Category: Ask

Overuse of Emphasis

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Here’s a portion of an email I received from a nonprofit last year.  I’ve changed the name of the organization and its location.

What I want you to notice Is how many things are visually emphasized using bolding:

There’s an old adage that says, “when you emphasize everything, you’ve emphasized nothing.”  I think that’s true here.  So many things are important that I don’t know what’s important!

Here’s the thing: when you choose what to emphasize, choose carefully.  Here are the rules I live by.

And remember that, when you choose what to highlight for readers, you are giving your beneficiaries a gift.  By generously curating the two or three most important ideas for your readers, you make your fundraising more accessible and easy to understand quickly.

And by making your fundraising more accessible and easy to understand quickly, you increase how many people donate – which means you can do more of your mission work to help your beneficiaries.

‘It’s Like YouTube’

Steven Screen  |  Ask

My wife and I got our kids to watch an episode of Seinfeld last night, something we’d never done before. 

Less than five seconds into the episode, our 15-year-old with a rocket for a brain began to doubt that this was going to be worth his very important time.  “So… what IS this,” he asked.

My wife said, “It’s a SitCom.”

Blank stares from the kids.

She continued, “’SitCom’ is short for ‘situation comedy.’  It’s a type of show.”

Just complete nothing on my kids’ faces.

So I said, “It’s like a 22-minute YouTube show with recurring characters.”

“Oh!” my two older kids said.  They understood.  “Sounds great, let’s watch!”

“Oh!” my youngest kid said.  “Like YouTube!”  He understood enough to be interested.

Once they had a frame of reference they understood, they were willing to give some time to this.

Let this be a lesson to all us nonprofit people and our jargon.

If you ask donors to “provide housing for a person who is justice involved” … you’re going to get a lot of blank stares.  The only donations you’ll receive are from people who already know the jargon, so you’ll have a very hard time growing. 

On the other hand, say you give donors a frame of reference that they understand and ask them to “provide housing to a person who has turned their life around after an early arrest.”  Then you’re going to get a lot of, “Oh, sounds great.”

It’s a generous act by a nonprofit to use language and concepts that are easier for a donor to understand.  (And of course there are boundaries: I’m not suggesting using hurtful terms or language, and in my contra-example I purposefully used people-first, supportive, respectful language.) 

When we make the generous choice, we’re sacrificing a tiny bit of accuracy for increased engagement, donations, and impact.

To bring it back to my kids; I could have been the pedantic parent, made them look up “situation comedy” and given them a brief history of the TV landscape in the 90’s. 

How do you think that would have gone?

That’s not the type of parent I want to be, and it’s not the type of nonprofit our beneficiaries need us to be.

Goal Reached? Keep Going!

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Say you’re running a campaign to raise a specific amount of money, and you reach your goal before the end of the campaign.

Should you stop the campaign, or slightly change your messaging and keep going?

My vote: update your messaging and KEEP GOING!

Here’s why:

  • Your campaign is working.  Every donor that has given you a gift has loved doing it.  Why would you stop a campaign that’s causing more donors than you expected to give gifts, especially when donors are enjoying it?
  • If the money raised beyond your original goal can be used to do more of your mission work, why would you stop?
  • For your donors that really care about your cause, which message would you like to send at the end of your campaign: “We blew past our goal and can help even more people” or “We met our goal and stopped the campaign immediately”?

If you need to change your messaging, change your messaging as needed.  For example, say you’re an organization that helps young people who are aging out of the foster care system.  Say your goal is to raise $100,000 before the end of the month to erase a shortfall.  You reach your goal – but you have a week to go in the campaign.

Change your messaging from “please give a gift before the end of the month to erase the shortfall” to “please give a gift before the end of the month to help a child who is aging out of the foster care system.”

Then, after your campaign, report back on the tremendous success of your campaign.

Personally, I suspect the people and organizations that want to stop their campaigns once the goal is met are people who wonder if fundraising is bothersome.  Deep down inside, they fear their fundraising bothers donors, or somehow manipulates them into giving.  And if that’s how you feel, it’s a relief to reach a campaign goal and an obvious choice to end the campaign early.

But if you believe that fundraising is a net positive – that it raises awareness for your cause, that it allows donors to make changes to the world that they can’t make on their own, that donors enjoy giving, that all of us are made better when we give gifts – you keep going.

