Category: Ask

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.

Use Graphics, But Not Too Many

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Here’s a question that one of our clients asked recently, and I think it’ll be helpful to you to know what we’ve seen over the years.

“Do graphics (like a visual of a meal in an appeal for meals) actually help?”

The answer is “usually, and up to a point.”

I’ll explain both parts of that answer…

Usually

Graphics are easier to understand more quickly than words, which is why you see them so often.  And when you embrace the idea that people are moving fast when they look at your mail or email, you can see why graphics are so helpful for donors. 

  • An image of a plate with food instantly means the appeal is about providing food
  • A image of a diving board, a s’more and a bunkbed communicates “summer camp” quickly
  • A large “2X” instantly means the donor’s gift doubles

Think of these graphics as a service to your donors, to make your appeals easier to understand quickly.  They make your appeals more accessible to more people.

I’ve seen some people who will push back against using graphics because “they are not professional and we want our image to be professional.”  I ask those people if they’ve ever been grocery shopping – because when you enter a grocery store (even high-end stores like Whole Foods)

there are graphics that immediately point your attention toward sale items – and shoppers don’t think, “oh man, this grocery story isn’t professional.”  Shoppers value graphics because they’re helpful.

As Jeff Brooks says, any time you can help a donor picture what their gift will help provide, you’re closer to getting a gift.

Up to a Point

You can absolutely use too many graphics and put emphasis on too many things.  We’ve all seen marketing materials that are so visually busy that you don’t know where to look.

There’s an old maxim that says, “when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.”  You’ve seen this in appeal letters where roughly half of the letter is bolded and/or underlined.  At that point it’s no longer helpful – it’s just noise.

So don’t use too many.

But… there’s a reason you keep seeing graphics on appeal letters and in emails: they reliably increase how much money comes in.  And they increase how much money comes in because they are helpful to donors.

A Thorough, Complete Argument for Why You Should Include a Reply Card

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Direct mail reply.

A nonprofit recently asked me if they should include a physical reply card with their mailers.  They asked, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we just had everyone go online to give their gifts?”

I’m going to give you a short answer, and then a long, annoyingly detailed answer.

The Short Answer

The nonprofit is correct that it would be cheaper, but there’s a hidden consequence: they would get fewer gifts overall and would end up raising less money.

Because of this, at Better Fundraising we recommend always including a reply card and a reply envelope in your direct mail packages.  Yes, it’s a tiny bit more expensive to do so, but it’s proven to result in more net revenue for your mission.

Here’s why this happens: in today’s world, statistically speaking, most recipients of a direct mail package want to use the mail to send their gift back to you.  (This seems like a good place to remind ourselves that the average age of a donor in North America is at least 20 years older than the average age of a Fundraiser in North America.)

This means, if you don’t include a reply card and a reply envelope, you are asking a majority of the people who want to give you a gift to do it in a way they don’t prefer.  Not all of them will do it your way, and you’ll lose some gifts.

The Long Answer

Say you send out a great piece of direct mail and, after scanning and reading your letter, there are 100 people who would like to give you a gift.

In other words, you have 100 people holding your letter in their hands with intent to give.

Based on the donor behavior that Better Fundraising sees across several nonprofit sectors, we estimate that of those 100 people, approximately 75 of them would prefer to give their gift to you through the mail, and 25 would prefer to give you a gift online. 

Using this donor behavior as a baseline, let’s think through what will happen.

First, let’s assume that of the 25 folks who prefer to give online, all 25 of them scan your QR code, arrive at your landing page, and 20 of them give you a gift.  That’s an exceedingly generous assumption, because I’ve never seen a giving page or mobile form with has an 80% conversion rate, but let’s go with it for argument’s sake.  (And if you don’t know the conversion rates of your giving/donate page, that’s something to add to your list to measure and manage.)

Now, the other 75 people holding your letter will all go looking for the reply card, and will experience a moment of friction when they can’t find one.  They can’t give their gift to your nonprofit in the way they would like to.

Let’s say 5 of them put your letter in the recycling at that moment.  I’m thinking about my mom here.  She’s a fantastic donor to several organizations.  But there’s no way in the world she’s ever going to give a gift online that involves her typing in a url or scanning a QR code. 

