Steven Screen

Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 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.

Your Fundraising Should Be MORE Repetitive

Steven Screen  |  Repeat

I often say, “In fundraising, repetition is the best friend you don’t know you have.”

Many people literally can’t believe I would say something so crazy.

But it’s true. Using repetition as a tool is the biggest lesson that advertising & marketing have to teach us fundraisers.

This post will tell you why that’s true, and how to use this idea to raise more money.

Two Reasons for Repetition

There are two reasons your fundraising materials — and all of your fundraising — should be more repetitive:

  1. Your donors don’t read the whole thing. They skip and skim.
  2. Humans often need to hear a message multiple times before they take action. And your donors are humans.

As always, this post is an attempt to explain what we’ve seen in head-to-head testing. Put another way, we know from testing that repeating the right things will increase how much money you raise, and this is an attempt to explain why.

Note: this idea is especially important for smaller organizations who are trying to make ‘the leap’ to the next level in revenue. Being more repetitive is counter-intuitive. It’s something your board or E.D. might push back against. But if you embrace it you’ll start raising more money both immediately and in the long term.

Your Donors (and Potential Donors) Don’t Read the Whole Thing

People don’t read your whole letter . . . or email . . . or newsletter, etc. (Except for your board, they read everything to find errors.)

If you want to make ‘the leap’ to the next level of income, you need to wrap your mind around this. People don’t read/watch/listen to the whole thing. They skim, they jump around.

If you want evidence of this, go check out the work of Siegfried Voegele.

So to increase the chances that your donor sees your main message (usually your call-to-action) you repeat it multiple times. That way, as your donor is skimming your fundraising, there’s a greater chance they will see what you want them to do.

Remember: you go through your fundraising with a fine-toothed comb, reading from the top to the bottom, looking at every detail. But most of your donors just glance at it. Repeating your main idea increases the chances that even your “glancers” will read what you want them to read.

This makes it difficult (at first) to write effective fundraising, by the way. We learn in school to set up an argument, tell a story, and then make our point. But the most successful fundraising tends to make it’s point, tell you why the point is so important, and then make it’s point again. Writing that way is a learned behavior.

Humans Often Need to Hear a Message Multiple Times Before They Take Action

You know this from your own life; telling a busy co-worker something multiple times, or talking to a friend who is doing something else at the same time.

It’s a good idea to assume that your donors are busy, or are looking at your fundraising and doing something else at the same time.

Smart fundraisers use this knowledge to do two things:

First, in their letters and emails, they’ll repeat key phrases and ideas multiple times. For instance, my rule of thumb is that each appeal letter should have three direct asks to the reader to send in a gift today. I usually put those three “asks” in the following three locations:

  1. Somewhere in the first three paragraphs
  2. Somewhere in the last three paragraphs
  3. In the P.S.

Because your donors are skipping around, if you only put your ask in one place in your letter, a whole bunch of donors just got your letter but don’t know you’d like them to send a in a gift. That’s a recipe for raising less money than you could be.

Second, smart fundraisers ask donors to do the same thing multiple times during the year. Because they know that of the donors who saw the message the first time you sent it, not all of them were convinced to make a gift.

Say you’re a community museum that has a hard time raising money with your general appeals, but the one time each year you ask your donors to ‘send a local child to the museum’ you raise a lot of money. Well, next year ask you donors to send a child to the museum twice (and do the things you need to do to make the funds undesignated).

To give you a real-life example, Jeff Brooks tells a great story about an organization that accidentally sent out the same exact appeal letter two months in a row. The same letter to the same people. What to know what happened?

The letter did better the second time!

The Consequences for Your Fundraising

It takes real discipline to use repetition in fundraising. Because when you do, your nonprofit will end up communicating more often to your donors, and communicating about fewer things to your donors.

Here’s a story to illustrate my point. We worked with an organization in the Midwest who raised about $10m per year. They talked about EVERYTHING they did, every program, all the time. They always wanted to say all the things!

We counseled them to make their fundraising simpler and more repetitive. For instance, in each letter and email they should only talk about one of their programs. Their response was an all-time classic:

“Steven, you don’t understand. We’re not a simple organization that just does one thing, like World Vision. We do so much more!”