You increase your goal.  You expand your vision of what’s possible.

If your donors show you that they have more capacity than your current vision, the solution is to expand your vision, not limit your donors’ giving.

Make It Easy

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Make it easy.

If you look at the detailed results of a lot of fundraising campaigns, a simple pattern emerges:

If you make it easier, more people will donate.

Look at these data-driven examples:

  • If you remove links to your social media feeds from your website’s donation page, more people will give.  Why?  It’s easier to fill out the form and make the gift if you don’t distract people with other activities.
  • If you ask a major donor for a gift and you give them a deadline for when you need their response by, you’ll get more responses and more gifts.  Why?  It’s easier for donors to answer the question “can I give by the deadline” than it is when the ask is timeless.
  • In a direct mail appeal letter, if you include a reply card and reply envelope, you will generally raise more money than if you don’t include a reply card and reply envelope. Why? For a donor who wants to give by check, it is easier if they don’t have to find and address an envelope.
  • When asking for money, when you use a specific offer (e.g., “$57 provides an hour of therapy” or “$41 helps on child learn to read”) you generally raise more money than a more generic “will you support our work” or “will you join us.”  Why?  Using an offer makes it easier for a donor to understand what their gift will make possible.  Offers also make it easier for donors to know how much they need to give in order to make a difference.
  • When you write fundraising materials, you raise more money when you use everyday language instead of jargon.  Why?  Everyday language makes it easier for donors to understand, as opposed to making them learn your vocabulary.

Look through your fundraising messages and tactics.  Are there any places you can remove distractions, or make it easier to understand, or easier to take action right now?

The Letter Looked Great, But…

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Handwritten.

About 20 years ago, I hired a freelance designer to design an appeal letter for a nonprofit I was serving.  The nonprofit wanted the letter to feel personal, and we decided that the entire letter would appear handwritten, instead of typed or printed.

The Designer went to work.  And a few days later I opened a PDF with the coolest looking letter I’d ever seen… that was almost unreadable. 

The “handwriting” the Designer used was cool, full of angles and interesting shapes.  I’m sure it took them a long time to create.

But I knew that for an appeal letter to raise a bunch of money, it needed to be highly legible – both to old people and to people moving quickly.

So I told the Designer that even though I loved how the letter looked, I needed it redone because it was too hard to read. 

The Designer refused.

“I can’t do it any better,” they said, “it looks great.” 

“I know it looks great,” I said, “but it’s too hard to read, so we need to redo it and make it easier to read.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” they said, “it won’t look as good.”  I don’t recall how the conversation ended, because after that moment I realized that I needed to hire a new Designer and that I was probably behind schedule.

I share this story today because it’s a great reminder that when we’re making fundraising, we’re not getting paid to make art.  We’re not getting paid to express ourselves.  We’re not getting paid to create designs or messages that we like.

When we make fundraising we are getting paid to fulfill a “business function” of building relationships with donors.

Fundraising that starts with the makers in mind – the aesthetic taste of the Designer, the language taste of the Executive Director, etc. – is more like art than Fundraising.  It may resonate with donors, it may not.

Contrast that to fundraising that starts with donors in mind.  It uses design that resonates with donors.  Vocab that donors already know.  Concepts donors already understand.

Fundraising created with donors in mind does a better job of retaining donors because it does the work to meet donors where they are at, instead of requiring donors to do the work to understand the organization.

So, if your organization is having a hard time retaining donors, look at your fundraising and say, “If we kept our donors more in mind as we made our fundraising, what would we do differently?”

The Flawed Argument That ‘Fewer Donors Giving to Our Appeal Means Some Donors Are More Engaged and Will Give More Later’

Steven Screen  |  Ask

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago where someone said the following:

“I like what you’re proposing for this appeal, but we need to include more information about our organization and its programs.”

I replied that, in my experience, if we spend more time educating donors about the organization that we would raise less money.

Their response was, “I can see that we might raise less money but I’m OK with that.  Because if donors know more, they will be more engaged, and we know that more engaged donors give more.  Plus, how will we ever get long term donors if they don’t know more about us?”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the idea I want to focus on is the myth that “if a nonprofit educates people more about the organization, it will result in more long-term giving.”  Maybe said differently, “it’s OK to raise less money with each piece, because donors will give more in the long term if they know more about us.”

