Steven Screen, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Simple Test

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

Here’s a simple test to run on your next piece of fundraising before you send it:

Glance at it and ask yourself: if you only had a few seconds to scan it and didn’t know your organization, would you know concretely how the world would be a better place if you gave a gift?

Because you’ll raise more money if your readers can quickly tell why their gift is needed and what it will make possible.

If you want to keep your organization around the size it is now, send out fundraising that takes readers a long time to learn what is being asked of them and what their gift will do. Because the only people who will read long enough to find out are your “true believers.”

But if you want to grow, a different approach is needed. To make your organization more accessible to people who aren’t “true believers,” you need to make it easy for a reader to understand, in around 5 to 7 seconds, why their gift is needed today and what their gift will make happen.

We have a tactic called “two letters in one” that we use to make the main idea accessible to anyone who glances at your fundraising and to give more of the details that a “true believer” might want, when they read more.

Because your ability to grow your mail and email revenue – and ultimately your organization’s impact – is unlocked when you send fundraising that activates everyone on your list.

What If Apple Advertised Like a Nonprofit?

Steven Screen | April 16, 2026April 9, 2026Ask

Here’s a fun thought exercise for you.

What if the companies that make phones (Samsung, Apple, Motorola) had to make TV commercials selling phones using the same messaging approach that many nonprofits use?

First of all, there would be no 30-second commercials. All the commercials would be 5 minutes long because someone at the company would say “we need to tell people everything about us before they will buy a phone from us.”

All the commercials would start by sharing what year the company was founded in.

The commercials would not talk about phones you could buy right now. They would only talk about phones they already sold a few months ago.

Each commercial would painstakingly detail how the phone was made and list any subcontractors. “Our previous model was so effective because we thoroughly vet our high-quality partners; the display was made by Samsung, the camera module was made by Sony, the display was made by LG, and our supply chain delivered all components to be lovingly assembled by Foxconn, our Chinese assembly partner.”

The ads would avoid naming any specific features of their phones, and would instead use concepts like “your purchase, like a pebble thrown into a pond, will cause ripples in your communicating power.”

There definitely wouldn’t be any urgency, because the CEO thinks urgency makes him look needy.

And at the end of these long commercials, the company would mention that their phones were available, but certainly not ask you to buy one today, that would be rude.

If that’s what commercials for phones were like, when a phone ad came on TV, people would switch shows or leave to go to the bathroom.

But, weirdly, that’s the approach fundraising letters take all the time!

My hope is that this thought exercise helps people see how deeply flawed the standard nonprofit approach is. When looked at in another context, when our fears around money and vulnerability aren’t part of the equation any longer, the standard approach just looks silly.

This blog, and Better Fundraising, have been growing for more than 10 years because our data-driven approach works far better than the standard approach.

If you’re reading this, and any of the fictional phone company approach resembled your organization’s approach, click here and say hi. Your donors have what we call “pent up giving” and you can be raising more money from them starting next month!

Treat Your Donors Like Partners (don’t just call them that)

Steven Screen | April 14, 2026April 6, 2026Thank

Donor-centrism gets a lot of bad press these days. (I even stay away from using the term sometimes because it can cause people to throw babies out with the bathwater.)

However, as Fundraisers and nonprofits, it’s still ethical and smart to honor an individual donor’s involvement in the work of a nonprofit. And there are two main ways to do that:

Write directly and clearly about their involvement. In other words, don’t write only about the organization, the beneficiary, or the community. Include the donor! When you’re asking for support, tell the donor “your gift will help pay for _______.” We’ve not inflated the donor into a “savior,” we’ve accurately described their involvement.
Report back in a way the donor understands. A person helping to fund your mission deserves to hear, in language and concepts that they don’t need a Master’s degree to understand quickly, how their gift made a difference.

If your donors really are your partners, treat them like partners.

Because in any partner relationship – spouse, business partner, co-worker, whatever – sometimes you briefly put your partner’s needs above your own. That’s all you’re doing here.

There’s no getting around the idea that from the standpoint of an individual donor, they aren’t “one of your donors,” you are one of their nonprofits.

When you talk to individual donors about their involvement, they are more likely to remain involved.

The Wave

Steven Screen | April 9, 2026April 6, 2026Repeat

Each individual donor is like a wave rolling across the ocean.

The wave formed before they met your organization. Their wave will continue rolling after they’ve left you.

Fundraising allows you to use some of a wave’s energy for your purposes.

But the creator of effective fundraising never forgets: your organization is tapping into their wave.

More Unsubscribes

Steven Screen | April 7, 2026March 26, 2026Repeat

I’ve talked before about how you want a regular flow of unsubscribes to your email list. This is what we see from organizations with growing email fundraising revenue.

So I was thrilled to find out that there’s a name for this phenomenon: The newsletter paradox.

Here’s the paradox:

When you offer your e-newsletter (or any email signup, really) people will join. Your list grows.
As soon as you send something to your list, you get unsubscribes and your list shrinks a little.

Put even more simply: your list grows when you do nothing; your list shrinks when you send things.

The result is what’s called a “sawtooth growth pattern” that looks like this:

This happens because when you send a fundraising email, some people on the list will look at it and think, “Oh, I don’t want to get these any longer” or “You know, I don’t care about this anymore.” And so they unsubscribe.

