Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 25 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.
The eBook contains the answer to a question we asked ourselves:
“What strategies & actions made the biggest impact helping our clients raise more than $1,000,000 annually from their individual donors for the first time?”
We wrote this eBook to share the four main strategies that helped organizations leave “six figures” behind and make the leap to raising “seven figures.”
One thing that was encouraging to see: this approach is accessible to even the smallest organizations. None of the organizations we looked at had everything buttoned up in the first couple of years. It was always a phased/iterative approach where they would get a little better each year. And then the improvements they’d make in one area would reinforce the improvements they’d make in other areas.
And for the people we’ve shared this with who have yet to break the $1m barrier, they love having a roadmap and seeing how everything works together.
Download your free copy today, we know it will be helpful for you!
My last post gave you a helpful, proven process to follow to write and design direct mail fundraising.
One of the steps in that process is the writing of a Creative Brief – a step that’s unfamiliar to many smaller organizations.
If having an example creative brief would be helpful for your organization, at the end of this post I’ve included a link to an example Creative Brief you can download for free.
And if you’re not sure why you’d want to start making Creative Briefs for your projects yet, here’s why a Creative Brief is so helpful…
To review, a Creative Brief is a document that contains all the details for a piece of fundraising (and often for an entire fundraising campaign). These details include who the package will be mailed to, the mail date, the offer, the specs, the creative approach, which story to tell, which photo(s) to use, the production schedule for the project, etc.
Creative Briefs are so helpful because they work for you.
When you write and share a good Creative Brief, you instantly create what amounts to an “External Brain & Project Manager” whose only job is to save you time and help you succeed:
When the copywriter doesn’t remember what to do, they look at the brief.
When the data person wonders which donors to pull for this mailing, they look at the brief.
When the Boss wants to know what the plan is for the April Appeal, you show them the brief.
When you wonder what you did on this project last year, and what the thinking was, you look at the brief from last year.
When you’re teaching a new staff member what you do for fundraising and how you do it, you show them the briefs.
All of which gives you more time to get other stuff done.
And when everyone is working from a brief, you end up with fundraising that’s more cohesive and on-target. You also avoid out-of-left-field situations like “the brochure for the capital campaign looks like a video game” because the freelance designer thought that would be cool. (True story.)
We use briefs for direct mail, email, campaigns, events, radiothons, you name it.
So if it’s helpful to you, here’s a link to download a sample creative brief that I created years ago. I’ve been using some version of this document for over 25 years. Some are 6 pages, some are 1 page, depending on the project and the organization. I’m sure you’ll want to customize it for your needs.
There’s nothing magic about this particular format or the exact info it contains. But what is magic is “thinking it through in advance” and then letting the Creative Brief work for you!
What’s your process like for creating direct mail fundraising? Does your process help or hinder your organization?
To (perhaps torturously) borrow from the famous first line from Anna Karenina,
“All organizations that have a successful process for creating direct mail are alike; each organization that has an unsuccessful process for creating direct mail is unsuccessful in its own way.”
After helping a couple organizations improve their process recently, I thought I’d share the process that I’ve seen be the most successful in case it’s helpful to you.
Creative Meeting: this is where the goals of the project are confirmed, the offer and audience decided, the creative approach is determined, and which story to tell is decided. The more details thought through at this stage, the better.
Creative Brief: all the details for the project are written down in the Creative Brief. The Brief then becomes the roadmap for the project.
Copywriting: the copywriter follows the Creative Brief and writes the copy. The resulting “copy package” includes everything needed to design the package, including suggested art direction as well as copy for things like the outer envelope and reply card.
Copy editing: the copy package is circulated, to as small a group as possible, for edits and feedback. One designated person makes the edits and resolves conflicting opinions. Additional rounds of edits are done only when necessary.
Copy approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the copy and it is sent to be designed.
Design: the Designer designs the package, following the Creative Brief and the copy package.
Design Review: the package is circulated for edits and feedback. Again, one designated person decides which edits will be made. The Designer makes the changes.
Design approval: the Project Lead gives final approval on the design.
Then you’re off to the races…
Of course, there are all sorts of tweaks and changes that can be made. For instance, smaller organizations tend to have one person doing most or all of the steps, and the steps sometimes get combined. Larger organizations tend to have teams of specialists doing just one or two steps each.
But the most successful processes tend to follow the same principles:
Think it all the way through at the beginning
Follow the plan
Keep approval teams small
Empower one person (ideally someone who has experience with direct response fundraising) to make all final decisions, because decisions made by committees result in fundraising that doesn’t work well.
I hope this helps with your process. If you have any advice to share, or improvements to this process, mention them in a comment.
In my next post, I’ll show you the power of having a Creative Brief, and include a sample brief you can download.
At a conference this summer, I was asked to speak about “why and how to use direct mail.”
