking about the organization and its programs. Start talking about the donor and telling her stories about lives that have been changed because of her kindness. Then she’ll think it was a great idea to give to the organization and be more likely to give again.”

So I went back to my office to do a complete rewrite.

But I was a far more effective fundraiser from that moment forward.

Your Newsletter

As you create your newsletter, you’ll be tempted to “write about your organization.”

People in your organization will even push you to write about your organization.

They’ll say things like, “But we have to tell people about everything we do and tell them that we’re good at it!”

No. You don’t. In fact, when you do, fewer donors will read your newsletter. Because hearing about your organization is not why they’re reading. They’re reading because they’re hoping to hear about themselves. They’re hoping to hear whether and how their gift made a difference and whether they’re a valuable part of your organization.

Keep this idea in mind as you read this series. Then all the tactics – the writing style, the headlines, the picture captions – will make sense.

You’ll start keeping your donors for longer. And your newsletter will become a major revenue source!

Read the series:

What the purpose of your newsletter SHOULD be
Why are you writing about the organization? (This post)

This post was originally published on February 25, 2020.

What the purpose of your newsletter SHOULD be

Steven Screen | June 1, 2021June 4, 2021Report

This is the first in a series of posts that will show you how to create donor-delighting, money-raising newsletters.

We’re talking about newsletters that your donors love to open, the kind that increase the chance they’ll keep giving to your organization year after year, and the kind that raise way more money than they cost to send out.

What Is Your Newsletter’s Purpose?

Here’s our approach, and it’s been successful for every type of organization in every sector we’ve tried:

Your newsletter exists to show your donor how her gift made a difference, and to show her what her gift today will do.

There’s a lot in that one sentence, which we’ll unpack during this series.

But it’s just as helpful to understand what your newsletter should not be:

It should not a newspaper, full of all kinds of stories
It should not be about your organization, your programs, your staff, your volunteers, your sponsors, or your partners
It should not be about how much money you’ve raised
It should not be a “playbill” about the upcoming events and ways a donor can get involved
It should not “hide the good news” by only mentioning the donor at the very end of stories

And yet, those are the things that most nonprofits use their newsletters for.

That’s why most newsletters don’t get read.

That’s why they don’t measurably help organizations keep their donors.

And it’s why most newsletters don’t raise much (if any) money.

Here’s the Big Idea:

Your donor is more interested in reading about herself – about what she and her gift did – than she is reading about any of those other things.

So if you want her to read your newsletter, write to her and write about her.

You Need a To-do list and a Not-To-Do List

Newsletters don’t raise a lot of money by accident.

The content is curated and the offer decided. Then it’s written and designed with the intent to raise money.

Everything included in it is done with a purpose. That means that a bunch of things are also excluded on purpose.

For smaller organizations, this is hard, because it means telling some staff that their program will never be featured in the newsletter. It means getting more stories and photos of beneficiaries. It means the “save the date” for your next event needs to be an additional mailing, not in your newsletter.

It’s hard, but it’s worth it. This approach works measurably better than any other approach I’ve ever seen in my 27 years of fundraising.

If you’d like to know more, stay tuned (and subscribe to our blog if you haven’t already)!

Read the series:

What the purpose of your newsletter SHOULD be (This Post)
Why are you writing about the organization?

This post was originally published on February 20, 2020.

In Memory of My Fundraising Mentor

Steven Screen | May 25, 2021May 25, 2021Thank

I’ve been wondering how to talk about a certain situation, and Jeff Brooks just did me a favor.

Here’s the situation…

My Father passed away a little more than a month ago. He was my fundraising mentor.

Longtime readers know that I mention my mentor pretty regularly. He’s in this post and in this post. Though he’s not mentioned, he’s all over this free eBook.

I purposefully never mentioned that I was talking about my Dad. I wanted your takeaway to be the fundraising knowledge that was shared and the power of mentorship, not that I was related to my mentor.

But he was my Dad, too.

So it brought me (and my family) great joy to read yesterday’s blog post by Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now. With Jeff’s permission, I’m going to post it here in its entirety.

