Ask Archives | The Better Fundraising Company

Assume Abundance

Steven Screen | January 22, 2026December 30, 2025Ask

As you begin your year, assume abundance.

When something bad happens, and you’re wondering if you can send an emergency email to your email list, assume abundance.

Later in the year, when you’re wondering if you can ask that major donor for a second gift, assume abundance.

When you’re architecting your fundraising event, and you’re discussing how to increase the average gift, assume abundance.

But there’s always fear around assuming abundance. We fear we’ll bother people, or offend people, or wear out our welcome.

I’ve been doing this for 30+ years now. The negatives we fear do not materialize, but assuming abundance does occasionally create a little friction. Case in point: just yesterday we heard from a client who “assumed abundance” last fall and began fundraising like it. They raised far more money at year-end than ever before. After sharing the results, they said: “we had a donor complain about our year-end appeal, and when our CEO met with that donor, the donor handed him a $1,000 check.”

To summarize: this nonprofit assumed abundance, raised more than ever before, experienced a little bit of friction, received a larger gift than they normally would have, and deepened a relationship with a major donor.

Assume abundance. Assume a tiny bit of friction.

It’s worth it.

For Individual Donors, There Is No ‘Later’

Steven Screen | January 15, 2026December 29, 2025Ask

When your individual donors receive your fundraising in the mail or email, they make decisions very quickly.

Right? An individual donor doesn’t receive a fundraising email in April, set it aside somewhere, then come back at a scheduled time to review all the fundraising emails she’s received.

She either gives a gift in response to the email… or she doesn’t. There is no “later.”

Contrast this to a Foundation. Foundations receive lots of grant applications by a certain deadline, have people who are paid to read and vet the applications, and at some point later the decision makers thoughtfully ask themselves, “Should we give a gift or not?”

Here’s what this means:

Foundations ask themselves, “Should I give a gift or not?”
Individual donors ask themselves “Should I give a gift right now or not?”

And this, my friends, is why having urgency in your email and mail fundraising is so effective.

When individual donors read fundraising with no urgency, there is no strong reason for them to give a gift “right now.” Will you get some gifts? Of course! Donors are great and they love what you do.

But contrast this to a piece of fundraising that has some urgency – maybe there’s a deadline, or matching funds that expire, or a surge of people that need help. That urgency communicates to the donor that their gift is needed now, and will make a difference soon. This gives a donor reasons to give a gift “right now.”

If your nonprofit doesn’t have any urgency in your fundraising, it means that as you are reading this, there’s a whole group of people who love what you do but tend to not send gifts because they never need to “right now.”

Here at Better Fundraising, we tap into that group of donors (and their “pent-up giving”) again and again. We start working with a nonprofit, we add urgency to their fundraising, and it unleashes giving from many of their donors who have been sitting on the sidelines.

The same easy increase is available to you – but you must include urgency.

If you don’t provide donors a reason to give right now, you’ll receive fewer gifts right now.

The ‘Change You Make,’ not ‘How You Make the Change’

Steven Screen | January 13, 2026December 29, 2025Ask

Here’s a rule I live by when asking for donations through the mail or email. It’s subtle but important.

Focus on the understandable change your organization makes in the world, not on how your organization makes the change.

Let me give you a quick “before & after” of an example ask, and then dig into the details…

Focused on how the organization makes the change:

Your gift will fund our research-based brain development program addressing the mental health and cognitive needs of children from 8 weeks to 5 years.

Focused on the change the organization makes:

Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.

In the “before” example, notice how much “how we do our work” is present:

Their work is researched-based
Their program is a brain-development program
Their program addresses mental health and cognitive needs

Those details are incredibly valuable to the organization, and are what make them effective.

But they are not why most individual donors, in email or the mail, donate.

What makes individual donors donate, based on the fundraising results we see, is the understandable change that the donor’s gift will make. Let’s look again at the example that focuses on the understandable change – you’ll see how it’s focused on things the donor will immediately understand and how the world will be better than it was before.

“Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.”

The gift “provides a pre-school” – everyone reading immediately knows what pre-school is and who goes there, as opposed to very few people knowing that a “research-based brain development program” is.
“where a child feels safe”’ – feeling safe is an obvious benefit, and indicates that the child didn’t feel safe before, which points to an obvious positive change the donor can help make.
“learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten” – this communicates that the child doesn’t have the skills now, but that the donor’s gift will help provide the skills. The obvious “understandable change” is that the child probably wasn’t going to succeed in Kindergarten, but now they will.

Here’s the hard-won knowledge I’m hoping you’ll work into your fundraising this year: if you focus your fundraising to individual donors on the understandable change your donors can help make with a gift today, you’ll raise more money.