I began with the following statistic (from Blackbaud):
Last year the percentage of charitable giving donated through online sources was 12%.
The 12% figure was a total surprise to a significant portion of the audience. I heard one person say, “Wait, WHAT?”
It’s easy to understand why so many people were surprised; the fundraising world is mainly populated with people under 40, and people under 40 do almost everything online. Plus, most of the people were from smaller nonprofits so they didn’t have the context that comes from working in larger, mature fundraising programs.
If you, too, are incredulous that just 12% of funds are coming in online for most organizations, let me share some helpful thoughts for you and your organization.
If your organization is raising more than 12% of your revenues online, that’s fantastic, you’re ahead of the curve. Online fundraising is growing (though not as quickly as everyone assumed it would), so it’s a strength to be getting good at raising money online.
If you’re doing well raising money online, it almost certainly means you could successfully raise money offline. This will give your organization another regular, dependable stream of income.
Note: if you’ve tried raising money offline and failed, it most likely means the campaign wasn’t executed well, as opposed to meaning that “offline donors don’t like us.”
You actively want to have an online fundraising program and an offline fundraising program because they reinforce each other. It’s a “1 + 1 = 3” situation. An offline program reaches people who aren’t reached by email. An online program reminds people that they forgot to give to the piece of direct mail they set down when the phone rang.
So, what percentage of your organization’s revenues come in online?
And regardless of your percentage, we recommend developing both strong online and offline fundraising programs. The average age of a donor in the U.S. is around 68, so you need both programs if you want to reach both today’s donors and tomorrow’s.
The test reveals a very handy principle to bake into your thinking as a Fundraiser:
Trying a new tactic is likely to have unintended effects.
In the case of the test above, asking online givers to pay the credit card fees resulted in 60% of donors choosing to pay the fees. That seems like a great result, right? It almost feels like free money.
If the only thing the organization measured and tracked was “what percentage of givers chose to pay the fees,” the tactic would feel like a great success.
However, the tactic also caused more people to abandon the giving form without giving a gift at all. Many people reached the point in the process where they could choose to pay the credit card fees or not… and chose to close the page without giving a gift.
Unintended consequences like this happen all the time to nonprofits. Here’s how to insulate your organization from them:
Be aware they exist. They happen all the time.
Never look at one metric in a vacuum. It is easy to happily focus on one metric while not noticing that other things are being affected, too. If your conversion rate is going up, celebrate it – but also check the size of your average gifts. More conceptually, if you make changes to your fundraising that make your Board happier, celebrate it – but also check to see if your fundraising is still raising as much.
Always always always look at Net Revenue (and, when applicable, retention rates). Net Revenue and Retention are the “mother metrics” – they matter more than anything else.
After you’ve done fundraising for a while, you realize that it’s relatively easy for small nonprofits to increase short term revenue if that’s all you care about. But you’ll tend to burn out your donors.
It’s also relatively easy for small nonprofits to increase retention rate. But if that’s your main goal, you’ll leave a LOT of money on the table and grow very slowly (if at all).
Sales plug – this is why I’m always talking about increasing revenue and retention rates. Increasing both at the same time is the holy grail, and our evidence-based approach is designed to do it.
Here’s my final thought for you today: pay close attention to tests run by large nonprofits and fundraising agencies. Learning from their results will help smaller nonprofits avoid the common potholes on the road to growth. And watch out for unintended side effects!
Should you ask your donors if they would like to pay the credit card fees for their gift?
Turns out you probably shouldn’t – look at this test done by the always-helpful NextAfter.
Their test showed that asking people making a gift online if they would like to cover the credit card fee of their donation resulted in raising 20.5% less than not asking donors to cover the fee.
Many people chose to pay the credit card fees. However, what also happened is that many people saw the option to pay the credit card fees and chose to not give at all. The result was a 20.5% drop in net revenue. (Click through to the post itself for all the details, which are fascinating if you like that kind of thing.)
Keep this study handy the next time “giving donors the option of paying credit card fees” comes up at your nonprofit!
Say I send out 1,000 pieces of mail and you get 38 gifts back.
That gives you a 3.8% response. Not too bad.
But I want to point out something helpful…
It’s true that 38 out of 1,000 people sent in a gift. But it’s also true that 38 of the people who noticed the envelope and opened it responded with a gift.
It’s helpful to notice that, because you can increase the number of people who notice and then open your envelopes. (And it’s not that hard to do.)
After all, you can’t control who is on vacation and won’t get your letter. But you can control using a large, colorful envelope that stands out in a crowded mailbox and gets noticed.
You can’t control the post office “batch-delivering” all the nonprofit mail on one day so that your donor gets 7 appeals all at once. But you can control writing a killer teaser that makes your donor want to open your envelope.
Your donor must notice and then open your envelope before you even have a chance of getting a gift. Andif you increase the number of recipients who notice and open your envelope, you’ll get more donations.