Future Fundraising Now: In memory of Bob Screen, fundraising mentor

In memory of Bob Screen, fundraising mentor

Posted: 24 May 2021 08:38 AM PDT

Last month, we lost one of the giants of fundraising, and my fundraising mentor: Bob Screen.

If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because retired a while ago and has little online presence. But if you’re over a certain age, you’ve heard of him. And you probably know him as a leading figure who helped make direct-response fundraising effective and knowledge-driven like it had not been before. He was especially a pioneer in direct mail and long-form broadcast fundraising.

I met him in the late 80s when I become a copywriter at his fundraising agency, Screen Communications. I had slim experience writing fundraising, but he hired me anyway.

This is the part of my professional journey that I rarely share the details about. I make it sound quick, easy, almost magical. Like: “I struggled in fundraising, then I found a mentor, and everything came together for me.”

That’s true, but it doesn’t reveal quite how it went. It was difficult. Sometimes painful. And it took a long time.

Here’s how my mentor worked with me:

I’d write a project for one of our clients and route it to him. He’d call me into his office, where he’d be waiting with my project (On paper; no email yet!) and a very sharp pencil.

He’d go through the project almost word by word, crossing things out, circling things, scribbling notes … and most importantly, explaining what he was doing and why.

I probably learned more about effective fundraising in one sitting like this than is possible at a whole quality fundraising conference.

But it was far from easy. I didn’t always get it first time around. I routinely repeated mistakes that I learned not to make. Bob never let those mistakes ride. Second time, third time … he’d raise the temperature of his corrections and the importance of the principle behind it.

Here’s the thing: any piece of information, no matter how useful, does not become your own until you’ve used it several times.

It’s necessary to screw up a few times in order to learn.

That doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.

There were times when I would have chewed off my leg to escape. I think you’d have felt the same way.

But it was effective. And over time I internalized hundreds of techniques and truths about fundraising, and became better and better at applying those odd and often counterintuitive truths to new situations.

More important, Bob Screen transmitted a mindset that made it possible to keep on learning. Things like:

You are not the donor. Writing in a way you find persuasive is not a dependable strategy. Get outside of your own head.
Offer! Always have a specific, compelling, simple call to action for your donors.
Write with energy. If you want to get through with your message, no project is ever “routine.”

Mindset is everything, because conditions change. If all you know are techniques, you’ll fall farther behind every year.

These things are gifts that have supported my career in the decades since.

The power of having a mentor — one who will stick with you in that awkward “adolescent” stage, where you’ve learned things, but don’t yet apply them consistently.

It’s not easy. Sometimes not fun. But it’s the greatest professional gift you can receive.

So I join many others who faced the sharp-pencil Bob Screen critiques in saying Thank you and Good bye to a giant.

Robert Screen
1940 – 2021
Everlasting Memory

Thank you, Jeff, for doing a brilliant job capturing so many of the themes my Dad taught – themes that are familiar (I hope!) to longtime readers: that every word matters, that you are going to screw up in order to learn, that you are not the donor, and to have a clear offer.

That approach – that “mindset” as Jeff calls it – is what I was blessed to receive and what this blog is attempting to pass on.

There’s a final thing to mention. The “sharp-pencil critiques.” My Dad reviewed my copy the same way; word by word, explaining the principles behind the edits, and never letting a mistake ride. He was a hard guy to work for.

And this is the pencil sharpener he used to sharpen all those pencils. I took this picture when it was on his desk, next to one of his favorite pencils (Dixon Ticonderoga 1388 2 5/10, of course).

As I write this post, the pencil sharpener is on my desk. It’s a great reminder to pay attention to every word.

Not because the “writing” must be great.

But because the right ideas, in the right order, arranged so that they break through into the donor’s life, can change the world one gift at a time. And then thousands of gifts at a time.

Thanks, Dad. I love you.

Everything You Send Makes You More Effective

Steven Screen | May 20, 2021May 20, 2021Repeat

All your bad appeals and e-appeals are useful and essential steps on the journey to great appeals and great donor communications.

No small nonprofit arrives on the scene sending out fantastic fundraising.

Nobody starts a nonprofit or ministry because they want to send out mail and email.

So you have to believe that a) “each piece of mail or email your organization sends out is an experiment and an opportunity to get better” and b) you’ll engage your donors and raise some money, too.