Now, I’ve done some work for World Vision. They are anything but simple. So I explained that World Vision isn’t simple, but they are disciplined in their donor communications.

So we convinced the organization to get more specific about one program in one letter. That letter raised roughly double any of their other letters that year.

By the way, iIf you follow this advice, it’s totally possible that your board and staff will like your fundraising less. They will think your letters and emails are repetitive. They won’t all hear about their favorite programs or parts of your organization. But you’ll raise more money and will be able to do more good. Whether they like your fundraising or not should not be a core issue. The core issue should be whether your fundraising is effective or not.

And if you use repetition as a tool, your fundraising will be more effective.

Repetition at Year-End

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that repetition is one of your core tools to year-end fundraising success.

Your donors are busier than ever, and repeating the same message (and your call-to-action) is one of the best ways you can get noticed by them.

Our Year-End Digital Fundraising Toolkit is on sale right now for more than 40% off. Grab it. You’ll see exactly how to use repetition over the next few weeks – among lots of other tips-n-tricks – and you’ll raise a LOT more money this year!

Highlights from Storytelling Conference After-Hours Session, plus a Bonus Gift

Steven Screen  |  News and Events

So at the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference earlier this month in San Diego, I did an after-hours bonus session. A couple hundred people trusted me with two hours of their evening.

Note: get a deeply-discounted ticket to next year’s conference here.

The focus of my session was creating year-end fundraising that causes your donors to give gifts instead of deleting or recycling your materials. This post summarizes that special session. And provides you with a link to the actual presentation that night. And provides you with a secret squirrel discount code . . .

This is a long post. It’s more of a novella. Maybe a mini-festo. So grab a favorite beverage. And if you’ve read our free eBook on Storytelling for ACTION, much of this will sound familiar. But keep reading to see how to apply it to your year-end letters and emails.

To start, three ideas for you . . .

Your donor should have a role — and see herself — in every single story you tell.

This basically means that in your donor communications, you want to focus on your donor’s part of the story, not your organization’s part.

Here’s a real-life example: “Will you help us continue this important work with families?” Pay attention to how that phrasing positions the organization as the “hero.” The donor is given the role of “helper” or “partner.”

Here’s how we improved that phrase for the organization’s next appeal: “You can give moms like Julianne their own apartment, and counselors to help them recover.” That phrasing positions the donor as the hero and doesn’t even mention the organization.

That’s two different sentences about the very same organization. The appeal with the second sentence raised 8-times as much money. There’s more to it than one sentence, of course. But hopefully the example makes the point; focus on your donor’s role, not your organization’s.

What story you tell, and when you tell it, matters a LOT

When you are Asking for support — in appeal letters, e-appeals, fundraising events — you want to tell what we call a “story of Need.” This is a story where someone needs help now, today. Put another way, there is a problem that needs to be solved, today.

Most organizations only tell what we call “stories of Triumph.” These are stories where the person has already been helped, the problem has already been solved.

When you tell stories of Triumph, the only role left for your donor to play is “supporter” or “helper” or “partner.” It shocks most nonprofits to hear this, but that’s not the most attractive role you can offer your donors. And it doesn’t work as well as the following approach . . .

You want to tell a story of Need and then ask your donor if she will meet the need today. That story puts your donor in the role of Hero. Look at it this way:

Take off your organization hat and put on your donor hat. You’d rather be the Hero, right? So give your donors chances to be heroes – especially at year-end!

Pro tip: save your stories of Triumph for your newsletters, when you are Reporting back to your donors on what their gift accomplished.

You have a Big Story you need to constantly tell your donor

Your Big Story is really simple:

  1. Your donor is needed
  2. Her gift makes a real difference

You want to constantly say that to her and show that to her.

I can’t overemphasize enough how important this is. Most organizations spend their time telling their donors how good the organization is at it’s job. But for my whole career, again and again, I’ve seen that telling and showing your donors that their gifts are needed, and telling and showing them that their gifts make a difference, is the surest path to raising more money and keeping your donors for longer.

Your Year-End Fundraising Communications

So what does all this mean for your year-end communications? Take a look at my presentation from the Storytelling Conference, focusing on the last 10 slides, for the details.