I’ve never met someone with numerical evidence to back this up.  And at Better Fundraising we have loads of experience helping organizations leave the “educate donors” idea behind; they start raising more money immediately, and they end the year with higher retention rates than they’ve had before.

Here’s how the math works…

Take an organization that is making sure to educate donors in their appeals, and they are getting a 3% response rate.  If they send 6 appeals per year, 18% of donors will have given to appeals.  (To keep it simple, I’m leaving aside donors who give multiple gifts per year.)

Compare that to an organization that’s following our approach (see my previous post) and is averaging a 5% response rate on its appeals.  If they send 6 appeals per year, 30% of their donors will have given to appeals by the end of the year.

Would you rather have your appeals cause 30% of your donors to give, or would you like to have your appeals cause 18% of your donors to give?

So if an organization is arguing that “less giving now” will cause more total giving, the organization must explain two things:

  1. How it is going to make up the lost gift from the 12% of donors (in the example above) who would have responded to appeals, but didn’t.
  2. How exactly the additional money is going to come in.  Will retention rates be higher?  Will gifts from major donors be higher?  Will average gifts be higher at year-end?  What’s the measurable evidence?

And while it’s true (in my experience) that “more engaged donors give more,” what is the evidence that a donor is more engaged?  How can you reach the conclusion that “because fewer donors responded to an appeal that there are also some donors who are now more engaged”?

As far as I can tell, there is zero empirical evidence for that.  (After all, if we were given an assignment to measure “engagement” for an appeal letter or e-appeal, wouldn’t the primary measurement be “how many people gave”?  Seriously here, if that’s not the metric, what is?)

I think you have to contort yourself into a very weird position to argue that “fewer donors giving indicates that some donors are more engaged.”

In my experience, the more people you have giving to appeals (and any sort of fundraising), the more money you’ve raised and the more donors you’ve retained at the end of the year.

Now, I can’t speak for an organization’s relationship with one particular major donor, where a smart major gifts officer builds a case over the course of a year and makes a bold ask and gets an amazing gift at the end of the year.  That’s a 1-to-1 situation.

But I can give you a data-driven recommendation for your mail and email mass donor programs, which are one-to-many.  For your next appeal, look for a part of your organization’s work that is happening soon, and is something that you think donors would be interested in funding.

Don’t try to educate your donors; share with them the important thing that needs to happen soon, and invite them to get involved by sending in a gift today.  You’ll raise more money in both the short term and the long term.

How I Think About What an Appeal Should Be About

Steven Screen  |  Ask

“When you first sit down to write an appeal,” he asked, “how do you figure out what the appeal is going to be about?”

Let’s see, I said.  In a nutshell: I look for a part of the organization’s work, it has to be something I think donors would understand quickly and want to fund, and it needs to be happening soon.

“Wait.  You don’t think about the organization itself, or its vision or mission?”

Not really.  When you’re fundraising in a letter or an email, you don’t have time to educate readers about an organization.  Go look at the results of appeals that explain entire organizations, or spend a lot of time talking about its mission or vision – they don’t work very well.  So I try to identify a part of an organization and just focus on that part, with the purpose of making the appeal and the ask easier for donors to understand.

“So you don’t think about the organization’s programs?”  

Not really.  I guess I look inside the programs to see if there are any activities or outcomes that I think individual donors would easily understand and be interested in.  But I don’t think about entire programs, because programs are usually complex and take time to explain – time I don’t have in a letter or email.

“You said that ‘it needs to be happening soon’ – what do you mean by that?”

When you look at the results of lots of appeals, you notice something interesting about time.  This takes a second to explain.  When an appeal focuses on things that have already happened – like telling a story about a person who has been helped in the past – the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on the timeless or continual nature of the organization’s work (e.g., “will you give a gift to help us continue our work”) the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on things that need to happen farther in the future, like “next year we want to…” and “we’re trying to end homelessness in our county,” the appeal raises less money.

But when an appeal talks about something specific that is happening soon, say in the next 6 weeks or so, the appeal raises more money.

There are great places to talk about the past, and to go deep on an organization’s vision for the future, like newsletters or annual reports and vision statements.  But it’s clear that if you want an appeal to individual donors to raise the most money, you want to talk about the near future.