That’s a pretty good 2-for-1, no?

What simple email could you send out this afternoon that would be another “step on your journey” to great appeals and great donor communications?

Got Complaints? Get Specifics.

Steven Screen | May 18, 2021May 18, 2021Repeat

It’s easy to get fired up when someone comes in and nervously says, “Oh my gosh, we’re getting so many complaints!” Panic sets in!

But rather than escalating the fear, get specific. We recommend creating a report that is just as specific as a report on giving.

Main Info:

Time period?
How many complaints were there?
How many gifts came in?
# of “Please remove me from your mailing list” compared to normal?
# of “unsubscribes” compared to normal?

For each complaint:

What is the person’s name or email address?
Are they a donor or non-donor?
If they are a donor, are they a mass donor or a major donor?
What was their complaint?

In my experience, reports that there were “so many” complaints and that “donors are really hating this appeal” have an outsized, negative affect on organizations.

But then when specifics are reviewed, like a light being turned on in a dark room on a scary night, it’s usually just a couple of complaints. And half of them are from non-donors.

Quick Advice

In addition to having a report that requires specifics, keep these things in mind:

Don’t Overreact. You know how sometimes, when you send out an appeal or an e-appeal, there’s an initial flood of gifts and you know you have a winner on your hands? When that happens, does your organization immediately change your budget for the year and spend more money? No. You wait for all the results to come in and then decide what to do. Follow the same process for complaints. When complaints come in – which they will – wait for all the results to come in and then decide what to do.
Context Matters. A complaint from a long-time donor should be listened to. Complaints from non-donors should basically be ignored. Seven unsubscribes doesn’t deserve any attention if you normally get six.
Count Everything. If you’re talking about the number of complaints, you also need to talk about the number of gifts. It’s counter-productive to focus on the five complaints that came in without viewing them in the context of the one hundred and sixty-seven gifts that also came in.

Don’t Let Complaints Hold Your Organization Back

Many organizations feel like they are held back from raising more money by complaints.

However, I don’t think it’s the complaints that hold the organization back.

It’s the organization’s reaction to complaints, and fear of complaints, that holds them back.

Make sure your organization is comfortable with a few complaints. Because the occasional complaint is a “cost of doing business” for fundraising organizations.

Set up a simple system to track and evaluate complaints. Like that light going on in a dark room, you’ll find the specifics far less scary than the emotions.

How to Make Good “Fundraising Bets”

Steven Screen | May 13, 2021May 13, 2021Repeat

At the beginning of your fundraising career – or when you start doing more direct response fundraising than you have in the past – you need to make “bets” on what you think your donors will be most likely to fund.

You’re writing an e-appeal and wondering, “Should I talk about this program, or that program?”

You’re writing an appeal letter and wondering, “Should I ask donors to fund this, or to fund that?”

Each decision is a bet.

The more bets you make, if you pay attention to the results, the better you’ll get at making bets. And ultimately, the better you get at making bets, the more money your e-appeals, appeals, newsletters, and events will raise.

The way to get better at this is for your organization is to practice.

Let me give you an example. It’s an outlier for most of us, but it makes the point.

My mentor spent his career doing direct response fundraising for some of the biggest nonprofits in the country in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, including most of the national Christian nonprofits.

True story: by the end of his career, he had sent so many pieces of direct mail, to so many of the lists available, that he could make accurate predictions for how each letter would perform.

He would hold the mockup of the letter in his hand, look at the offer, and look at the writing and the design. Then he would look at the mailing list that it was being mailed to. Cultivation, acquisition, didn’t matter – he could tell you with relative certainty how many people would respond, what the average gift would be, etc.

I walked into his office once and he was concentrating so hard he didn’t notice me for a couple minutes. He was as “in the zone” as it’s possible to be. I watched him write some numbers in the margins of a printed-out spreadsheet, then I asked him what he was doing.

He said, “I’m writing down my predictions for how each letter to each mailing list is going to perform.”

Here’s the amazing thing: he was usually correct to within a 10th of a percentage point on response rate, and within a dollar or two on average gift size.

It was remarkable. It was otherworldly.

