Category: Ask

A Powerful Fundraising Sentence

Steven  |  Ask
powerful

Today I’d like to share one of the most powerful fundraising sentences I’ve ever heard. 

I’ll show you why it’s so powerful, and how to apply its lessons to supercharge your organization’s direct response fundraising.

Here we go…

It’s one of the most successful fundraising sentences I’ve ever heard:

“You can cure a major disease like Leprosy for just $250 dollars.”

This sentence has three main elements:

  • The “before” is that a person has leprosy
  • The “after” is that a person will be cured of their leprosy
  • The cost is $250

(If you need a refresher on how we use “before” and “after,” read this post or this post.)

Here’s how those elements work together…

  1. There’s a large contrast between “having leprosy” and “being cured of a dreadful disease.”  That’s a big change in a person’s life! 
  2. The cost to cause that big a change seems pretty minimal.   

Any time you can show a donor that they can make a big change with a gift, and the cost to “cause the change” seems like a good deal, you’re about to raise a lot of money.    

In Your Fundraising

In your fundraising right now, when you tell donors what will happen when they give a gift, does it feel like the donor will cause a big change?

The secret is finding a “before and after” with quite a bit of “distance” between them.

And the good news is that if you describe things well, almost all your “befores and afters” can seem powerful.  Here’s a list of examples off the top of my head:

  • “You can save an heirloom quilt from mold, moths and being forgotten for just $150.”
  • “You can provide a struggling village with a cistern that improves farming results, improves hygiene, lowers sickness and helps a village break the cycle of poverty for just $10,000.”
  • “You can help a child with disabilities go from unable to exercise to skiing with a qualified instructor and adaptive equipment for just $50.” 

Each of these is a fundraising “offer” (and here’s our free eBook on how to make great offers for your organization).

Your donors care about your beneficiaries and/or your cause.  If you can focus their attention on a portion of your work – a “before” and an “after” – that show a big change, and the cost of that change seems like a good deal, you’re on your way to even more fundraising success.  

Before’s & After’s

Steven  |  Ask
Change.

Our last post was about how the distance between the “before” and the “after” shows the donor the power of their gift.

Speaking of this, I’ve noticed that there are four different ways organizations tend to handle “before’s and after’s,” and each results in different fundraising results…

Only the “Before”

Organizations that share only the “before” – the need that exists in the world before your organization has helped – will raise a lot of money in the short term.

But these organizations have troubles keeping their donors, because their donors never see or feel what their gift accomplished.

This short-term success can be extended to medium-term and even long-term IF the organization has a fantastic donor acquisition program and works on an issue with broad appeal. But it’s not a good strategy for smaller organizations – and I don’t think it’s particularly honoring to beneficiaries or donors.

Only the “After”

If organizations only share the “after” – the positive state after the organization has done its work – the organization will raise less money than it could be raising.

Some donors are motivated just by hearing the “after.” But a lot more donors are motivated by hearing the “before” and the “after.” When the “before” is never shared, a significant percentage of people don’t give, or give less.

A secondary consequence of only sharing the “after” is that organizations accidentally hide the need faced by their beneficiaries.

No “Before” and No “After”

If you share no “before” and no “after,” you also raise less money. This happens when a nonprofit tells donors that the work is happening now, that the work will continue, and asks the donor to “continue to” support the work. There’s no “before.” There’s no “after.”

These organizations accidentally communicate to donors that no change happens when the donor gives – so why should the donor give?

I hope it’s obvious that “why should the donor give?” is a rhetorical question, because the nonprofit is presumably doing good work. This post makes the case for why asking a donor to “continue to” support an organization’s work is one of the least compelling ways to ask for support.

“Before” AND “After”

The organizations where we’ve seen the greatest fundraising success share both the before and the after. They share the bad news and the good news.

When Asking in appeals and e-appeals, they share what’s happening now (the “before”) and what will happen if the donor gives a gift (the “after”).

When Reporting in newsletters, they share what was happening (the “before”) and what’s happening now (the “after”).