These unsubscribes often cause people to panic. However, they are a natural part of list building.

And if you only build your list but never ask anything of it, then you’re maximizing the wrong outcome: you’re optimizing “list size” instead of “money raised.”

The lesson here is that unsubscribes when you send out an e-appeal are natural.

Email and Snail Mail: in the way or on the way?

Steven Screen | April 2, 2026March 25, 2026Ask

As a follow up to my recent post about why organizations are still using email and snail mail to raise money, there’s one other idea I want to address.

This is for the people and organizations who are annoyed that they have to do fundraising in email and the mail.

This is like getting annoyed at having to go through Oregon when driving from Washington to California.

Oregon isn’t in the way, it’s on the way — if you want the fastest route.

Can you drive around Oregon and get to California? Sure, but it’ll take longer and be more expensive.

Can you get lucky and have someone give you a ticket on McKenzie Scott Airlines so you can fly to California? Sure, but the chances are pretty slim.

Fundraising in email and the mail isn’t “in the way” of a nonprofit raising more and having more donors; they are “on the way” to raising more and having more donors.

Why Use Email and Snail Mail?

Steven Screen | March 31, 2026March 25, 2026Ask

There’s a conversation we’re having more and more as young people enter the fundraising profession and older people on Boards are replaced with the next generation.

The conversation always starts with a question that goes something like this…

“Why should a nonprofit like ours get good at raising money via email and the mail, both of which seem like ‘legacy’ communication methods?”

We could talk about this for hours, but if this is coming up for your organization, let me give you a couple of quick reasons these tools are still so useful to so many nonprofits.

Email and the mail help small organizations scale. There are only so many people you can personally know, and only so many people who will go to your event. So the ability to communicate effectively with thousands of people at once is necessary in order to scale (particularly to break the “raising $1m annually from individual donors” threshold.)
Email and the mail make your organization more resilient and less fragile. Two ways. First, you want to have the skill of fundraising and being in relationship with donors even when you can’t meet with them. (We all saw what happened to event-driven organizations during the pandemic. Ouch.) Second, having a good mail and email program spreads your revenue across the entire year, so you’re not so dependent on the world running smoothly (no wars being started, no natural disasters) the month of your event.
The mail and email help you identify new mid- and major-donors. You watch giving patterns, you identify prospects, and you raise up your next generation of majors. (A friend of mine used to run the individual donor program for a national organization with hundreds of thousands of donors. He said, “Yes, we raise a lot of money with the mail and email, but our real job is to identify major donor prospects.”)

And that’s just three reasons. There are all sorts of other reasons, like “lots of majors still give via the mail” and “mail & email keep you in touch with Majors who don’t answer your attempts to get in touch” and “you aren’t dependent on the whims of the social media algorithm because you own the relationship.”

The mail and email are proven and effective; that’s why they’re still in use!

Story, not Summary

Steven Screen | March 26, 2026March 25, 2026Report

Next Tuesday (March 31^st) I’m giving a free webinar on how to “report back” to donors.

Here’s a sneak peak at one of my main points: when you are reporting, share stories, not summaries.

Here’s what I mean. Any time a nonprofit says something like, “We served 347 people last month,” they’ve shared a summary of all the work they’ve done.

Compare that to when a nonprofit says, “Let me tell you about Gerald, a gentleman we served last month.” That’s a story.

When a nonprofit says “we helped 347…” to individual donors, they are hiding 347 individual stories of impact behind a summary. And every one of those 347 could have been a story that caused a moment with a donor.

Individual donors are engaged by and motivated by stories, not summaries:

Summaries are impactful for people who have the context and time to unpack them. Share summaries with grantmaking organizations and foundations who are experts in your sector and have all the context and time they need to understand the summary. (And in your Annual Report, if you want to feature a bunch of summaries on a page or two, no problem.)
Stories are impactful for any human with just a few seconds, no knowledge required. Share stories to your individual donors in your email, direct mail and events.

Because if you can make your Fundraising interesting and powerful to any human with a few seconds to spare, and they don’t need to have any knowledge about your organization or sector, you just unlocked your ability to raise a lot more money from a lot more people.

Report with a story, not a summary.

They Didn’t Believe It

Steven Screen | March 24, 2026March 23, 2026Ask

I’ve written many times about how an organization’s beliefs about fundraising play a major role in how much money they can raise.

Case in point:

“The ‘stories an organization tells itself’ about fundraising have a greater effect on how much money they raise than the stories they tell their donors.”

Well, I have a new one for you.

I just returned from the fantastic Elevate conference, which is focused on helping nonprofits use their events to raise more money and cause more connections.

While at the conference, I had a conversation with a group of nonprofits who were extremely skeptical that they could raise money using the mail and email. It was clear that these smaller, event-driven organizations did not believe that it was possible to communicate powerfully enough in a letter or email to inspire a person to give.

Here was my advice to them. Don’t worry about the power of a letter or email to communicate your work. Instead, believe in the power of how much a donor cares about what your organization is trying to accomplish.

The donor’s desire to do something to help is so strong that a letter or email is all many donors need to send in a gift.

In the mail and email, you don’t need to convince donors. You need to believe that they already care, then give them a timely invitation to help fund compelling work that’s happening soon.