Steven, Author at The Better Fundraising Company

Your All-Important First Thank You/Receipt

Steven | June 4, 2019June 4, 2019Thank

My theory is that the Thank You/Receipt you send to a brand new donor is one of the most-opened, most-read messages you will ever send.

With your first touch point after a donor’s first gift, she begins to form her opinion of how important she is to your organization… or not.

Is she important and meaningful… or a small cog in a big machine?

Are you going to talk to her about her gift… or tell her more about yourself (your organization)?

Are you going to use boilerplate language that’s about your whole organization… or customized language that speaks to the specific event or offer she gave to?

Ask yourself: what kind of letter would YOU like to receive? Which kind of organization would YOU rather give to?

Your New Donor Gives to LOTS of Organizations

She’s constantly scanning for organizations that help her make the change she wants to make in the world.

And she gave your organization a gift. She picked you!

How will you respond?

You’ve already made a favorable impression on her – she gave a gift, after all.

But this is your chance to confirm her first impression.

This makes the first sentence of your Thank You/Receipt copy the most important sentence.

It’s your first sentence that tells your donor:

Are you really grateful for her gift, or are you just writing to acknowledge it?
Are you writing to thank her for her generosity and what she’s going to accomplish, or are you writing to tell her more about your organization?

Because your donor is trying to get a feel for your organization. She’s trying to decide whether her gift to you was a good idea… or not.

So go look at the language – and especially the first sentence – of the Thank You/Receipt package you send to first-time donors. Make sure it acknowledges that it’s her first-ever gift. Make sure you mention your donor twice as much as you mention your organization. Make sure your first sentence is short, easy to read, and makes a great first impression!

Beliefs that Cause Small Organizations to Raise Less Money, Ranked

Steven | May 29, 2019May 29, 2019Ask

Here’s a quick list of the beliefs that – according to me – keep smaller nonprofits from raising more money.

Please note that I’m specifically focusing on when you’re talking to everybody – your “mass donor communications.” This is your direct mail, your email, your website, your social media, etc. I’m not talking about your grant application, or your major donor who is also a Board Member.

Here’s the list, and it’s ranked by things that do the most damage to fundraising effectiveness:

Believing that you have to list or explain everything that your organization does
Believing it’s wrong to share the needs of your beneficiaries
Believing that your donors are unique
Believing that your donors give because your organization is good at what it does
Believing that what makes you feel good about your organization is what will make donors give

If your organization has any of those beliefs, you’ll see them in your mass donor communications. So go look for them. And if you find them, replace them with an approach that’s been proven to work better!

A System to Thank the Right Donors the Right Ways at the Right Times

Steven | May 23, 2019May 23, 2019Thank

I want to share some simple best practices for your Thanking system.

Think of these as our recommended “default settings” for a system that thanks the right donors the right way at the right time.

And I want to acknowledge right away that you don’t have to do exactly what I suggest below. But in my experience, you want to be close.

There’s no magic to any one of these things. But there is fundraising magic to doing all of them on a regular basis.

Here’s the list…

Mail out a printed receipt letter, within 24 to 48 hours, for all individual gifts.
- You don’t need to do this for monthly donors.
- Include a reply card and a reply envelope. Here’s why.
For gifts received via your website, your system should send out an immediate autoreply.
- For smaller organizations, I recommend sending a printed receipt even if you send an e-receipt. For those smaller organizations who struggle to find new donors and keep their existing donors, being “extra thankful” to a donor is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.
Make sure the receipt letter (printed or electronic) directly reflects the donor’s intent when they made the gift.
- This means you want to have custom receipts for each piece of fundraising you send out. For instance, if your appeal asks donors to “give to help during the summer slump,” the first paragraph of your letter should say something like, “Thank you for giving a gift to help during the summer slump” and then reuse words and phrases used in your appeal. Why do this? Because when your donor gives to the summer slump (or to your event, or whatever) and you send her Thank You that talks about your 14 programs and how effective your organization is, she thinks you did not do with her gift what you said you were going to do. You want to avoid that!
The text/letter portion of your receipt should be more about the donor and less about your organization.
All gifts over a certain amount should receive a call and a hand-written note from your Executive Director/CEO within 48 hours. You get to decide what that amount is, based on how much time your ED/CEO will allot to make those calls and write those notes. In other words, if your ED is willing to call five donors a week for this program, lower the gift threshold so that she gets to make about five calls a week.