If you want to know more about why this happens, read my post from last Thursday.

And if you want two other ways of describing the same general concept, here you go:

Donors fund outcomes, not process
Focus on what you make possible, not on what you do

Good luck, and I hope your year is off to a great start!

Audience and Channel

Steven Screen | January 8, 2026December 23, 2025Ask

If you’re going to be a very effective Fundraiser, you have to constantly be aware of context.

The two main contexts to be aware of in your email and mail fundraising are Audience and Channel.

Audience

“Audience” is who you’re talking to. For instance…

Individual donors care about different things than institutional donors
Institutional donors care about different things than Program Staff and Organization Insiders
Longtime major donors care about different things than First Time Email Donors

If you’re not constantly thinking, “Who am I talking to right now and what do they value,” you’re constantly missing opportunities to connect. Because if your voice or message is perfect for one of your audiences, it’s not close to perfect for your other audiences.

Channel

“Channel” is the method you’re using to communicate to your audience. For instance…

In the mail and email, you have a different amount of time than you have over lunch with a donor, so you communicate differently
At an event, what you tell a donor is different than what you’d say over lunch
In a grant application, what you tell an institutional funder is different than what you tell an individual donor.

If you’re not constantly thinking, “What channel am I communicating with the audience right now and what works best in this method,” you’re probably making one method work well and causing the other methods to be ineffective. (By the way, the most common phase of this for smaller nonprofits is to be effective in person 1-on-1, but not effective in the mail and email – which is why we at Better Fundraising have jobs 🙂 )

The clearest example I’ve come across to illustrate this is the following:

	Audience	Channel	Knowledge Level	Time Spent Reading
Grant Application	Institutional funders	Multi-page Grant application	Likely knowledgeable about your sector and work	Several minutes
Email appeal	Individual donors	300-word email	Unlikely to be knowledgeable about your sector and work	Several seconds

At the foundation, a subject-matter expert is paid to read your application. On the individual donor’s phone, a non-expert is more likely to flick through your email than to read it.

Just given that context, of course the two pieces of fundraising should be written differently.

So as you think about your fundraising for this year, may this year be one of increased awareness at your nonprofit for which audience you’re talking to and which channel it’s taking place in.

Want More People Interested in Your Organization?

Steven Screen | December 9, 2025December 2, 2025Ask

This is oversimplified, but still true…

At the beginning of a nonprofit’s fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“How can we describe our work to be as inspirational as possible?”

Farther along on their fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“What do humans tend to be motivated by, and how can we talk about our work in a way that taps in to what motivates people?”

The second question results in creating fundraising that’s more interesting and relevant to drastically more people, which increases the amount of money the organization can raise.

Why? Because there aren’t that many people interested in your work itself, no matter how inspirationally you describe it.

But there are millions of people who are engaged by emotions, who want to see justice done, who want to right wrongs, and who want their gift to make a meaningful difference. Focus your fundraising on how those elements are part of your work, and your organization becomes a lot more interesting to a lot more people.

The Gift of Not Having to Know the Details

Steven Screen | December 2, 2025December 1, 2025Ask

When writing appeals, it’s a natural instinct to tell individual donors more about the organization itself.

This results in copy like:

Founded in 1971, we’ve been…
Our three pillars are…
Our program, Uplifting Kids, addresses the needs…

All of this is educating the donor under the belief that “if our donors knew more about us, and knew how competent we are, they would give more.”

However, in 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, what I’ve seen is that appeals raise more money when they educate less. (The two most successful appeal letters of my career don’t even mention the organization.)

Here’s my interpretation of the data: by eliminating the education, you remove content that is unimportant to a donor’s decision. This results in appeals where more of the content is relevant, which causes increased giving.

Put differently: when you remove the noise, the signal is stronger.

Reminder – I’m talking about communicating with individual donors and non-donors in the mail and email. Not at an event, not at lunch with a major donor, not a tour, etc.

Here’s how I advise nonprofits to think: “It’s a generous act to simplify our mail and email fundraising for individual donors. They don’t need to need to know the details – that’s what they have us for! If we get a chance to interact in person or at an event, they are showing interest so it’s appropriate to go into the details. And if they keep giving faithfully through the mail or email without ever interacting with us another way, that’s OK too.”

Remember, you’re already removing lots of details about your organization from your mail and email fundraising. You don’t talk to donors about your accounting practices, or whether you own or rent your office space, or your approach to HR.

So, just remove a few more details about your organization.

When you make the generous act of not requiring donors to know your organization’s details, you unlock more generosity from more donors.