He was able to do it because he had done it so many times before. He was very, very good at making “bets” for what an organization should talk about, how they should talk about it, and who they should talk about it to.

And when he was wrong – when one of his predictions didn’t match up with what actually happened, he would say, “Huh, I wonder what I missed?” And then he’d look at the letter and the list to figure out where he had gone wrong, so that his next bet was more accurate. So that his next bet raised more money for whatever nonprofit he was serving.

You and your organization can get great at knowing what to talk about, how to talk about it, and who to talk about it to.

But you have to practice. A lot.

It’s not a gift, not a talent, not an ability. It’s an acquired skill.

Before & After

Steven Screen | May 11, 2021May 11, 2021Ask

Here’s another fundraising “before & after” for your reading pleasure.

It’s the first sentence of an appeal, and it feels like a great example of all the thinking that goes into successful first sentences – and into successful direct response fundraising in general.

Here’s how it arrived on my desk:

I send this urgent letter to you because our organization-supported orphanages are overwhelmed, and in desperate need of help.

This is very strong fundraising. It’s clearly urgent. The word “you” is used. It’s clear that there’s a specific problem that the donor can help with.

But I thought it could be stronger. Here’s how it looked when I was done with it:

You’re receiving this urgent letter because there’s an orphanage that’s overwhelmed and in desperate need of help.

Let me break down the changes and tell you why I made them…

You > I

Notice how the first word of the letter changed from “I” to “You.”

“I send this urgent letter to you…” changed to “You’re receiving this urgent letter…”

“I sent…” puts the focus and the action on the letter writer. “You’re receiving…” immediately puts the focus and action on the recipient.

Plus, we humans are trained to be more likely to read and respond to the word “you” … so I moved “you” to be the very first word of the appeal.

Our organization-supported

I deleted the phrase “our organization-supported” from before “orphanages.”

Mentioning that the orphanages are supported by the organization doesn’t help make the case that the donor should send in a gift today.

In fact, it weakens the case because it spends valuable time focusing on who has funded things in the past instead of focusing on what the need is today.

And finally, always remember how fast donors are moving. Go back and read the first sentence again. But quickly, like a donor. Doesn’t it say that the orphanages are supported by the organization? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for the quickly-scanning reader to think, “If the orphanages are supported by the organization, why do they need my help?”

“Orphanage” Is Better Than “Orphanages”

Note that “orphanages” became “orphanage” (singular).

Why? At the beginning of any direct response fundraising, I want to present the donor with a problem that is solvable. If I tell her that a bunch of orphanages are overwhelmed, I’ve likely presented the donor with a problem that is too big for her to solve.

In our experience, when you focus fundraising on problems that are too big for the donor to meaningfully help with a gift, you get fewer gifts.

So rather than saying “orphanages are overwhelmed” (potentially a very big problem), I changed the sentence to read, “an orphanage is overwhelmed” (a smaller problem where a donor is more likely to feel like she can make a meaningful difference).

Many nonprofits believe that sharing the large size of a problem makes donors more likely to give a gift. In direct response fundraising, it’s generally the opposite; if you present your donors with a smaller problem where they feel they can make a meaningful difference with a gift today, they’re more likely to make a gift today.

Remove the Comma!

My general rule is to make first sentences as simple and easy-to-understand as possible.

So “…overwhelmed, and in desperate need of help” became “…overwhelmed and in desperate need of help.”

It’s a tiny little change. But you want to think of the first sentence as the onramp to your whole appeal. If your onramp is easy to understand and keeps your reader moving forward, your reader is more likely to continue reading your letter or email.

If your onramp is a perfect, well-formed, multi-clause sentence that your high school English teacher would reward you for, and the comma-induced pauses add richness and complexity… well, it’s statistically less likely that people will continue to read your letter or email.

All That From One Sentence?

Yup. It’s a curse of the trade. When every word matters, and lives or livelihoods or real life consequences are on the line, you tend to obsess about each word.

Even as I’m writing this blog post I’ve thought of a way to make it better. And I’m annoyed at myself for not noticing it on my initial pass.

But here’s the thing for you: just practice. You’ll get better and better. With email fundraising, the positive feedback loop is almost instantaneous. You can get very good at this stuff, very quickly, if you’re willing to practice.