Here’s the summary:

  1. Write to your donor about what her gift will do, not about what your organization is doing. If you’re an Arts organization, tell her that “your gift will preserve and promote the arts in your community in 2018,” instead of saying “Please support our programs to preserve and promote the arts in our community in 2018.”
  2. Tell her a story of Need. Don’t tell her how well things have gone in 2017, tell her how much her help is needed to achieve the outcomes you want in 2018. If you help homeless women and children, tell her that “your gift will provide safe housing for a mother and child –and keep them out of the cold–this January”, instead of “Thanks to you, we served 318 mothers and children in 2017.”
  3. Flat out tell her that her gift is needed and that she will have an impact! Phrase it any way you want. But say it loudly, clearly, and in multiple places.
  4. Final thought: focus on the deadline. Deadlines are magic for causing action in fundraising. If your year-end fundraising materials don’t mention the December 31st deadline early and often, you’re doing it wrong!

Now, to reward you for the half hour it took you to read this manifesto, I have a gift for you . . .

In my presentation, on slide forty-seven, there is a coupon code that will save you 25% on our year-end fundraising products

If you haven’t sent your year-end letter or Follow-up letter yet, save on the Successful Year-End Letter Samples.

If you’re already focusing on your online fundraising, save on the Year-End Digital Fundraising Toolkit.

With the coupon you’ll save 25% on your whole purchase, save a ton of time, and raise way more money than you did last year.

OK, now it’s up to you. It’s the most important month of the year for fundraising. Remember that your donors love to give, and go give them lots of chances to do so!

Thanks for Standing Up Like My Neighbor

Steven Screen  |  Uncategorized

Growing up, my next-door neighbor was an old guy named Mr. Barnett. He was kind, avuncular attorney. Great neighbor.

It wasn’t until later that I learned he was a hero. And it wasn’t until a long time after that I learned that you are, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I grew up on an island outside of Seattle. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the very first place during World War II that Japanese Americans were forcibly rounded up and relocated to internment camps.

Not the brightest moment in our history.

I learned later that Mr. Barnett was the attorney for the only Japanese American to challenge, through the legal system, the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes. Mr. Barnett took the course all the way to the Supreme Court, and was not a popular guy for doing so.

But he stood up for the men, women and children who were interred. And for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I was thinking about how I had no idea my next-door neighbor had done something so incredible. And my next thought was that most fundraisers have no idea they do something so incredible.

The deeper into my career I get (25 years!) the more I see that most fundraisers — and maybe even you — only barely grasp the important role you play.

You stand up for your beneficiaries. Who often have no voice.

You are their voice to people who have the resources to help.

Without fundraisers like you, how would they get help?

Like Mr. Barnett, you stand up for a person who needs justice.

And maybe the cause you work on isn’t one of the sexy ones, like “social justice.” Maybe it’s foundational like “supplemental math skills for elementary school kids.” Maybe you’re one of the few standing up for your cause. Maybe you’re the only one – like Mr. Barnett.

But you stand up.

Thank you.

As a fundraiser, you do fight for justice. Whether it’s for food or math skills. For immigrant rights or for a museum that preserves Quilting Arts. Over these next couple busy months, in the middle of this crazy year-end, remember this . . .

You are standing up for your beneficiaries or cause. Who often have no voice.

You are their voice to people who have the resources to help.

Thank you!

You Are More Important Than You Think

Steven Screen  |  Uncategorized

You already know that fundraising is so much more than writing your next appeal, or prepping for your next event, or talking to your Board.

But let me put words to how much more you do.

I think fundraising is creating a sacred connection between people who have resources and people who need help.

And that sacred connection is made by you and your fellow fundraisers. Which is amazing because less than 1 in 10 fundraisers actually likes asking for money. (That stat is based on my impromptu polls at conferences.)

I mention this today because it’s the busiest time of year. “Fundraising” seems like a series of tasks. Each day feels like a long list of things to do but not enough time to do all of them.

The difference between a fundraiser and a Fundraiser

I wish there was a difference in our field between “fundraiser” and “Fundraiser.” I think a person should only get the capital “F” if they know that fundraising isn’t ultimately about the money.

With training, it’s not that hard to be an effective fundraiser. Right? You can learn to be donor-centric. You can learn segmentation, and how you should spend more time (and money) on your Major donors than your Mass donors. You can learn to speak and write effectively. You can learn the difference between marketing and fundraising.