The constant contrasting of the “before” and “after” helps a donor see how big an impact their gift to your organization can make, or has made in the past. This is the best strategy, and it provides a strengthening blend of short-term and long-term success.

This strategy honors beneficiaries because it creates awareness of the current situation and of the hopeful future that’s possible. It honors donors by showing them the impact of their generosity.

The Distance

Steven  |  Ask

The graphic above is the best way I know to show why it’s so helpful to donors when nonprofits share “before and after’s” in their fundraising.

The distance between – the contrast between – the “before” and the “after” is what shows the donor the power of their gift. 

Here’s how it works…

Appeals & E-appeals

When you’re Asking for a gift in appeals and e-appeals, you want to share the “before and potential after.”  Describe the “before” – what’s happening now that needs to be fixed? Then describe the “potential after” that the donor’s gift will help make possible.

If the distance between the before and the potential after is large, the donor will feel like their gift will make a big difference. And when you make your donor feel like their gift will make a big difference, you’ll get more gifts.

Newsletters

When Reporting back to donors in newsletters, you want to share the “before and after.” Your newsletter story or E.D. letter should describe the “before” (what was happening that help was needed”) and then describe the positive “after” that the donor’s gift made possible.

If the distance between the before and the after is large, the donor will feel like their gift made a big difference. And when you make your donor feel like their gift made a big difference, you’ll get more future gifts.

More Important

When you create a lot of direct response fundraising, you quickly find out that donors care much more about the “before” and the “after” than they care about how your organization made the “after” possible.

So don’t spend time in letters and emails talking about your programs, or about how your programs work.  That’s the “how you made it possible.” Save that info for grant applications and the small group of major donors who love the ins and outs of your programs.

For direct response fundraising, show donors the big distance between the before and the after.  If you can get your donors thinking, “Wow, my gift can make that big a transformation?” or “Wow, my donation made that big a difference?” – they’ll loving giving to your organization because of the impact they can make. 

How To Get Matching Funds from a Major Donor

Steven  |  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.

This post was originally published on November 6, 2017.

Give Complaints the Attention They Deserve

Steven  |  Ask
complaint

I’d like to suggest a process for how to give complaints the attention they deserve.

I suggest this because complaints, at smaller organizations, tend to be given outsized attention. And that outsized attention almost always guarantees that the organization won’t grow as fast as it could, and won’t achieve as much of its mission as it could.

In my experience, here’s how complaints are usually handled:

  • Vague information.  No numbers are used, it’s always phrases like “so many” and “the front desk was bombarded with calls today” and “we had a scary number of unsubscribes.”
  • Super-emotional delivery.  Complaints are reported breathlessly, or with trepidation. 
  • Immediate escalation to leadership.  Complaints don’t get reported through normal channels and departments, they are immediately shared far and wide.

Please don’t get me wrong: I think these responses to complaints are normal and understandable. Asking for money is hard, awkward work. It takes vulnerability. And vulnerability opens us up to being wounded by complaints. 

All that said, these responses to complaints are unhelpful.

Here are my proposed guidelines for how smaller organizations handle complaints:

No vagueness allowed. Only hard numbers and actual counts, please. When someone says, “OMG so many complaints!” the appropriate response is, “Thank you, please tell me exactly how many, over what time period, and what they said.  Then we’ll figure out how to respond.”

Share context about the Complainer. Are they a donor or non-donor? A major donor? A board member who we already know doesn’t like fundraising?  Context matters; a complaint from a major donor is significantly different than a complaint from a non-donor who is on your email list.

Share context about the Campaign. When talking about complaints, the fundraising results of the piece of fundraising should also be shared. The complaint(s) and money raised are results of the same thing, and both need to be evaluated to understand the whole picture.  If you’re told that 5 complaints came in, that sounds awful. If you’re told that the 5 complaints came in along with 500 gifts, the “5 complaints” is a completely different story.

Escalate appropriately. Complaints are reported to the Fundraising department or appropriate staff person – and no one else. Then trust the process from there. 

Complaints are a fact of life for growing nonprofits as they communicate with more and more people.  Complaints are a fee, not a fine. 

