Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

It’s OK to Ask for a Smaller Approval Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You hired a fundraiser. Let them be one.

It’s OK to Write Fundraising That’s Emotional

Steven Screen | May 19, 2026May 14, 2026Ask

If you’ve ever written a fundraising piece you knew was going to work, only to have someone in the room say “this is too emotional” – I feel you.

And I want to give you a couple tools to help you get your great fundraising approved.

Because what has happened to you is pretty common: a Fundraiser drafts an appeal that’s vivid, urgent, and emotionally honest. They send it around for review. And someone – usually program staff, or the branding lead, or a senior leader – pushes back: “This is too emotional. Donors will feel manipulated. We need to tone it down.”

Even though every word is true!

What makes this objection so hard to argue against is that it sounds reasonable. Even ethical. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being manipulative, or be accused of being manipulative. And the person raising the objection usually holds real authority and means well – they understand the work deeply and they care about how the organization shows up in the world.

So the piece gets toned down. And it raises less money. And the Fundraiser feels frustrated.

But here’s why you want emotion in your fundraising. More than 70 years of head-to-head testing & research on giving consistently shows that people give for emotional reasons, the vast majority of the time:

One well-known study compared donations in response to images of a sad child, a happy child, and a neutral child. Same need. Same ask. Same beneficiary. The sad-child version raised donations from 77% of viewers. The happy-child and neutral-child versions? 52% each. When there’s less emotion, there’s less giving.
After the Notre Dame fire in 2019, donors from around the world sent hundreds of millions of unsolicited (!) dollars to repair an old building. Curing cancer is arguably more important – but what happened to the building was emotional, and people responded.

Emotion isn’t a flaw in giving. Emotion is how giving works.

When you write emotionally, you’re not manipulating your donors. You’re reminding them why they care. The reasons they got involved in the first place were emotional – and the most respectful thing you can do is meet them in the same place they entered from.

So the next time someone in your organization calls a piece “too emotional,” here are two things worth saying – in this order – to keep the emotional version alive:

“You know everything we do and why we do it. You’re an expert. But our individual donors aren’t experts. They became donors because their emotions were touched – by a story, a moment, a need. When we tap into those same emotions in our fundraising, we’re not manipulating anyone. We’re reminding them why they care. What feels ‘too emotional’ to you doesn’t feel that way to a donor. To a donor, it feels real.”

“If we change this to be the way you’d describe the work to another expert, donors will experience it as a dry lecture. And in test after test, that approach to individual donors raises less money. The most respectful thing we can do is meet our donors where they actually are.”

One real boundary worth naming: manipulative fundraising distorts, lies, or exaggerates. That is NOT what we are talking about here. We’re talking about sharing the emotions of our beneficiaries, and the emotions of our team around the work, and the emotions a donor might be feeling. Because emotions aren’t manipulative any more than the truth is manipulative. As long as we are telling the truth, we’re not crossing a line.

And we’re giving a gift to our donors, because we’re letting them know the full picture of what’s going on and what’s at stake. Not a dry lecture with numbers and program details, but real lives with real consequences.

The people who became your donors did so because something touched their hearts. Fundraising that touches their hearts again is the surest way to get them to give again.

It’s OK to Tell Your Donors When You’re Behind on Your Fundraising

Steven Screen | May 14, 2026May 7, 2026Ask

If your organization is behind on its fundraising goals, you’re allowed to tell your donors.

If you’re behind your budget right now, you’re probably feeling a little sick about it. I’d like to help with that because in my experience, telling your donors is one of the best things you can do!

Of course, this feels dangerous.

So when an organization is behind its fundraising targets, here’s what tends to happen: someone offers up the idea to share the budget gap with donors, and someone else says, “We can’t do that, people will think we are bad at managing money, and our leadership will never approve it because they think it makes them look bad.” (And if you have a Marketing or Branding department, they’ll say you can’t do it because it’ll hurt the long-term image of the organization.)

The instinct to hide a shortfall comes from a good place – staff and leaders want to protect the organization’s reputation, and you want donor confidence to remain high.

And there’s a layer that makes the whole thing even harder: even though shortfall campaigns happen all the time, nobody ever talks about them. The organization doesn’t want to share that they had to do one. Shortfall campaigns never get talked about at conferences.