So now you have 70 people left who have an intent to give, but must “switch media channels” (from direct mail to online) in order to give you a gift.  More friction.

Of those 70, maybe 35 will find their phone, open up the camera app, scan the QR code, and go to your giving page.  Great.  Let’s assume your giving page is great and your conversion rate is 50% for visitors arriving with intent to give, so of those 35 donors, 18 will give you a gift.

For the other 35 donors who don’t use QR codes, they will pull out their phone or laptop, hopefully not get distracted by text messages or email or their home page, and enter your website address by hand.  The standard rule of thumb is that for every click that users must make to reach a destination on the web, half of the audience is lost.  So our 35 visitors who arrive at your site, 18 make it to your giving page.  And we know that the giving page’s conversion rate is 50%, so from those 18 visitors we will get 9 gifts.

Whew.  Let’s look at the totals…

The Results

We had 100 people with intent to give after reading your letter.

In the scenario where there was no reply device, you received 47 total gifts:

  • 20 from the people who prefer to give online
  • 18 from the people who use QR codes
  • 9 from the people who had to enter your website manually

Now let’s quickly look at what would have happened if the 100 people with intent to give had a reply card and reply envelope in their hands along with your letter.

I predict that you’d receive about 90 gifts:

  • 20 from the people who went online of their own volition, and
  • 70 from people sending back the reply card with a check or credit card number.  (I’m accounting for some “loss” due to people being unable to find their checkbook, some wouldn’t have stamps, some would forget to mail the letter, etc.) 

That’s 90 gifts versus 47 gifts. 

Now, your numbers might be a little different.  Your assumptions might be a little different.  Your giving page conversion rates might be a little different.  But I think you’ll see that, if you’re counting your pennies and trying to get the most bang for your buck, you’ll include a reply card and a reply envelope.

The Myth of ‘Engage 7 Times Before Making the Ask’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Seven times.

There’s some advice going around out there that I’d like to debunk: you do not have to talk to a person seven times before asking them for a gift. 

I say this because I have helped nonprofits acquire hundreds of thousands of new donors over my career, gifts from people the nonprofit had never contacted before the moment they made the gift. 

Just last year we helped a nonprofit launch a brand new monthly giving program.  They have acquired 3,300 new donors in the last year, and approximately 95% of those new donors had never heard of the organization prior to giving their first gift. 

I have experience acquiring new donors for small to mid-size nonprofits who most donors have never heard of before, through email, direct mail, television, radio, telemarketing and face-to-face.

Just last Saturday I went to a small fundraiser for a person running for local office.  (I had nothing to do with the event; I was in the audience.)  There were about 40 people there.  None of the potential donors had ever met the candidate before.  Yet the campaign left with a meaningful number of donations and new donors.

This is not sorcery; it’s mostly being confident enough to ask.  And some of it is knowing how to ask well.

I suspect that the myth of “you have to engage with a donor 7 times before asking them for a gift” hangs around because asking feels risky.  And the idea that “we need to warm them up first” feels like good relationship-building.  But the data doesn’t support it, and in the meantime, gifts are being left on the table. 

Instead, please know that it happens every day.  It’s happening right now.  It’s probably happening to your donors right now.

Be confident.  Assume abundance.  Make the ask.

You’ll be glad you did.    

***

P.S.  Are there a couple vanishingly small contexts where the “7 times” advice holds?  Sure.  If you run into a potential major donor at the grocery store, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift.  If you’re talking to the grants officer from a foundation for the very first time, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift.  But don’t take those contexts and apply them to your event, or your email list, or the mail, etc.

The ‘Good Bad Idea’ That Raised $9,000

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Good or bad idea.

I just returned from the always-excellent GiveCon with a fun story to tell you.  It’s a great example of how small nonprofits often underestimate their donors.

A man named Jon and I were chatting, and we got to talking about the small nonprofit he serves (they have about 160 active donors).  Jon mentioned that they’d recently made a large payment to one of their local partners, and were short on cash. 

I said, “Jon, I hesitate to say this, but I have a good bad idea.”