Don’t treat each piece of fundraising as precious. Write e-appeals, do the best you can, and send them out.

After all, for most smaller organizations it’s easy to make the argument that the volume of fundraising you send out is more important that the quality. Just practice.

Most likely, you’re not communicating to your donors enough.

Go practice! What can you write and email out this week to learn from?

A Generous Ego

Steven Screen | May 6, 2021May 5, 2021Ask

If your organization wants to do more fundraising (which we obviously believe in) we’d recommend that you do so with what we call a “generous ego.”

You need to have enough ego to know that what you’re doing is important, that it matters, that your organization is making a difference. You need to believe those so strongly that you want to share them with other people.

But you also need to be generous. When you do your fundraising, you need to make the generous act of crossing the gap to your donors’ level of understanding. You need to make the generous act of asking more often than you think you can, on behalf of your beneficiaries.

When asking for support, make the generous act of focusing on your donor’s role, telling her how her gift that makes a difference. When reporting back on previous giving, make the generous act of giving the credit to the donor, and directly telling her how her gift made a difference.

Too many nonprofits have a hard time being generous in their fundraising. They make their fundraising all about themselves. About their process. About their programs. About their staff. About their volunteers. About how they think about their issue. They ask the donor to support their organization instead of asking the donor to help people.

Of course, what your organization does is important. What your organization does makes the world a better place.

Your organization should have a healthy ego. Your ego should cause you to want to do more fundraising, because you know more good would be done if you raised more money.

But be generous about it in your fundraising. Be generous about it in your branding.

Generously focus on how your donors’ gifts will meet beneficiaries’ needs. Do that, instead of raising money for your organization, and you’ll raise more money for your organization.

Don’t Hide Behind Polish

Steven Screen | May 4, 2021May 4, 2021Ask

Many smaller organizations have a very hard time increasing the number of communications they send to their donors.

It’s a human resources question/issue. There’s only so much time.

However, many of those organizations are… self-sabotaging.

It’s not their fault, either. Somewhere in the nonprofit-o-sphere we were all taught that our donor communications need to reach a certain level of fit & finish or they’re not going to work at all.

That single belief has resulted in an astonishing amount of money NOT raised.

Today, hundreds of thousands of smaller organizations desire for their fundraising to look and sound as professional as organizations 100 times their size. So it takes them far longer than it should to create and send their fundraising communications.

And so they send fewer communications than they should.

But here’s the thing: their donors know that they’re small. The donors’ expectations for small organizations’ fundraising are different.

So my advice to smaller nonprofits is to embrace your smallness. Don’t prioritize looking like one of those massive organizations with perfect email templates and a fancy website.

Instead, just write. Just send it.

Send one email a week that’s 250 words that shares a quick detail of some good thing that happened that week. Give the donor the credit. Doesn’t have to be anything close to perfect. Typos are fine. Do that every week for a year and you’ll have an expanding tribe of devoted followers and incredible donor retention.

When some acute need or surprise expense happens, dash off an email to your email list. Provide a couple links for them to click on that go directly through your donation form, tell them that their gift will help with that acute need or a special expense and support the work of your whole organization. Now your funds are undesignated. Do that 12 or 15 times a year and you’ll raise more money than you expect and have a higher donor retention rate. And you’ll have a higher engagement rate.

For smaller organizations, getting good at communicating more often and direct response basics (things like effective landing pages and reply cards) is so much more important than perfectly written and designed donor communications.

Don’t try to be perfect. Your goal should be to create breathless dispatches from the field, not fundraising emails and communications that look like they went through the standard nonprofit pastel-colored hope machine.

And always remember, you learn more about what works by doing more and paying attention to the results. You learn less by trying to be perfect and doing less.

Your donor values knowing the problems in the world that you’re working on more than she values perfect, professional communications.
Your donor values reading a story about how her gift made a difference in the life of one person more than she cares about perfect, professional communications.
Your donor values having a one-to-one relationship with a human who is working like crazy to make the world a better place more than she values perfect, professional communications.

In your donor communications, do not hide behind a need to appear professional.

There’s nothing in that hiding spot that helps you help more people.