Treat them appropriately and they come to be seen and felt as an unfortunate fee you have to pay – but a fee you willingly pay because the organization is raising so much more money and achieving more of its mission.

Two-Minute Survey

Steven  |  Ask
Survey.

Hey, would you do me a favor?

Would you please take this two-minute survey?

Your answers will be completely anonymous.

I’m trying to figure something out. So that more organizations can raise more money. And you can help.

The survey is about appeals. You know, those letters and emails that raise tons of money but “nobody likes”? Yeah, those. I’m trying to figure out why fundraisers like you, and organizations like yours, don’t send more appeals.

Because sending a couple more appeals is the single easiest way to raise more money – especially for smaller organizations.

If you’ll share your thoughts with me, that would really help us as we work to increase the fundraising capacity of small-to medium-sized organizations.

And again, your answers will be completely anonymous. You can be as blunt and as honest as you’d like.

Please take the survey, and thank you so much!

How (and Why) an Organization Goes from 3 Appeals to 9 Appeals

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Appeal

Organizations that send out nine appeals a year weren’t born that way. 

They started with one appeal per year, and grew from there.

Organizations that grow in this way tend to follow a process. I’ve put the following graphic together to help illustrate the process, and I’ll put the lessons from each year below the graphic.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Year 1

This nonprofit has three different programs. Each appeal talks about all three of their programs.   

Year 2

The organization decides to focus their appeals more, so each appeal focuses only on one program.  And they make the changes in wording needed so that the funds raised from each appeal are undesignated.

They notice that the appeal about one of the programs raises more money than any appeal they’ve ever sent.  And they notice that, in total, they raise more through the mail than ever before.

Year 3

They replace the worst-performing appeal with a new version of their best-performing appeal.    

Internal stakeholders are concerned that one program is no longer mentioned, and one program has two appeals about it.  However, the organization raises more through the mail than ever before.

Year 4

Emboldened by how much money they are raising, they add two new appeals. One is focused on the program that raises the most, and one appeal is focused on the program that raises the second-most.

Internal stakeholders are convinced that “donor fatigue” is imminent.  However, all appeals continue to do very well.  The organization raises more through the mail than ever before, and notice that their overall donor retention rate has increased.

Year 5

They add two more appeals, for a total of seven. 

They notice, for the first time, that one of the appeals for their most popular program did not raise as much as it had in previous years.

The organization is concerned about that particular appeal, but they are not concerned about their overall program because they are raising more than they ever have before, and donor retention continues to improve.

Year 6

They add two more appeals, for a total of nine appeals. Of the two new appeals, one is a completely new appeal and one is about their second-most popular program.

Additionally, they pay particular attention to the appeal that didn’t work well the previous year. They find that its message veered off-topic, so they revise it for this year and it works great again.

The Process

Going from one appeal to nine appeals is a process. The same is true for fundraising emails.

And of course, as an organization goes through this process it should also be Reporting to its donors, use segmentation, have a Major Donor program, etc.

And the organization itself changes – the Development Department gets bigger, maybe an agency gets hired. 

But it’s just step-by-step growth. This is a well-known, proven path. 

And the results are clear.  Look at how many more dollar signs there are in Year 6 than in Year 1. That organization has meaningfully increased how much good it can do.

It’s also made the organization safer; if one appeal doesn’t work well, it’s insulated by several other appeals.

And it made the organization stronger – the increased volume of communication led to increased donor retention. They keep more of their donors year-over-year than they used to.

I’d call that a big win!

How to Write As If You’re Talking to One Person

Steven  |  Ask
Write

Experienced copywriters say things like this all the time:

“The best fundraising sounds like it’s from one person to one person.”

But how do you write fundraising and make it sound like you’re talking to one person?

Here’s how. The following are the ideas I have in my head as I create fundraising materials. One or all of them should help you!

Have One Person in Mind

Most of your donors will have several common traits. You can create a fictional person, imbue them with the traits your donors have, and write your letters/emails/newsletters to that person.