Thanking Systems can get super complex. This one should get you started. Tweak it as necessary per your organization.

But remember: build your system to Thank and retain the donors who are giving the highest amounts!

How to Thank Your Donor So She Actually Feels Thanked

Steven | May 21, 2019May 20, 2019Thank

The goal of your Thank You and/or Receipt package is not just to acknowledge your donor’s donation.

Any organization can do that.

Any autoreply or receipt letter can do that.

Your goal should be to make your donor feel thanked, appreciated and important.

How?

I shared this last Friday, but it’s worth sharing again…

When you thank her for helping your organization do its work, you’ve make it about you, about your organization.

What you want to do is make it about her. So, thank her for her generosity. Tell her what her gift is going to do (instead of saying what your organization is going to do). Tell her how important she is to your organization.

When you do that, you’ll find that most of your Thank You/Receipt copy is about her. And less of it is about your organization.

Less about You, More about Her

Donors are inundated with requests for support. In the United States, there’s one nonprofit for every 200 people. And almost all of those organizations talk about themselves. Endlessly.

But a very few of them have learned the secret: your donors are more interested in themselves – their lives, their values, their impact – than they are in your organization.

So if you talk to donors about their lives, their values and their impact, they will finally feel like a nonprofit “gets” them. They’ll feel that there’s a nonprofit that’s working on their behalf – trying to help them do what they want to do – instead of just another nonprofit trying to sound great to get their next donation.

Do you feel the fundamental difference? The posture of gratitude for what the donor did, not for what she helped your organization do?

If you can embrace that fundamental difference, and start communicating to your donors that way, you’ll begin to build a tribe of loyal donors who will give you more gifts, larger gifts, and will give to you for longer.

Summarizing and Closing This Chapter on Fundraising Offers

Steven | May 16, 2019May 16, 2019Ask

Why write eleven blog posts on fundraising offers? More posts on one subject than we’ve ever done before?

Because your offer is that important.

In every piece of fundraising you send out, what you say will happen when a donor gives a gift matters a LOT. (Our clients’ success is directly related to our focus on helping them develop and deliver great offers.)

Here are the five most important ideas from this series:

An “offer” is the main thing a fundraising piece says will happen when the donor gives a gift.
Some offers work better than others. Your job is to figure out which one(s) works best for your organization.
You’ll raise more if you ask your donor to help someone/something that needs help now. Another way to say the same thing: an offer will work best when there is a current need for the thing that your offer promises. This is radically different from the standard approach of, “Here’s a story about someone we’ve already helped, please support our work.”
You’ll tend to raise more if you help donors understand what size gift is needed to make a meaningful difference.
One of the reasons offers work well is because they cause your fundraising to be less about your organization, and more about your cause or beneficiaries.

“Offers” are complex. But when you understand what they are – and understand how to make good ones – you’ll start raising more money immediately.

A good offer serves donors (and potential donors) by helping them understand, quickly, the powerful difference they can make with a gift. That’s far more important than most organizations realize – and can be the key to your success.

Read the entire series:

Offers for Major Donors

Steven | May 14, 2019May 16, 2019Major Donor Fundraising

Today’s topic is a complex subject. But I’ve done the work to be able to talk about it in a succinct manner.

The topic? Using offers to increase major donor giving.

Three main ideas for you…

Offers for Major Donors: Under-Utilized, but Very Effective

Presenting a major donor with a specific thing that their gift will do for a specific amount of money is a very powerful tactic.

But in my experience, too many nonprofits stop using specific offers when their donors move up and into major donor status. All of the asks move into the generic “support our mission” approach.

Do not remove specific offers from the toolbox you use to cultivate and upgrade your current major donors.

One of the main reasons our major donor consulting practice is thriving is because we help organizations develop specific offers for their majors. Those offers usually result in higher giving and higher retention rates.