The ROI on the time and money you spend on your envelopes is fantastic.
This fall, with the election and the batch-delivering we’re hearing about, it’s more important than ever that your envelope get noticed and opened. Read this post for help with your teasers, and the last half of this post for help with your envelopes. The first job of your envelope is to carry your letter.
Then the job of your envelope is to get noticed. Then the job of your envelope is to get opened.
Your printed newsletter should be raising a lot of money – as much as your appeals and, in some cases, even more.
The goal of this series has been to give you a tested, proven approach to creating a donor-delighting, money-raising printed newsletter:
Direct mail experts ran a series of head-to-head tests of different types of printed newsletters. The approach detailed here beat all the other approaches.
We’ve used this approach since 2004 to reliably (and sometimes incredibly) increase the money nonprofits raise from their newsletters.
We’ve taught this model at conferences, seminars and webinars. We’ve received hundreds of pieces of feedback about how the approach increased newsletter revenue. You do not need to be an expert to follow this model and raise more money!
So take it this approach and apply it to your organization. Test it against your current approach, or any other approach.
Be Intentional with Your Newsletter
Figure out what your organization’s approach is. Discover and name your organization’s underlying assumptions.
Maybe your organization believes that printed newsletters are obsolete. (They aren’t.)
Maybe your organization believes that printed newsletters shouldn’t or can’t raise money. (Neither is true.)
Maybe your organization believes the way you’ve always done your newsletter is the only way your organization can do a newsletter. (Not true.)
Maybe your organization fears that if you change your newsletter in any way, your donors will leave. (Also not true.)
Maybe your organization believes you could do a newsletter like the one taught here, but you could never do an Ask along with it, because it would offend donors. (You guessed it, not true!)
I’ve run into all of these beliefs before. And it doesn’t matter what you believe – what matters is that you identify what you believe that results in your current approach. Then you compare it with the approach outlined in this series and decide which approach to take.
Great newsletters don’t raise money by accident. Content is included for a purpose, and content is excluded for a purpose.
And remember: the primary reason donors read your newsletter is not to hear about your organization. They’re reading because they’re hoping to hear about themselves. Specifically, donors are reading to find out if they and their gift made a difference.
So start with this proven approach that shows and tells donors how they made a difference. And good luck!
The back page of your print newsletter is where your donor’s good feelings can turn into another gift… or not.
What’s Happened So Far
If you’ve followed the newsletter approach I laid out starting here, your donor has scanned three pages of your newsletter. Those pages have been full of stories that show and tell the donor how she and her gift made a difference.
You’ve proven to her that her gift to your organization was a good decision.
Unlike other organizations who have sent your donor chest-thumping puff pieces about how busy and heroic their organization is, you have made your newsletter about the donor who is reading it.
She’s thinking, “Finally, an organization that gets me and what I’m trying to do.”
And she feels great!
Let’s Turn Those Feelings into Action
Here’s how to get a regular percentage of those donors to make a gift right then and there:
Feature one story on the top of back page.
That story should be a “story of need” (this is different than the “stories of success” mentioned in this post in this series)
The need should be a need that your beneficiaries or organization are currently facing, or are going to face in the next two months.
Describe how the donor’s gift today will perfectly meet the need. This is your Offer, and you can download this free eBook if you’d like to know more about how Offers work and how to create a great one.
The bottom of the back page should be what we call a “faux reply card.”
The faux reply card is not meant to be cut off and sent back. The separate reply card you include with your newsletter is what will be sent back. The faux reply card is added because in head-to-head testing it increased the number of people who sent in a gift by 15%.
A successful back page tends to look like this…
Or this…
Want to Get Even More Donors to Take Action?
Pro-level newsletters select their stories to set up the offer that’s used on the back page.
In other words, if the back page is going to tell a story of need about feeding children, the stories in the rest of the newsletter will all be about children who the donor helped feed. Or if the back page is going to share a need to do advocacy work on an issue, the stories in the rest of the newsletter will all be about how the donor has helped fund successful advocacy work.
Put slightly differently: each newsletter has a theme, and the theme is directly related to the offer. The greater the percentage of content that is not on-theme, the lower the amount of money the newsletter will raise.
Your newsletters do not need to be perfectly themed to succeed. But in our experience it increases the chances you will raise more money.
Feelings
It may feel weird to have a story of need and a reply card on the back of your newsletter.
Your newsletter is a Report, after all.
But it works great. This approach raises more money than any other approach that was tested.
And there are no negative consequences to doing your newsletter this way. People do not complain about it. You do not lose donors because of it.
You simply start raising more money with your newsletters. And retaining more of your donors.
Because remember, your donors love to give. All you’ve done with this method is proven to your donor that her previous gift made a difference, then given her a reason to give another gift today.