“If you would be willing to write the first draft of an email about this, I’ll edit it for you.  If you send it out tonight, I bet we’ll raise a bunch of money.  My goal is to raise at least as much as it cost for you to come to the conference.”

Jon was game.  It was on!

Before he left the Better Fundraising booth, he and I talked about what the ask should be for.  He was thinking it would be to “refill our coffers after this large payment.”  I encouraged him to not make it about their cash flow, and instead make it about the services the money would eventually provide.

Their organization helps women in Africa who are victims of kidnapping and sexual slavery, and the money would eventually be used to help women recover.

I asked him for some program specifics, and we came up with the following: your gift of $250 will help a woman recover for a month by providing a box of food, assistance paying her rent, and 2 visits from a licensed psychotherapist from her own community.  And we included language to make the funds undesignated in case they raised more than they needed.

Jon sent the email late morning of Day 2 of GiveCon.

After lunch Jon came up to me with a huge grin on his face.  “We’ve raised $2,500 thus far!”

A few minutes after the last session of the day, Jon came back.  “We’ve raised $4,500!”

The next morning, Jon came to a session I was giving.  Near the end I asked him if he would share the current total with the people in the room, and he shared that it was over $9,000. 

This is a meaningful amount of money for their organization.  And it all came in because they had the courage to ask.

I share this story because it’s a perfect illustration of two things you’ve heard me say if you’ve read this blog for any length of time:

  • If you have a need, share it with your donors!  You can do this far more often than you think, donors will love helping, and donors will feel more connected to what’s going on at your organization.
  • Make it easy for donors to know what their gift will make possible.  Jon could have explained the “inside baseball” context of partner payments and cash flow.  And that might have been appropriate in a conversation with a major donor.  But this was a quick email, so instead he talked about what the money would do in the field, using specifics that everyone would understand.

I’m proud of Jon and his organization for sending out the email.  And I’m not the least bit surprised that it raised far more than they thought it would.

At Better Fundraising, we find donor generosity to be both amazing and predictable when donors are given acute, understandable reasons that their support today will make a difference.

Jon’s donors were ready.  Yours are, too.

It’s OK to Ask for a Smaller Approval Team

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Approval team.

If you’re a fundraiser whose appeals have to wind their way through four (or six, or eight) reviewers before they go out the door, you’re allowed to push back.  In fact, you should.  Here’s the case to make.

You were hired to do two things (well you were probably hired to do lots of things but there are two main things you were hired to do in regard to this): understand donors & what motivates them, and understand how direct response fundraising actually works.  That’s your job, and is one of the main ways you add value to your organization.

But a long approval chain takes those exact skills out of your hands.  Every reviewer who can change your copy is, in effect, overriding your expertise.  By the time a piece survives six approvers, it doesn’t sound like a fundraiser wrote it.  It sounds like a committee wrote it.  Because a committee did.

Let me acknowledge something up front: the heavy approval process doesn’t exist because anyone is being unreasonable.  Boards want to protect the brand.  Leaders want to make sure nothing embarrassing goes out under their signature.  Program staff want their work represented accurately.  Marketing wants the language consistent.  All of those instincts come from a good place.

Let me give you an analogy: the best performing appeals are like a screwdriver; they do one thing and they do it perfectly.  A large approval process tends to turn the screwdriver into a Swiss Army Knife that does a lot more things – but none of them well.

I’ve watched this scenario at hundreds of organizations.  And I’ve noticed that the orgs that grow their individual donor revenue the fastest have a few things in common, and one of them is this – they keep their approval teams small, and one person, not a group, makes the final decision.

When committees decide, fundraising gets compromised in predictable ways.  The bold ask gets softened.  The emotional language gets neutralized.  The specific gets generalized.  The urgent gets diluted.  Nobody in the room is trying to make the piece less effective, but the cumulative effect of “let’s also add…” and “could we soften…” and “I’d feel better if we mentioned…” is fundraising that doesn’t work.

It’s also slower.  Every reviewer adds days.  Every round of revisions adds more.  Every piece that takes a month to clear is a piece you didn’t send while you waited.  The hidden cost isn’t just the quality of the pieces – it’s the volume.  The orgs that send more, raise more.  Approval bottlenecks suppress volume.