And so we find ourselves operating in the dark on this issue, afraid of some consequences that we’ve never actually seen happen.

But (and this is a big “but”), please let me share with you the results of the 60 to 70 times I’ve run campaigns where nonprofits let their donors know that they were behind their fundraising goals.

Here’s what actually happens:

The campaign almost always raises significantly more than the nonprofit’s regular campaigns. It’s usually the best campaign of the year. One of Better Fundraising’s clients usually raises about $150k at year-end, and their shortfall campaign raised $650k. Here’s that story.
- Specifically, response rates and average gifts are higher than average.
The feared negative consequences don’t happen. I’ve measured – there’s no drop in retention rates, and there’s no drop in long-term giving.
The number of calls the organization gets from “concerned donors” is usually less than five.

In a nutshell, here’s why a campaign that lets donors know a nonprofit is behind their fundraising goals or budget is usually so successful: donors know that the organization is a nonprofit. They know that funding is uneven. They don’t want any of the nonprofit’s services to be cut. A shortfall is a clear, urgent need – and humans respond to clear, urgent needs.

And if this is something you are open to, it’s the conversation with your boss or your Board where the idea to share the shortfall gets killed. Here are three things to say to your boss, in this order, to help them be more open to the idea:

“I know this feels risky. I had the same instinct. But shortfall campaigns have been run successfully for a long time, it’s just that nobody talks about it. Here’s what one experienced fundraiser saw as he ran more than 50 of these campaigns… (show them this blog).”

“Our donors know that we’re a nonprofit. They know that funding varies from year to year. When we tell them we’re behind our budget, we’re building trust – we’re treating them like partners instead of just calling them partners.”

“We know our donors care about our work. Let’s tell them what’s going on and give them a chance to help, not hide it and take the decision out of their hands.”

When you’re behind budget, trust your donors. They care about what your organization is working on, and they care about your organization. They want you to keep going. Give them the chance to help. You don’t have to hide what is happening.

Your donors can handle the truth. They will thank you for telling them. And they will surprise you with their generosity.

You Don’t Have to Change Your Fundraising Because of a Complaint

Steven Screen | May 12, 2026May 7, 2026Repeat

When a complaint comes in, you do not have to change your fundraising.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t change your fundraising. Let me take that worry off your plate.

Here’s the situation: a complaint comes in, there’s a flurry of anxious emails, people get worried, and sooner or later someone proposes that “we should pull the campaign” or “well, we can’t use that phrase again.”

But if an organization follows those instincts, it builds a habit that will keep the organization small. It sets a precedent that 1 or 3 people’s opinions can drive the organization’s communication strategy.

Let’s not let that happen! Here’s what to do instead…

First, realize that a complaint is a fee, not a fine. (A fee is something you pay in order to do something, a fine is something you pay when you’ve done something wrong.)

As you communicate with more donors more often, you will get complaints. This isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a sign that you’re talking to more people. And any time you’re talking to more people, more things happen: more complaints, more gifts, more returned envelopes with bad addresses, more unsubscribes, more unexpected large gifts.

So when a complaint comes in, let’s not think, “we’ve done something wrong.” Instead, think, “we’re operating at scale now, and these things are going to happen.”

Second, realize that the complainer doesn’t speak for all donors.

I’ve heard it called “the most expensive assumption in fundraising” – treating one loud voice as representative of the thousands of donors who you didn’t hear from. But that often happens when a complaint is received. You hear things like, “If one person said this, imagine how many thought it but didn’t write in.”

You want to give each complaint the same amount of weight that you give each gift. Don’t let one complaint be more important than all the gifts that came in.

Finally, right-size your organization’s reaction.

Complaints almost never actually damage an organization, but an organization’s response to a complaint – the breathless drama and worry, the time wasted, the effective fundraising cancelled – has a very real chance to reduce the organization’s impact.

So, build a process that gives a complaint its due. Don’t escalate it. Contact the donor and apologize. Listen. Ask if they’d like any changes in their communication preferences. Tell them that their gifts have been incredibly helpful. Match the energy of the response to the size of the issue.

You are allowed to handle a complaint in 15 minutes and get back to work.

***

Your beneficiaries or cause are counting on you to keep raising money. That requires communicating with more and more donors. And communicating with more donors will, occasionally, generate a complaint. That’s the deal.