None of this is rocket science. There’s a set of accumulated wisdom our sector has created over the past 60 years, and it’s available to anyone with the drive to learn it.

But a person who knows all that AND knows — in their bones — that it’s not about the money? That’s a Fundraiser. That’s a person who is aware of, and loving, creating connections between donors and beneficiaries.

Notice I didn’t say ‘between donors and organizations.’ But that’s a post for another day.

But again, why take the time to write about and then send this to you today?

Because this is a call, to you, to be a Fundraiser

To know, in the midst of the year-end crazy, that you’re creating sacred connections. To know that your job is SO MUCH MORE than sending emails and pulling mailing lists. To feel — in your bones — the joy your donors have when they make a gift through your organization.

Do you feel that joy? Will you choose to feel it for the next few weeks? For every donor who gives a gift between now and midnight on the 31st? That’s a lot of joy!

Because if you do that, you’re going to LOVE the next few weeks. You’re going to write differently. You’re going to talk to donors differently.

And you’re going to raise a lot more money!

So please, when it gets hectic next week (or later today), remember the joy your work gives to donors. Remember the joy your beneficiaries get when they receive help. You’re doing that. That’s you. You’re a Fundraiser.

Lessons from 25 Year-End Fundraising Seasons

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Lessons from 25 Year-End Fundraising Seasons

This year will be my 25th year-end fundraising season. (In related news, I have a lot of grey hair.)

That means I’ve been a part of about 250 separate year-end campaigns for different nonprofits around North America.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned. Because we do lots of testing, pay close attention to what works, and have a pretty good handle on what works the best.

But before I do, allow me a brief aside. The thing I’m personally most excited about this year is the four low-cost products we just released. They take complex year-end fundraising campaigns and break them down into simple, easy-to-follow steps. They are written and designed so that you’ll learn what to do, when to do it, and how to say it. I couldn’t be more proud.

Today, I want to share how to think about year-end fundraising. It’s a short set of ideas that put you on the path to happy donors and full bank accounts.

Idea #1 – Your donors love to give, but they are busy

Before you do anything, just think about this for a moment. Your donors love to give! Share this idea with your staff and board. If you want to have a great year, you must remember that your donors love to give, but they are busy!

Most nonprofits think two unhelpful things:

  1. Our fundraising makes people give gifts they don’t really want to give.
  2. Every donor receives every message we send.

Neither of those things are true. And if you think those two things, you will only communicate with your donors a couple times in December. That’s a HUGE mistake.

Instead, remember that your donors love to give, but they are busy. They need to be over-communicated with during this busy season. (And if there’s a donor or board member who has already given their year-end gift, by all means remove them from the mailing list!) But for everyone else, you need to communicate to them often enough to break through all the noise, get their attention, and remind them to give you a gift.

Idea #2 – Think of your year-end fundraising as a service

That’s right. Not as fundraising, but as a service to your busy donors who love to give.

You are reminding them to do something they would love to do.

So what makes a good reminder?

  • A clear focus on the action you want them to take. In all your communications (letters, emails, your website, social) get to the point very quickly. Ask them to give a special year-end gift before the end of the year.
  • A clear focus on the deadline. Remind donors, again and again, that their special year-end gift is needed before the end of the year. Deadlines are magic in fundraising, and this is the best deadline you’ll ever have. Mention it early and often!
  • Remind them what their gift does. This is NOT a reminder of what your organization does with their gift. For instance, if you’re an Arts organization, don’t remind them that their gift ‘supports our programs to promote the arts…” Instead, remind your donors that their gift ‘supports the arts so that our community has a thriving arts scene and culture.’

Idea #3 – The only other ideas to add are reasons to give now

Resist the urge to talk about your upcoming capital campaign, or tell a story about somebody you’ve already helped.

The only other ideas to add are reasons your donor should give a gift right now. Things like:

  • Their gift will be doubled by a matching grant
  • Your organization has a shortfall and you need to ‘close the gap’ as quickly as possible
  • You have a big need for funds early in 2018 and the donor’s gift will help

The Main Point

You can do these things and still write a warm, personal letter or email. Really, it’s a matter of focus. Make sure you communicate the main things in a way that donors who just briefly glance at your letter will still get the point.

