Steven Screen

Have you ever wanted to know how to evaluate – and improve — your organization’s fundraising?

The Better Fundraising Co. is offering this FREE seminar to help Board Members and Executive Directors evaluate and improve your organization’s fundraising.  September 8, 9:30am-12:00pm, downtown Seattle.

Most Board members and E.D.s aren’t professional fundraisers, and have to rely on gut instinct and a small handful of experiences to govern and evaluate their organization’s fundraising.  This session will teach you what you need to know to be as helpful as possible!

What you’ll learn:

• The two performance metrics you should focus on: net revenue and retention rate
• The three things your organization needs to be doing, especially with Major Donors
• How Boards can govern their organization’s fundraising but still let the fundraisers do their jobs
• What successful donor-focused fundraising looks and sounds like

Jim Shapiro and Steven Screen will present what’s working and what’s not working in fundraising today – with real-life examples you can learn from – so that you can be more informed, help your organization, and help raise more money.  In honor of International Day of Charity, they’d love to help you and your Board be more effective at governing your organization’s fundraising – for free!

Sign up today!

The Nonprofit Storytelling Conference is in Chicago this November – and the conference is running an “early bird” discount for people who sign up by July 15^th.

Go here to learn more, sign up, and receive your discount.

An INCREDIBLE lineup will be presenting at the conference.  You’ll learn how you can use storytelling to engage your donors and raise more money.  And I can easily say that last year’s event in Seattle was the best conference I’ve ever been too.  The expertise, the camaraderie – everyone present wants to do their job better, and will happily share what they’ve learned with you.  It feels more like a family-reunion than a conference — only if you liked everyone in your family and you were all working towards the same purpose!

Jim is presenting on how you can use Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat to raise more money from your major donors.  Steven will be co-presenting with Tom Ahern and Jeff Brooks on how to make your donor newsletter a donor-delighting, money-raising machine.

We hope to see you there – and don’t miss out on getting a discount!

We’re reposting this graphic because it got a lot of traction recently.

Most organizations don’t realize that after their donors make a gift the donor doesn’ know what happened and they don’t know if their gift made a difference.

So the job of your follow-up communications are to convince your donors that their gift made a real, important difference!

Your Thanks You’s / Receipts should tell each donor that their gift was received, that it matters, and that is is appreciated.

Your Reports (Newsletters, usually) should show her how her gift helped make a difference in the life of a beneficiary.

If you Thank and Report well, each donor will know their gift made a difference.  And because they know their gift made a difference, they are FAR more likely to give your organization another gift.

So, do your donor communications close the loop?  Do your donors know their gifts made a difference?

If not, you have some work to do (and you should get in touch!).  And if you are Thanking and Reporting well, I hope you enjoy all the money you’re raising!

We looked at the fundraising performance of hundreds of nonprofits.  Big ones and small ones.  Here are the lessons from the most effective fundraising organizations:

• Ask your donors to send a gift to help a beneficiary in a specific way.
• Thank donors for exactly what they gave for.
• Report back to donors on what their gift accomplished.
• Repeat the steps above at least a couple times each year.  Each time you do, you’ll build trust, relationship, and revenue.

The lessons from successful organizations are really simple at their core: practice and get really good at Asking, Thanking and Reporting.  Master those three things and success will follow!

We talk a lot around here about “Reporting back to donors” so that they know the difference their gift made.

Because if they don’t know the difference their gift made, the chances they are going to give you another gift have flown out the window and landed on the doorstep of the next nonprofit they are going to support.

But I want to talk for a moment about the goal of your Reporting.  It’s to make your donor feel like she made a difference.   Not “understand” that she made a difference, or not “prove” that she made a difference, but FEEL like she made a difference.

And you do that by using stories, not statistics.

Internal staff and experts love statistics.  But most donors don’t.  In all the testing that I’ve done, making a big number or a statistic the main part of any fundraising piece will reduce the amount of money you raise.

Statistics and big numbers have their place.  But they should be supporting points, never headlines or first sentences.  To appropriate a famous quote from Steve Jobs, “If you see a big number or statistic, they blew it.”

Instead, tell compelling stories about people whose lives have been changed with help from the donor’s gift.  That’s the way to make a donor feel like she made a difference.

Aim your communications at donors’ hearts, not their heads.

When a donor gives you a gift something very important has happened.  Your organization has become part of her life.

It’s also true that she has become part of your organization’s life.  And unfortunately, that’s what most organizations focus on.  They say things like, “Thank you for partnering with us as we …”  Or they’ll solemnly say, “Your partnership helps us to complete our mission to…”

From the donor’s perspective, that’s a pretty big miss.

You’ll raise a lot more money if you adopt the posture that your organization is part of the donor’s story – not the other way around.

When your donor opens your communications, do you know what she’s hoping for?  Your donor is hoping that some organization – finally – will tell her a story that has her in it.  She doesn’t really want to hear a story about you.

She’s thinking, “If you’re just going to talk about yourself, leave me alone.  Don’t waste my time.”

In your communications with donors, are you talking about her?  About what she can do with her gift?  About what she has done with her gifts?  Or are you talking about all the stuff you’ve been busy doing?

Listen, at a donor-centric organization you’ll never hear the phrase, “We have to tell them what we’ve been doing!”  You’d hear something more like, “We have to show our donors what they and their gifts have done!”

You’ll know you’ve really embraced donor centricity when a phrase like “We have to tell our donors what we’ve been doing” sounds self-centered and awkward.