You don’t have to change your messaging. You just need a process, and the confidence that one complaint is not a verdict on your fundraising.

PS — If you’d like to know more about what causes complaints, have a script for how to respond to a complainer, and help setting up a system for handling them, click here to download our free eBook, “The Sanity-Saving Magic of Understanding Donor Complaints.”

How to Figure Out if Your Fundraising is ‘Working’

Steven Screen | May 7, 2026May 6, 2026Repeat

I was giving a webinar recently and was asked the following question: “should we still be sending a printed annual report to our donors?”

It’s a perfectly good tactical question and I answered it… but later I found myself thinking that what I should have done was teach the person how to figure out the answer for themselves.

Because it’s a real sign of growth when a nonprofit learns how to answer the question, “is [INSERT TACTIC or STRATEGY] is working or not?”

I should mention that what I’m about to share is easy to understand, but difficult to put into practice.

Here’s the deal…

You can always figure out whether a fundraising strategy or tactic is working if:

Every fundraising activity has a declared core purpose, and
You have an empirical way to measure its effectiveness.

Here’s why it’s difficult to do this at a smaller nonprofit. Smaller nonprofits tend to have multiple purposes for each project, and personal forms of measurements.

Let’s take appeal letters as an example…

A smaller nonprofit will usually give multiple core purposes for sending an appeal letter: “We send appeal letters to update our donors on our work, and to inspire our donors, and to raise money.”

And most of the ways the appeal performance is judged are personal: the ED judges whether it was in his voice, the Board Member judged whether his mother would read a letter that long, and (maybe) someone has expectations for the gross revenue.

It’s almost impossible to measure whether something is “working” or not when you’re juggling three unranked criteria and multiple personal forms of measuring success.

Contrast that to the following…

When each fundraising activity has one core purpose: “We send appeal letters to raise money.”

And the appeal is judged according to empirical fundraising metrics: “was the response rate above 3.5%, the average gift above $75, and did we meet our Net Revenue target of $43,500?”

With that kind of clarity of purpose and metrics, it’s easy to figure out whether the appeal “worked” or not.

So, back to question in the webinar about whether to send printed annual reports. The challenge (and it can be a formidable challenge, sometimes) is to define the core purpose for sending the printed annual reports to donors, as well as empirical measurement targets.

For instance, we could use metrics like:

Donors who receive the printed annual report are 5% more likely to be retained than donors who don’t; or
The annual report will raise more than it costs to produce and send.

Great, now we’ve got something we can measure.

What doesn’t work are criteria like:

“Our major gifts officers really like to have it when they go meet with donors in person,” or,
“[NAME] on the Board says we must have one if we are going to be perceived as professional.”

Criteria like that hold nonprofits hostage, because when deciding between different people’s wants and preferences, someone always loses. It’s often easier to “just keep doing the thing” because the alternative is hurt feelings, the highest-ranking person getting their way, or people leaving their jobs.

(I could write several blog posts on this alone because it’s partially responsible for the crazy turnover in our sector, and it’s what causes many nonprofits to be unable to grow – they don’t really know how effective their fundraising is or isn’t, and they can’t cancel anything because every project and strategy is someone’s pet.)

So… if your organization has limited resources… and you want to be able to make good decisions in order to grow… what you want are defined core purposes and empirical metrics.

Then you can have more fruitful discussions about how to improve your fundraising, which will lead to raising more, which will increase your organization’s impact.

Want Your Fundraising to Get Luckier?

Steven Screen | May 5, 2026May 4, 2026Repeat

Jason Roberts is an entrepreneur and writer who has a simple idea he calls “luck surface area.” It’s a useful tool for how to think about your organization’s fundraising, and here’s the gist:

The amount of good luck that comes your way is roughly equal to how much you do, multiplied by how many people know about it.

Doing × Telling = Amount of Luck

I love this idea because it names something we all already intuitively know: the more you do, and the more you’re out there, the more things tend to happen. (And it’s good to mention that some of those things that happen are good, and some are bad.)

This aligns perfectly with something we see in fundraising all the time: when organizations increase the amount of fundraising they send to individual donors, they receive more “unplanned” (lucky) gifts.

But there’s one thing to watch out for: you can’t just “tell” people what your organization is doing. That results in the kind of awareness that’s not particularly valuable. Make sure you are asking people to get involved.