Word Pictures

Steven Screen | November 11, 2025November 6, 2025Ask

It happens all the time at nonprofits – you want to include a story in your next appeal or e-appeal to help donors understand the situation better… but you don’t have a story.

In case that ever happens to you, here’s a technique we use all the time. I call it “telling a true story about a person you know exists but you have not met.”

Here’s an example for an organization that sends missionaries and is raising money to provide training for the missionaries.

As I write you today, there’s a missionary who could use a little help. Their faith is strong, their marriage is strong, but they could use a little break and a little encouragement. That’s why I’m excited to tell you that your gift of $XX will provide a day of respite and training.

Because in the life of a missionary, there should be times of rest. These are people who think about their calling 24/7! And with as rapidly as today’s world is moving, it’s hard to build deep cross-cultural relationships and stay on top of the latest missionary knowledge.

Your gift will allow one person to do just that.

Imagine the relief when a missionary hears, “A generous donor has sent in a gift to help pay for your training. And the cost for this break and trip will be paid for – it doesn’t come out of your personal budget!”

If you put yourself in a tired missionary’s shoes for a moment, I’m sure you can image tears, and relief, and joy, and wonderment.

See how there’s no traditional “story”? But can you also see how we’ve painted a true word picture that helps the donor see the situation and what their gift will do?

Here’s the thing: you are an expert in the people or cause you’re working on. You know the details, the circumstances, and the emotions.

So you can share details that you know are true, even though you don’t know the people themselves.

This technique is not a replacement for “a great story from the field.” (There are details and emotions in real stories that even the best writers can’t create.)

But sometimes you don’t have a story. And when you know your work, and you know your fundraising would be more powerful with true details, this technique is helpful.

Fundraising in Two Steps

Steven Screen | November 6, 2025November 10, 2025Ask

At its simplest, I think you can boil “raising money from individual donors through the mail and email” down to two steps:

Making an emotional connection with the humans reading your fundraising (which I wrote about on Tuesday), and
Then giving people an easy, low-cost step they can take to make a meaningful difference.

This approach is easy to understand but hard to do. And it goes against the standard orthodoxy of “make a case and describe our work in an inspirational way.”

But in my now 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, this “two step” approach is at the heart of the fundraising that works the best. (And if you want evidence, just call me. Better Fundraising’s clients routinely see huge jumps in revenue as soon as we help them switch them from the standard approach to this approach.)

And it makes sense, right?!? If you “make a case and try to inspire people with your work” you have to teach them about your work and tell them why it’s inspiring. This means your reader has to learn something before your request for support makes sense. This is homework, not fundraising!

Or you could tell your reader an interesting story about something they care about. (And you know they care about your cause or your beneficiaries – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be on your list.)

Once your donor is emotionally engaged, you give them a low-cost way to make a meaningful difference. You lower the barrier to giving a gift. You describe something great that they can do or be a part of. You describe the meaningful difference it will make.

Get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a difference. I share how to do this in this post, this free eBook, and it’s what McKenzie is describing in this post.

Really, that’s it: get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a meaningful difference.

Scary Data Frankensteins

Steven Screen | October 30, 2025October 24, 2025Ask

When you are reviewing fundraising data, beware any time the data contains information from two different media channels or two different audiences.

Here’s a simple example…

Say we recently completed a campaign that included one appeal letter to current donors and two e-appeals. Here are the results:

11,000 sent
124 gifts
1.4% response rate.

With those numbers, we can get a vague sense of whether the campaign was successful. But I would say that the data above hides more than it illuminates because when we go to run the campaign next year we don’t know how to improve the campaign because we don’t know which parts of the campaign worked, and which parts didn’t.

But look at what happens when we can see the results for each piece of the campaign…

Direct mail appeal letter to current donors

1,000 sent
83 gifts
8.3% response

E-appeal #1

5,000 sent
31 gifts
.62% response

E-Appeal #2

5,000 sent
10 gifts
.20% response

OK, now we’re talking. Look at what we know now:

The appeal letter is a tremendous success. An 8.3% response in direct mail is fantastic.
E-appeal #1 is also a success – a .62% response in email is also a success.
E-appeal #2 is not a success – a .2% response is too low.

Compare that to the combined data, which gave us an average response rate of 1.4%. That number didn’t tell us anything.

But looking at the performance data for each piece enables us to do something powerful: learn that the messaging used in the appeal letter and e-appeal #1 worked great, and then apply those the next time we do this campaign and to all our future fundraising.

Additionally, by breaking out the results for each piece, over time you’ll learn your benchmarks for each audience and each channel. This is very powerful because it helps you identify the pieces of fundraising that are effective, and those that aren’t.

But if you keep everything together, you just get a Frankenstein.