So of course you can talk about how it’s been a good year. And you can thank your donor for their previous generosity. You can even talk about how pretty the snow is.

But those should not be the main, most noticeable parts of your letter. If you write and design you year-end fundraising following the principles above, you’ll raise a lot more money!

How To Get Matching Funds from a Major Donor

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Major Donor Fundraising

Matching funds are the easiest way to make everything you do (appeals, events, newsletters, you name it) raise more money.

And your easiest source of matching funds are your major donors.

We’ve had great success helping our clients get their major donors to donate matching funds. When done correctly it engages the major donor, gives the major donor a chance to multiply their impact (who doesn’t like that?) and helps you raise more money towards your development goals.

Here’s how we go about it. And of course every major donor is different, but here’s the approach that’s worked for us . . .

Review your major donors for the right donor(s)

Look for a donor who either a) hasn’t given a gift yet this year, or b) you think has the capacity to give another gift at year-end. At year-end, I think approaching majors who haven’t yet given a gift this year is your best move.

Approach the donor with a question

Use the opening question of, “Would you like the chance to multiply your giving and increase the impact of your generosity?” You want to — right away — get the donor in the frame of mind that they can increase their impact by donating matching funds.

Share the stats with them

Make it clear to the donor that they will be multiplying the impact of their own giving. Here’s why: not only do they get their gift matched by the rest of your donors, but there’s additional giving that takes place because of the match!

Look at these stats from MailChimp. I would share these stats directly with your major donor, and talk about how their donation can make results like this possible:

  • Matching funds increase average gift size by 41%
  • Matching funds increase the # of donations by 110%
  • Matching funds increase revenue by 120% (and that’s not including the matching funds themselves!)

Do you see how a match does more than double the money you raise? You get 2x the original amount because you have the match, and the funds raised to match it. But then your fundraising performs better than average too! This is an instance where 1 + 1 = 2.5. THAT’s the opportunity you have to give your donor!

Give them a deadline

If your donor is interested but doesn’t commit, give them a deadline that’s reasonably soon. You want to make them feel like opportunities to multiply their impact like this don’t come around that often (which is true). Tell them that if they say “no” you are going to contact another donor because you need the match to increase fundraising results.

And if you haven’t heard from them by the deadline, contact them to check in. Then if you need to talk to another donor, talk to the next person on your list.

Having a match really is the easiest way to increase your fundraising results. And if you want those kind of increased results for your year-end fundraising? Figure out what major you should be talking to right now and approach them right away.

Say “Thank You” Like You Really Mean It

Steven Screen  |  Thank

Note from Steven: This is a guest post from Lisa, an experienced Development Director who is on the Better Fundraising team.

Your receipt letters are arguably the most-opened, most-read piece of mail (or email) you’ll ever sent to your donors. Are you giving them the attention they deserve?

When I started as the Director of Development at a local non-profit, the first thing I looked at was the receipting process. Why? Because the receipt letter was the first ‘touch’ a donor would receive after sending in their gift.

What I found was an organization that loved their donors but didn’t know how to thank them. It was common practice to hold on to the receipts until there were enough to mail at a bulk rate. This meant some donors were being asked for another gift BEFORE they had been thanked for their first one.

The receipts letters were generic so they could be used year around. There was no acknowledgment of the donor’s actual gift amount, or what their gift was used for.

Put on your “donor hat” for a moment. How would you feel about receiving a generic receipt after you’ve been asked again?

I would probably look somewhere else to donate my charitable dollars. And I believe many of their donors did.

So simply saying “thank you” IS NOT enough.

Better Fundraising understands the importance of saying thank you and how to say it well. It is part of their “virtuous circle” and the Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat system.

So what does it mean to thank donors well?

  • Let them know you received their gift in a timely fashion. Ideally, within 2-3 business days after you received their gift.
  • Be sincere and emotional in your thank letter. True gratitude shines through a well-written thank you.
  • Let them know what their gift was used for. For example, if you asked them to give a gift provide food and shelter, thank them for providing food and shelter.

And the thank yous don’t need to stop here! You can thank donors multiple times for their gift. By phone, text, online, at an event, a hand-written note. You can also develop a different thank you strategy for your mass, mids and major donors.

