Category: Ask

Questions?

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Do you have any questions for us?

Maybe there’s a new tactic you want to try, your boss isn’t likely to approve it, and you’d love to know how we would convince them.  Maybe there’s a question you’ve just always wanted to ask.  Maybe there’s a specific situation in your organization that you’d like feedback on.

We can keep you and your organization anonymous if you’d like.  🙂

We’re going to do a series of posts and videos asking questions like yours – and maybe yours if you’ll send it in!

If you’re reading this blog post in your email, you can hit “reply” and we’ll get your question.  If you’re reading this on our website, fill out the form below to submit your question.

I look forward to hearing from you!

How to Make a Moment

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Special moment.

One of the most reliable reasons a letter, email or event resonates with donors is when it contains a moment that engages their emotions.

So I wondered, in the successful fundraising that Better Fundraising has created, what are the “ingredients” in the most powerful moments?

After reviewing a ton of top-performing fundraising, here are the ingredients that I noticed again and again…

Primarily about one “unit” of the nonprofit’s work.  In other words, it was primarily about a child, not “the children.”  It was about one acre, not entire ecosystems.  It was about what needed to be done next month, not “the future of the community.”

There was real conflict.  A person was in a brutal situation because they were unable to afford legal representation.  The library had 50 children’s books, but 200 kids who need to learn how to read.  The young man was struggling in college, but had aged out of the foster care system and didn’t have a trusted adult to help them. 

There was real, obvious emotion.  The piece of fundraising either highlights emotions of the people or situation, or brings emotion into the storytelling. 

The stakes were meaningful.  If the middle schooler didn’t catch up in math, their prospects for a good job were in real trouble.  If the Missionary Kid doesn’t make friendships, they are likely to leave the church. 

The donor can make a difference.  It’s made clear to the donor that their gift will make a meaningful difference, and that difference was clearly described.

The gift needed isn’t large.  The “cost to help one unit” was small, usually under $100.  (If you read this and think that your organization doesn’t have anything meaningful that costs less than $100, you need to narrow your focus and “zoom in” a little further.)

The donor is asked to help.  The letter or email doesn’t say things like “we value your partnership” or “please consider making a gift.”  The donor is clearly asked to make a gift with language like, “Please, will you send in a gift today?”

There is a hopeful future.  The letter talks about the change that will take place if the donor gives a gift.  The donor knows and feels how the world will be better if they send in a gift today. 

These ingredients, all used at the same time, create fundraising that causes donors to take action. 

When combined, these ingredients create fundraising that’s full of emotion.  And all that emotion can feel scary, which is why many nonprofits hide their emotion behind numbers, statistics, and qualifications.

But when creating your fundraising for individual donors, moments and emotions are more important than numbers.  Why?  Because information leads to conclusions, but emotions lead to action.

***

PS — If you’re not sure how to do this for your organization, or not sure you have the right team in place to do it, get in touch!

‘Front Load’ Key Words

Steven Screen  |  Ask
First things first!

When you think about how to capture donor attention when there are so many things competing for your donors’ attention, here’s a tactic for you: “front-load” the most important ideas for your readers or listeners.

Sketchplanations recently published the following graphic that does a brilliant job describing what “front-loading” is and how to do it.  The author is talking about writing for the web, but it’s 100% applicable to any fundraising writing that’s going to individual donors, from a direct response email to a major donor proposal…

Our donors are moving quickly, and this is a great way to get your point across more quickly.  Because it’s a non-starter to make people wade through a bunch of content to figure out what you’re talking about if you want to grow.

Front-loading applies to sentences, but it also applies to your fundraising in general.  For example, front-load the ask in your appeals in the first few paragaphs.  If you’re meeting with a major donor to thank them for their gift and report back to them, front-load the idea that you are not going to ask them for a gift today.

You’ll see the same idea expressed in my posts Three Editing Principles and Put The Most Important Information First, but it’s great to have the official name for this tactic.

Now, the next time someone asks you why you’re writing in this slightly strange way, you can tell them that you’re front-loading, that you’re placing the words with the most signal right at the start – instead of buried in the middle or at the end.

Your Donors ARE Different… When You’re Small

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Small connections.

Your donors are different when you are a small organization.

Why?  Many of them know you, or someone on staff, personally.  Or they’re one degree removed from you.  Or they’re some of your first volunteers.  Maybe they are intimately connected to the cause, saw what you were doing, and sought you out.

But this isn’t true when you get bigger. 

Case in point: as you get more donors, you have a personal relationship with a smaller percentage of them.

This means that if you want to get bigger, you must learn to fundraise to donors who:

  • Don’t know you or anyone on your staff
  • Don’t know anything about your organization
  • Don’t know much about your cause or beneficiaries, other than that it touches their heart

So when a nonprofits says to me – “Steven, that tactic you want us to use, that won’t work for our donors.  Our donors are different” – there are two things I want the nonprofit to know right away.

First, we want them to use the tactic because it’s proven to help them grow beyond their current group of donors. 

Second, their donors are giving to several other organizations too, and many of those organizations are happily raking in the money with whatever tactic we’re suggesting.

So your donors are different – but only when you’re small, and only in relation to yourorganization.  Your donors are completely, happily normal in relation to several other organizations.  So when you use the data-driven tactics that are working great for those other organizations, they are bound to work well for you, too.

What Should Your P.S. Do?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
PS.