Here’s a small structural change worth proposing to your leadership:

  • A small group reviews each piece – three or four people, max.
  • Reviewers can suggest changes, but not make them.
  • One person – ideally someone who knows direct response – makes the final call on what gets changed.
  • After a piece goes out, anyone in the org can comment on it.  Those comments go to the person in charge of fundraising, who decides whether to take them into account for next time.

That’s it.  Same care.  Same brand protection.  But the fundraiser gets to do their job, the pieces stay sharp, and the volume goes up.

If this is something you want to bring up, here are three things to say, in this order:

“You hired me to understand donors and to understand how fundraising through the mail and email works.  The current approval process makes it hard for me to do what you hired me for.  I’d like to propose a small change that keeps everyone involved but lets me move faster and keep the pieces effective.”

“It’s a well-known truth that fundraising written by a committee performs worse than fundraising an experienced person. That’s not a criticism of anyone on the team – it’s just how committee decision-making works.  The pieces get smoothed out, and smoothed-out fundraising raises less money.”

“What I’m proposing isn’t ‘no review.’  It’s right-sized review.  Reviewers can suggest.  One person decides.  After the piece goes out, everyone can give feedback for the next one.”

And one note for any leader reading this: the trade-off is real.  You can have careful fundraising, or you can have effective fundraising.  The organizations I see grow the fastest have learned to choose the second – by trusting the person they hired to do the job they were hired for.

Importantly, when the person doing the job feels trusted, they will tend to stay in the job longer.

You hired a fundraiser.  Let them be one.

It’s OK to Write Fundraising That’s Emotional

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Sad puppy.

If you’ve ever written a fundraising piece you knew was going to work, only to have someone in the room say “this is too emotional” – I feel you.

And I want to give you a couple tools to help you get your great fundraising approved.

Because what has happened to you is pretty common: a Fundraiser drafts an appeal that’s vivid, urgent, and emotionally honest.  They send it around for review.  And someone – usually program staff, or the branding lead, or a senior leader – pushes back: “This is too emotional.  Donors will feel manipulated.  We need to tone it down.”

Even though every word is true!

What makes this objection so hard to argue against is that it sounds reasonable.  Even ethical.  Nobody wants to feel like they’re being manipulative, or be accused of being manipulative.  And the person raising the objection usually holds real authority and means well – they understand the work deeply and they care about how the organization shows up in the world.

So the piece gets toned down.  And it raises less money.  And the Fundraiser feels frustrated.

But here’s why you want emotion in your fundraising.  More than 70 years of head-to-head testing & research on giving consistently shows that people give for emotional reasons, the vast majority of the time:

  • One well-known study compared donations in response to images of a sad child, a happy child, and a neutral child.  Same need.  Same ask.  Same beneficiary.  The sad-child version raised donations from 77% of viewers.  The happy-child and neutral-child versions?  52% each.  When there’s less emotion, there’s less giving.
  • After the Notre Dame fire in 2019, donors from around the world sent hundreds of millions of unsolicited (!) dollars to repair an old building.  Curing cancer is arguably more important – but what happened to the building was emotional, and people responded.

Emotion isn’t a flaw in giving.  Emotion is how giving works.

When you write emotionally, you’re not manipulating your donors.  You’re reminding them why they care.  The reasons they got involved in the first place were emotional – and the most respectful thing you can do is meet them in the same place they entered from.

So the next time someone in your organization calls a piece “too emotional,” here are two things worth saying – in this order – to keep the emotional version alive:

“You know everything we do and why we do it.  You’re an expert.  But our individual donors aren’t experts.  They became donors because their emotions were touched – by a story, a moment, a need.  When we tap into those same emotions in our fundraising, we’re not manipulating anyone.  We’re reminding them why they care.  What feels ‘too emotional’ to you doesn’t feel that way to a donor.  To a donor, it feels real.”

“If we change this to be the way you’d describe the work to another expert, donors will experience it as a dry lecture.  And in test after test, that approach to individual donors raises less money.  The most respectful thing we can do is meet our donors where they actually are.”