There are Two Main Ways to Create Offers for Majors

The first way: use the same offer you use for your mass donor, but in greater quantities.

Instead of “$50 provides supplemental math training to a student for a week,” say “$1,500 provides supplemental math training for an entire classroom for one week” or “$4,500 provides supplemental math training for all the 3rd grade classes at a school for one week.”

All you’re doing here is using large multiples of a smaller offer. But (and this is important) you are grouping those multiples into the right-sized groupings for major donors.

The second way: create custom offers for major donors.

This is often done by reviewing program budgets to find line items at an amount a specific donor might give. For instance, say you’re a community Arts organization and your rent for the year is $20,000. You could say the following to a donor:

“Your gift of $20,000 will provide a headquarters for our organization for an entire year. You’ll make it possible for the entire team to have a place to work together, to meet, and to work to preserve the local Arts and artists that you care about so much.”

Note: this raises an issue of designated vs. un-designated giving, which is not the subject of this post. In my experience, organizations that are set up to raise both kinds of giving tend to have the most success.

A “Donor-Shaped Hole”

I’ve shared the concept of how all of your fundraising pieces should have a “donor-shaped hole” in them: an obvious role for your donor to play in an appeal, at an event, in your organization.

The trick with major donors is to create the right-sized hole for each donor, while not ignoring the fact that some of your majors would like to accomplish specific things with their gift.

That’s the reason offers work for major donors, too. An offer shares a specific need that allows a major donor to support your organization, your beneficiaries or cause, AND feel like they’ve accomplished something specific. For some donors, that’s a powerful combination.

Too many organizations’ major donor fundraising comes down to communicating, “You can give a lot of money, please support us.”

That’s just not as powerful an offer as, “Here’s something powerful and specific that needs to be done to help, will you do this?”

It usually takes more work to create and refine offers for major donors. But it’s worth it.

Read the entire series:

Half As Important

Steven | May 9, 2019May 16, 2019Ask

Good Lord. Why in the world have we written nine blog posts on fundraising offers?

Here’s why:

Donor-centric writing is half as important as your fundraising offer
Organizational-centricity is half as important as your fundraising offer
Your organization’s or ED’s “voice” is half as important as your fundraising offer
How effective your organization is – that’s half as important as your fundraising offer
Your visual brand is half as important as your fundraising offer
How well-written (or not) the piece is – that’s half as important as your fundraising offer

In other words, in your mass donor fundraising, how you deliver your fundraising offer is half as important as what your fundraising offer is.

(Offers are also important for your major donor fundraising, which we’ll talk about in the next post.)

How do we know that those things are about half as important? Here’s how…

The 40 / 40 / 20 Rule

I learned this rule in 1993, and I find it just as true today:

40% of the success of any fundraising is who you are talking to.
- For instance, if you’re talking to major donors, you can expect to raise more money than if you’re talking to non-donors.
40% of the success of any fundraising is the Offer.
- As this blog series has shown, the “offer” of any fundraising piece (letter, email, newsletter, etc.) is what you promise will happen when a donor gives a gift. The better your offer, the more money you’ll raise.
20% of the success of any fundraising is the “creative” – how you deliver your offer.
- This is the writing style, whether you’re donor-centric or not, the typeface you use, the header on your email, etc.

Note that in the list I started off with, all of those things are in the 20%.

All of those things at the top are half as important as whatever offer you’re using.

Here’s What You Should Do

Any time you’re creating a fundraising piece that’s going to all your donors, be more concerned with what your offer is than with how the piece delivers the offer.

In other words, spend more time thinking about how you’re going to describe what will happen when a donor gives a gift. Spend less time trying to sound like your Executive Director, or with getting your grammar just right.

Because most organizations spend most of their time on how they write. On “getting their voice right.” Or on using brand colors. And those things matter half as much as what you promise will happen when your donor gives a gift.

Spend more time on the portion of your communications that makes the most difference. Spend less time on the portion of your communications that makes the least difference.