At my first fundraising job, there was a cardboard cutout of an older woman right inside the front door. We were instructed to write all our letters to her.

The fancy marketing word for this is “persona.” Large nonprofits with lots of donors have multiple personas; personas for online donors, personas for major donors, personas for event participants, etc.

The point is the same: visualize who you are writing to and then write to that one person.

Watch Your Plurals

If you’re writing to one person, you don’t use the plural to refer to him or her.

So don’t use plurals like these in your fundraising writing:

  • “Dear Friends,”
  • “All of your gifts…” (which doesn’t make sense for a donor who has only given one gift)
  • “Thank you to everyone who…”

What you want to watch out for is anything that makes the reader think, “Oh, I thought this thing I’m reading was to me, but it turns out it’s to everybody.”

Use the Donor’s Name

Merge in the donor’s name. It’s commonplace to merge the donor’s name in the salutation, and it’s a pro move to merge their name in the letter itself.

For instance, if there’s a paragraph I particularly want the donor to read, I often use the donor’s name as the first word in a paragraph.

People are trained from birth to pay attention to what’s said immediately after their name. Use that to your advantage!

Use the Word ‘You’

This is the obvious one. Second only to a person’s name, the word “you” gets people’s attention.

But there’s another reason “you” is so helpful: it transforms a truth about your organization into a personal truth for the donor.

You can FEEL the emotional difference between, “A gift to our organization will fight cancer” and, “your gift will fight cancer.”

I have a general rule of thumb for when I edit fundraising: whenever I see the organization’s name, I try to delete it and replace it with the word “you.” It’s not the right thing to do in all cases, but it’s the right thing to do in most cases.

Use the Language a Donor Would Use

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who has a stellar vocabulary and kind of shows it off? Or talked to a person who’s an expert in their field and is constantly using jargon and you’re not quite sure what it means?

What’s the result when people like that talk to you? It makes you feel like the person isn’t really talking to you. It makes you feel like they are kind of talking to themselves and people “just like them.”

By using language that insiders value and appreciate, a lot of nonprofits accidentally make their donors feel like outsiders.

But using language that a donor would use crosses the gap to donors, instead of widening the gap.

Think of It This Way

Donors are looking for organizations that make it easy for them to understand what’s going on in the world and how their gift will help.

If you follow these rules, you’ll create fundraising that makes each of your donors think, “Hey, this organization is writing to me.” She’s more likely to feel known, and you’ll make it easy for her to understand what you’re writing about.

And you’ll notice that your fundraising results will tick up meaningfully.

The Dreaded SASA LELE!

Steven  |  Ask
Sasa lele

Posting this because it’s fun. And it’s a perfect way to end the recent mini-series of posts about heat maps and first sentences.

I hope it rings true that all of us occasionally write and/or design things that make perfect sense to us… but causes our audience to give a quizzical, “huh?”

I’d describe a SASA LELE as any time internal folks think the writing/design/messaging is communicating well, when it’s actually causing confusion and lowering fundraising results.

Here are two “fundraising SASA LELEs” that I see all the time.

The positive appeal letter that communicates that everything is going great. There are pictures of happy, healthy people. There’s a story about someone who is doing great.

There’s 4 pictures and 500 words communicating that things are going very well… and two sentences asking for support.

SASA LELE! The message most donors receive is that everything is going great and their support is not needed right now.

The other example is the appeal letter that starts off with a Thank You and assumes the donor will keep reading.

But you know from the heat maps that a significant percentage of donors will only read the first part… think the letter is some sort of thank you note… remember that they have a bunch of other mail and bills to go through… and put the letter in the recycling.

SASA LELE!

And here’s a “hot take” for you – SASA LELE does more actual damage to organizations’ fundraising than the mythical “donor fatigue” ever has.

In your direct response fundraising, every word you write and every design choice you make needs to be with the purpose of helping that piece of communication do its one job.

So be clear. Get right to the point. Don’t be conceptual.

Any time you find yourself working on a piece of fundraising where donors need to understand the gist of it at a glance, work like crazy to make it clear, and beware SASA LELE!