A thoughtful reader recently wrote in with a question.  I’ve edited it lightly for brevity:

“Talk to me about the use of postscripts in asks. We currently use the P.S. as an extension of the core ask – for example, in our next appeal the P.S. asks donors to consider becoming a monthly donor. One of your podcasts suggested the P.S. should be a reiteration of the core ask. I would love to hear more about this.”

This is a great question, and one that vexes many nonprofits. 

At one level, our answer is really simple: we recommend that the P.S. repeat/reiterate the core ask because that is the approach that, according to all the head-to-head testing that I’ve done or seen, is most likely to increase the chance the reader sends in a gift.  *

So the question becomes, “Well, why does the ‘reiterate approach’ tend to out-raise other approaches?”

Here are the core ideas that are helpful to know:

  • According to eye-tracking studies, when most people first look at a direct mail letter, they do not read it.  They scan the whole thing first.
  • Often, after they finish their scan at the end of the letter, the P.S. is the first part of the letter they actually read.  When I started doing direct mail in 1993, I was taught that for the majority of readers, the P.S. is the first part of the letter that’s read.
  • So if the P.S. is about one idea, and the person goes back to the top and starts reading the letter and finds that the letter is about a different idea, we’ve immediately caused confusion in the reader’s mind.
    • In the example where the P.S. is about becoming a monthly donor, and the rest of the letter is about whatever the need is for a single gift, then the donor might think, “Wait, I thought this was about becoming a monthly donor, but that’s not what this letter is about at all.”  Confusion increases abandonment, abandonment reduces readership, reduced readership = lower giving.
  • Finally, a good P.S. taps into the power of repetition.  Brain science shows us that when something is repeated often, we become more familiar with it and we’re more likely to believe that it’s true.  This is why the best-performing direct response fundraising is often a little repetitive – and why you want to use the P.S. to repeat the core ask that’s in the letter.

In a nutshell, you never want to give your reader a second thing to consider doing before they have fully committed to doing the first thing. 

So, keep the whole letter about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the headline of the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the action copy on the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the descriptions behind each giving amount about whatever the letter is focused on.

Then, only after the reader has decided to give a gift and has ticked the check box next to the amount they are going to donate, then you can give them an option to do something additional – like make their gift monthly, or send in a prayer request, or contact you about an estate gift.

To borrow from the Dos Equis advertising campaign, Stay focused, my friend.

***

* I have both written and seen P.S.’s that take other approaches, and suspect that some of them have worked great.  That’s because there are contextually dependent times when a different type of P.S. is called for.  But those times are few and far between.  The model is the model for a good reason.

Script for Getting Matching Funds

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Matching funds.

After a month of big-picture, more thought-provoking posts, let’s get tactical.

If you’ve ever had to ask major donors to provide matching or challenge funds, I have something for you today that I think you’ll like.

Here’s the brief “case” to make to your major donors.  After you ask them if they’ll provide a gift to be used as challenge funds, tell them the following:

  • It’s well–documented that challenge funds increase how much a fundraising campaign will raise, so by doing this your gift will have a greater impact than it normally does.
  • Here’s how that happens.  When a fundraising campaign has challenge funds, more people give to the campaign than if the campaign didn’t have them.  So your gift will cause more people to give.
  • Additionally, when a fundraising campaign has challenge funds, people give larger gifts than they do when campaigns don’t have them.  So your gift will cause people to give more.
  • So by making a leadership gift and allowing us to use it as challenge funds to inspire other donors to give, you’ll have more of an impact, and you’re helping our organization and beneficiaries more than you normally do.
  • And, if you give your gift now and allow us to use it as challenge funds, you also get to enjoy watching the campaign unfold while knowing that your generosity is inspiring more giving to happen than would have happened without you!

Combine the “script” above with the info in this post (one of our most popular posts ever) and you’re on your way to having multiple campaigns with matching or challenge funds this year!

Matching Funds vs Challenge Funds

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Both “matching funds” and “challenge funds” multiply the power of a donor’s gift – but one works better than the other. 

Here’s a working definition of each, plus an example of how they work.   

  • “Challenge funds” describe a situation where the nonprofit will receive the funds regardless of how the campaign performs.
    • If a nonprofit announces that an appeal has $50,000 in challenge funds, and the appeal raises $35,000, the nonprofit still receives (and often already has received) the $50,000 from the donors who gave/pledged the challenge funds. 
  • “Matching funds” describe a situation where the matching funds are conditional, and are only released to the nonprofit in direct proportion to how much the campaign raises.
    • If a nonprofit announces that an appeal has $50,000 in matching funds, and the appeal only raises $35,000, then the nonprofit only receives $35,000 of the matching funds.

Both matching funds and challenge funds are excellent at increasing the amount of money an appeal or campaign raises.  And it’s also helpful to know that matching funds tend to work a little better than challenge funds.

The generally accepted reason matching funds are more effective is they they are conditional. This taps into what behavioral economists call “loss aversion” – your donors don’t want your nonprofit to miss out on this opportunity, which increases their likelihood to give a gift. 

It leads to copy like:

  • “Please send in your gift today because I want to unlock every single dollar of the matching funds – plus, your gift will be doubled!”
  • “We have until [deadline] to raise the [match amount] to take advantage of the matching funds.”
  • “Every single one of these matching dollars can fund [your nonprofit’s mission], but only if we raise [match amount] by [deadline].”

That copy really drives home the conditional nature of the funds, and it works like crazy.  (As always, it helps your donors to know what’s at stake.)

The next time you have matching or challenge funds, be sure to describe them correctly.  And lean into them because both are great at increasing response rate and average gift!

Assume Abundance

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Abundant tree.

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  |  Ask
Act now!

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.