Read the entire series:

How to Make Sure a Low-Priced Offer Does NOT Produce Small Gifts

Steven | May 7, 2019May 16, 2019Ask

Here’s a question I get every time an organization is thinking about using a good fundraising offer with a low price point:

“OK, so our offer is $7. Are we going to get a ton of $7 gifts? Aren’t we going to raise less money this way because our donors are going to give less?”

The short answer is:

Not if your Ask Amounts for each donor are at or above what that donor gave last time.

Let me explain…

Offer Amount vs. Ask Amount

There’s a difference between your Offer Amount and your Ask Amounts.

Your Offer Amount is the cost of your offer – the cost to do the thing you promise will happen if a donor gives a gift. (We’ve talked about how those amounts should usually be less than $50.)

Your Ask Amounts are the amounts you list for your donor to give on your reply card. They often look something like this:

[ ] $50
[ ] $100
[ ] $150
[ ] $_______

Those are your Ask Amounts. (This is also often called “gift ask string” or “gift ask array” but we’re going to refer to them as Ask Amounts for clarity’s sake.)

Think of it this way:

Your Offer Amount is how much it costs for the donor to do one meaningful thing.
Your Ask Amounts are how much you’d like the donor to give today.

Make sense? Still with me?

How Smart Organizations Raise More Money

This is simple to explain, but it takes a bit of work to do. But here’s what the smart organizations do:

They customize the Ask Amounts for each and every donor.
The customized Ask Amounts for each donor are in increments of the Offer Amount.

Here’s what that looks like. Say I had recently given a donation of $100 to an organization. And they were writing me with an offer of “$35 will train one volunteer to advocate for our cause.” My Ask Amounts would look something like:

[ ] $105 to train 3 advocates
[ ] $140 to train 4 advocates
[ ] $210 to train 6 advocates
[ ] $______ to train as many advocates as possible

There’s a lot going on in that example that’s helpful.

First, the Ask Amounts are all in $35 increments – increments of the Offer Amount. Because remember, your whole letter (or email, or newsletter, or event) should be about the Offer. So it will make more sense to your donor if your reply card has amounts that are based on the offer you are writing them about.

Second, the beginning Ask Amount is at or above how much I gave last time. This is key to helping donors give how much they gave last time… or more!

Third, the description text (“…to train 3 advocates”) describes how many of the outcomes my gift will fund. This helps donors know exactly how much good their gift will do. It’s a proven tactic.

To do this, most smaller organizations use Excel to calculate the Ask Amounts and Outcome Amounts (“3 advocates”) for each donor. Then they merge in those amounts onto the reply card. Get in touch if you’d like a sample Excel file that shows how that’s done.

This takes real work. It’s worth it.

The Benefits to You

When your Offer Amount is low, and your Ask Amounts are at or above how much your donor gave last time, two positive things happen:

More people respond because your barrier of entry is so low. In other words, more people respond because it costs so little for them to make a meaningful difference.
You’ll raise more money because donor’s gifts will usually be at or above what they gave last time.

Increasing the number of people who respond + keeping their gifts at the same size or larger = more money for your cause!

Read the entire series:

What About Internal Experts Who Don’t Like Fundraising Offers?

Steven | May 2, 2019May 16, 2019Ask

There are people at your organization who will not like a good fundraising offer (even though a good offer will raise your more money).

Let’s talk about why – and what to do about it.

‘That’s not the whole picture’

A good offer presents only a part of what your organization does. It purposefully does not present the whole picture.

This will feel “wrong” or “not true” to internal experts.

But a better word would be “incomplete.” And remember, we’re being incomplete on purpose.

So here’s what I say to internal experts all the time:

“You know more than our donors do. You understand the depth and breadth of what we do and why we do it. But donors don’t understand the whole picture. And they shouldn’t need to in order to donate! When we only have a few moments of a donor’s attention – in the mail or email or a brochure – we don’t have time to give them the whole picture. And organizations like this one have found that they raise more money when they talk about just one compelling part of what they do. Fundraising done that way feels incomplete to experts like you. But to most donors it feels just right.”

‘But if our donors knew more about what we do, they would give more’

There’s a common feeling at nonprofits (you’ve probably heard it said around your office) that, “If our donors knew more about what we do, they would give more!”