The asking is where the lucky breaks come from:

The donor who upgrades her gift because your e-appeal happens to land on a good day for her
The board member who forwards your appeal letter to a friend who’s been looking for a cause
The lapsed donor who comes back because you invited her to get involved
The major donor who finally takes the meeting because she missed the first three messages

None of those things happen if your organization stays quiet. They only happen if your organization shows up – often, and on purpose.

(And yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “We don’t want to bother our donors.” I’d gently suggest that your donors are less bothered than you fear, more forgetful than you’d like, and far more tolerant of additional asks than you think. But that’s a different blog post.)

So if you want 2026 to be a luckier year for your nonprofit, that means one more email in October. It means an ask at the end of your spring newsletter, along with a reply card, instead of a hint and a URL. It means sending a new mailing in February. It means picking up the phone and calling a donor you haven’t heard from in a while.

Each one of those actions is a small expansion of your surface area. Each one is another chance for something good to happen.

Never Interrupt Your Donors When They’re Being Generous

Steven Screen | April 30, 2026April 28, 2026Ask

My mentor used to tell a story about “the $100 donors.”

He was serving a large national charity that had approximately 250,000 active donors at the time. The charity noticed that every time they sent out an appeal, a large group of donors would each give $100.

A person at the charity was worried they were going to “burn out” those $100 donors, so he decided to remove all $100 donors from the next few appeals.

My mentor always talked about how “three bad things happened, two in the short term and one the long term”:

The $100 donors stopped giving. They just stopped. Thousands of them gave to one appeal, and none of them gave to the next appeal.
The organization raised a lot less money. Their appeals simply raised less than they used to, and the organization accomplished less.
When the $100 donors were added back into appeals months later, some of them started giving again, and a significant percentage of them never gave again.

One person’s fear that “their donors were going to get burnt out” was given more weight than the behavior of thousands of donors. Because of that, the organization raised less money and lost many of those donors.

Hearing this story, you can see how that was a big mistake. But at the time, the person’s worry sounded strategic. I’m sure the reasoning was something like, “Let’s not burn these donors out. Let’s let them rest, and then they will give more later.”

That reasoning sounds smart because we all have fears around asking too often. And the idea that “we can ask less often and will somehow raise more” is very attractive. So it’s easy to say yes to suggestions like this.

But because of stories like this one, and 30+ years of fundraising experience, at Better Fundraising we’ve learned to assume abundance instead of letting our fears put boundaries around donor generosity.

There’s a great quote from Napoleon, who said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Here’s how that applies to this story and fundraising: “Never interrupt your donors when they’re being generous.”

The Bad Part of the Story

Steven Screen | April 28, 2026April 27, 2026Report

The bad part of the story helps us know how good the good part of the story is.

If your donors don’t know the “bad parts” – what things were like for a person before your organization helped, the emotions of the person when they were in need – your donors will never know how powerful your work is.

Because they don’t know how powerful your work is, your fundraising won’t raise as much money.

The “after” isn’t particularly interesting or powerful if you don’t know the “before.”

Transactional Donors

Steven Screen | April 23, 2026April 20, 2026Repeat

If anyone at your nonprofit has ever said something like, “We don’t want transactional donors,” keep reading.

This belief sounds good on the surface, but it’s limiting your growth.

Instead, you want to purposely make your nonprofit attractive to “transactional donors” for two reasons:

Revenue. A lot of “transactional donors” giving gifts can add up to a lot of revenue and mission impact.
Many “transactional” donors, through the action of giving, will develop into true believers over time.

Larger nonprofits have long known that many of their best donors are “transactional donors” who gave one small gift, had a good experience, gave again, and developed through habit and experience into true believers. (Recent brain science is catching up to this phenomenon. In his incredible book Atomic Habits, James Clear calls this “identity-based habits.” He says that most people believe that “belief drives action” when it’s more often true that “action drives belief.”)

So, it’s smart for nonprofits to develop low-priced offers, and to make your fundraising accessible, so that your organization becomes attractive to “transactional donors.” And once you attract and cultivate “transactional donors,” some of them will through their actions develop into true believers.

It’s emotionally easy to prefer true believers. It’s enjoyable to meet with true believers, and talk to them at events, and be appreciated by them.

But don’t accidentally let personal preference cause your organization to have less impact.

You want both kinds of donors if you really want to grow.