Thanking donors well should be part of your organization’s culture. If it’s not, start today!

To learn more about thanking donors (especially important this time of year!) watch Jim and Steven’s video on saying “Thank You.”

The False Assumption That Does Massive Damage

Steven Screen  |  Repeat

There’s an assumption most nonprofits make that does massive damage to their fundraising, their beneficiaries, and their donors.

When a fundraising letter, email or event does really well, too many nonprofits assume that they cannot do that same thing again.

Yet I know from experience (and lots & lots of testing) that the opposite is true! If something works, it has a very high likelihood of working again. And there are no longterm negative effects.

But between you and me, just saying this to nonprofits doesn’t change their behavior. They don’t believe it. It goes so strongly against their “common sense” that sometimes I think they literally can’t even hear me say it.

So let’s pull apart the assumption and take it piece by piece.

Assumption #1: “All our donors heard about this”

Unfortunately, “all our donors” didn’t hear about it. Less than half of them did. Take a look:

  • If it was a successful email, and your email open rate is 30%, then 7 out of 10 donors never saw your message.
  • If it was a successful direct mail piece, your open rate is maybe 50%, so 5 out of 10 donors didn’t even hear about it.
  • If it was an event, maybe a couple hundred people on your donor file heard about it. So hundreds, maybe thousands of people don’t even know it happened.

So instead of making assumptions, let’s embrace Reality #1: a maximum of half your donors heard about it, and it’s probably lower than that. If those donors liked it so much, why not send it again to give your other donors a chance?

Assumption #2: “We can’t repeat something, our donors will stop paying attention.”

Let me tell you a story. Storytime With Steven! Earlier in my career, I used to spend a couple million dollars a year buying radio ads all across the country. Our goal was to get each listener to hear the same ad three times in one week. 3 times in a week! Because when that happened we saw sales increase. The maxim we lived by was this:

  1. The first time a listener hears an ad, they barely notice it.
  2. The second time they hear it, they start to pay attention.
  3. The third time they hear it, they pay attention if they are interested.

The same principle holds true in fundraising. Unfortunately, fundraisers are afraid that donors will stop paying attention. But in my 25 years of fundraising I have NEVER seen data that showed donors paid less attention. There’s a story from a single donor or three, of course. Last year we had a client use the same offer in two mailings in a row because the first mailing did so well. They came to me really worried about “all the complaints” they were receiving. But when we checked, it was only about 15 complaints, half of were donors saying that the problem must be bigger than they thought for the organization to ask two times in a row. And in addition to those 7 or 8 complaints they received over 700 gifts.

It’s not a fun truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless: our donors aren’t paying as close attention as we’d like to think. So instead of assuming, let’s embrace the Reality #2: repeating your message helps your donors notice it, remember it, and be more likely to take action. Commercial advertisers and marketers know that repetition is one of their most important tools. (It’s also one of the reasons that “Repeat” is in Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat.)

Assumption #3: “Repeating messages will alienate our core donors.”

This is the only assumption that has a grain of truth. There are some donors that this could happen to. But the trick is to figure out who they are and treat them separately!

  • If there are board members who won’t like seeing a similar mail or email two times in a row, take them off the mailing list for the second impact.
  • If you’re going to use the same powerful ask at an event for the 2nd year in a row and you’re worried about a major donor, call that donor, tell them your plan, and ask them if they’d like to come.
  • If a donor complains, take them off your list for some of your impacts.

The mistake most nonprofits make is to take the personal preferences of a very small handful of staff & donors and apply that to all their donors. That’s a big mistake.

Instead of making an assumption, let’s embrace Reality #3: all our donors are not the same, let’s not take the preferences of a few close-in donors and apply them to the rest of our donors. We’ll learn what most of our donors like through asking them and closely watching the results.

So . . . next time . . .

Next time you have a successful fundraising effort – be it in the mail, or email, or an event — look for how you can make the same offer to your donors again. Soon. Because if a lot of your donors responded the first time, it’s likely to work as well or better the next time.

Listen, this fundraising thing you’re doing is not a test. It’s possible lives are at stake. We don’t have time for false assumptions, and we have to be willing to take a couple complaints from board members in exchange for raising thousands of more dollars and bringing joy to so many more donors!