In some cases that’s true, like at an event where you have a donor’s attention for a longer period of time. But it’s basically never true in direct mail, email, or in social media.

In your mail and email, if you try to tell donors “more about what you do,” you’ll raise less money. Trust me, I’ve tried. A lot. And failed. A lot.

And here’s what I say to internal folks who believe this myth:

“I know it feels to you like ‘if our donors knew more about what we do, they would give more.’ That can be true in cases where we have a lot of time with donors. But in the case of mail and email, donors are deciding what to read, delete and recycle really fast. We find that telling donors a lot about one thing your organization does works better than telling them about all the things that your organization does.”

‘This is Too Emotional’

As we’ve talked about, a good fundraising offer is best delivered with a lot of emotion. And because a good offer keeps things simple, you have more time/space in your letter or email to talk about emotions.

Internal audiences often find this approach “too emotional.” They also often say that they don’t want to “emotionally manipulate donors.”

Two rejoinders for you.

First, the emotion is not manipulating anybody. It feels overly emotional to internal experts because they are experts! Experts are professionals. They know their stuff. They have removed most of the emotion. They think in terms of inputs and outputs, systems and outcomes.

But your donors are not experts. And for the VAST majority of donors, giving is an emotional experience.

For those donors, hearing an organization talk about what it does (in the way an expert would talk about it) feels dry, full of jargon, and a bit like a lecture.

And I’m here to tell you that, in test after test after test, “dry, full of jargon and a bit like a lecture” does not work very well in the mail or email.

Second, if brain science has taught us anything about giving in the last 70 years, it’s that people give for emotional reasons. Sure, foundations give for more rational reasons. And some major donors give for rational reasons.

But the vast majority of donors, the vast majority of the time, are giving because their emotions have been touched. So you want to include emotions. You’ll be more effective when you do.

The best recent example of donors giving “irrationally” is Notre Dame. Repairing a centuries-old building seems to pale in comparison to curing cancer, right? (For more on this, read Jeff Brooks’ blog post, or this tweet from Angela Cluff.)

So here’s what I say to internal people who think a certain type of fundraising is too emotional:

“You know everything we do and why we do it. You’re an expert. But our donors aren’t experts. They think about our cause / beneficiaries because their emotions have been touched at some point, not because they’re experts in our field. So if we tap into their emotions – which are the reasons they became our donors in the first place – we have a better chance of getting a gift. What may seem overly emotional to you doesn’t feel that way to a donor. To a donor, it reminds them why they care. And that’s why they donated before, and will donate again.”

‘But we need to tell donors how effective we are!’

The final piece of pushback we receive goes something like this, “But we need to tell donors how effective we are!”

No, you don’t.

I’ve created thousands of very effective fundraising offers that never mention whether the organization is effective or not.

And when a mailing or email spends much time talking about how effective an organization is, that mailing or email tends to raise less money.

Why? Because your organization’s efficacy is not one of the main reasons people give in response to letters or emails.

Here’s a simple way to put it: your organization’s efficacy matters, but it’s something like the 7th most important thing that matters. And you’ll raise more money if you make sure you do a great job talking about thing #1, and thing #2, etc. Then – if you have time/space left – mention how effective you are.

Just know that it’s not the most important thing to donors, and treat it accordingly.

Here’s what I say to internal people who want to include an organization’s effectiveness:

“Your effectiveness makes you great at what you do, and sharing it with foundations, government organizations and certain major donors is exactly what you should do. But in a letter or an email, most donors are taking just a few seconds to decide whether they care about what we’re doing. That’s the big hurdle we’re trying to jump. So we spend our time talking to them about what they care about, not about how effective we are.”

Good Luck!

I hope these ideas will be helpful as you respond to people at your organization who don’t prefer fundraising that uses an offer.

It’s a rare person who can immediately change their mind, so you should expect resistance to this new way of communicating to your donors.

All of these ideas are meant to help people who are experts in your field realize that there are people who are experts in fundraising. It’s a profession that’s done countless tests to determine what works best in the mail and in email.

These ideas are meant to help people who are experts realize that they are different from their donors. And that’s the first (and possibly biggest) step to unleashing your organization’s fundraising potential!