***

In my experience, appeals that follow this approach raise the most money.  This is evidenced by Better Fundraising’s experience, over and over and over, when we help organizations shift from their approach to the one I explain above.  They start raising more money immediately, and they start retaining more of their donors each year.

In my next post, I’ll mention the pushback that almost always comes to this approach, and why it doesn’t hold water.

Feelings, Not Fact

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Here’s a bit of fundraising copywriting advice for you:

When you find yourself sharing a fact, instead, share a feeling. 

As we create fundraising and make the case for a donor to give a gift, it makes logical sense that we tend to reach for facts:

  • 15% of local Moms face homelessness at some point
  • There are over 5,400 unspayed and un-neutered pets in our county!
  • We helped 377 people last month

But facts don’t move the needle in direct response fundraising – feelings do. 

So the next time you’re about to share a fact, share a feeling or emotion instead:

  • It’s not fair that so many moms face homelessness.
  • Seeing so many local pets have babies makes my heart hurt, and I know it bothers you, too.
  • You’ll love knowing that you came to the aid a person who needed a helping hand.

Feelings, not facts, are the way into your individual donors’ hearts.

Lots of Small Steps

Steven Screen  |  Ask

The more distinct ideas a letter or email includes, the less likely it is to succeed.

Let me tell you what I mean, first with a concept and then with an example. 

100% Important, or 33% Important?

If I send you an email that has one main idea, you know that that idea is important. 

To use numbers, if I send you a message with one main idea, that idea is 100% important.  And if I send you a message with three distinct ideas, each idea is only 33% important. 

We all intuitively understand this idea.  When we have an important message to send, we communicate only about that one message because any additional ideas are distractions from the main message.

Case in point: nonprofit e-newsletters.  E-newsletters have abysmal open rates because they are updates on everything to everyone.  They talk about this, and there’s a story about that, and they update on the other thing.  You know how low the open rates on your e-newsletter are, and you know they cause almost zero action and have almost zero effect on fundraising results.

What Does Focus Look Like?

First, a letter or e-appeal focuses on part of what the organization does, not all of what the organization does.  This focus makes it easier for donors to understand what is needed and what their gift will do.  It’s usually expressed in an offer, like “$55 provides an hour of equine therapy for a child” or “$37 provides supplies for one classroom.” 

(By the way, even if you feel like your organization doesn’t “just do one thing like that,” you can still focus your fundraising on just one thing.  This is a messaging choice, not something that’s driven by your programs.  Additionally, you can do this and still raise undesignated funds.)

Second, every idea in the letter or email provides reasons for the donor to give a gift to “do the offer.”

Here’s what this looks like in practice.  For this example, say you’re a maritime history museum, you run fun classes for children in August, and you’re doing an appeal in July.   Every piece of content in the letter should be about why it’s such a good idea for the donor to send in a gift to send a kid to one of your August classes. 

Here are a handful of messages you could include in the letter:

  • You know how important the maritime industry has been (and still is!) to our part of the world, and you know what a tragedy it would be if that history fades away.  The student you help send will learn about their history!
  • You and I both know there’s no substitute for time on the water for a person to learn about the sea.  So the students spend time on a boat each day.
  • A week on the water in the summer is often the only time a child from an underprivileged background has the chance to be on the water.
  • During their class, a young person will learn (IMPORTANT THING 1), and (IMPORTANT THING 2), and (IMPORTANT THING 3).
  • You’ll love knowing that while on our ship, the children are connecting with nature, not the internet.  Sails, not screens!
  • The local maritime industry is struggling right now to find tomorrow’s workers, and you know that an introduction to the industry through a fun summer class is a great way to introduce a person into a rewarding line of work.

Can you feel the focus?  Can you see how all the messages are about how important it is for a child to take a class this August?

This approach works so much better than letters and emails that are about many distinct things.

The big idea here is to think of the letter as “convincing the reader to do this one thing” instead of “convincing the reader to support our organization.”

You might say, “wait, but we want donors to support our whole organization!”

Here’s what I’ve learned from looking at the results of campaigns on donor files for over 30 years: give donors lots of small, easy to take, affordable steps.  When you do that, more people will arrive at “supporting your organization” than if you ask them to make the whole journey in one large step.