One real boundary worth naming: manipulative fundraising distorts, lies, or exaggerates.  That is NOT what we are talking about here.  We’re talking about sharing the emotions of our beneficiaries, and the emotions of our team around the work, and the emotions a donor might be feeling.  Because emotions aren’t manipulative any more than the truth is manipulative.  As long as we are telling the truth, we’re not crossing a line.

And we’re giving a gift to our donors, because we’re letting them know the full picture of what’s going on and what’s at stake.  Not a dry lecture with numbers and program details, but real lives with real consequences.

The people who became your donors did so because something touched their hearts.  Fundraising that touches their hearts again is the surest way to get them to give again.

It’s OK to Tell Your Donors When You’re Behind on Your Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Broken pig.

If your organization is behind on its fundraising goals, you’re allowed to tell your donors.

If you’re behind your budget right now, you’re probably feeling a little sick about it.  I’d like to help with that because in my experience, telling your donors is one of the best things you can do!

Of course, this feels dangerous.

So when an organization is behind its fundraising targets, here’s what tends to happen: someone offers up the idea to share the budget gap with donors, and someone else says, “We can’t do that, people will think we are bad at managing money, and our leadership will never approve it because they think it makes them look bad.”  (And if you have a Marketing or Branding department, they’ll say you can’t do it because it’ll hurt the long-term image of the organization.)

The instinct to hide a shortfall comes from a good place – staff and leaders want to protect the organization’s reputation, and you want donor confidence to remain high.

And there’s a layer that makes the whole thing even harder: even though shortfall campaigns happen all the time, nobody ever talks about them.  The organization doesn’t want to share that they had to do one.  Shortfall campaigns never get talked about at conferences.

And so we find ourselves operating in the dark on this issue, afraid of some consequences that we’ve never actually seen happen.

But (and this is a big “but”), please let me share with you the results of the 60 to 70 times I’ve run campaigns where nonprofits let their donors know that they were behind their fundraising goals.

Here’s what actually happens:

  • The campaign almost always raises significantly more than the nonprofit’s regular campaigns.  It’s usually the best campaign of the year.  One of Better Fundraising’s clients usually raises about $150k at year-end, and their shortfall campaign raised $650k.  Here’s that story.
    • Specifically, response rates and average gifts are higher than average.
  • The feared negative consequences don’t happen.  I’ve measured – there’s no drop in retention rates, and there’s no drop in long-term giving.
  • The number of calls the organization gets from “concerned donors” is usually less than five.

In a nutshell, here’s why a campaign that lets donors know a nonprofit is behind their fundraising goals or budget is usually so successful: donors know that the organization is a nonprofit.  They know that funding is uneven.  They don’t want any of the nonprofit’s services to be cut.  A shortfall is a clear, urgent need – and humans respond to clear, urgent needs.

And if this is something you are open to, it’s the conversation with your boss or your Board where the idea to share the shortfall gets killed.  Here are three things to say to your boss, in this order, to help them be more open to the idea:

“I know this feels risky.  I had the same instinct.  But shortfall campaigns have been run successfully for a long time, it’s just that nobody talks about it.  Here’s what one experienced fundraiser saw as he ran more than 50 of these campaigns… (show them this blog).”

“Our donors know that we’re a nonprofit.  They know that funding varies from year to year.  When we tell them we’re behind our budget, we’re building trust – we’re treating them like partners instead of just calling them partners.”

“We know our donors care about our work.  Let’s tell them what’s going on and give them a chance to help, not hide it and take the decision out of their hands.”

When you’re behind budget, trust your donors.  They care about what your organization is working on, and they care about your organization.  They want you to keep going.  Give them the chance to help.  You don’t have to hide what is happening.

Your donors can handle the truth.  They will thank you for telling them.  And they will surprise you with their generosity.

Never Interrupt Your Donors When They’re Being Generous

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Generous people.

My mentor used to tell a story about “the $100 donors.”

He was serving a large national charity that had approximately 250,000 active donors at the time.  The charity noticed that every time they sent out an appeal, a large group of donors would each give $100.

A person at the charity was worried they were going to “burn out” those $100 donors, so he decided to remove all $100 donors from the next few appeals.

My mentor always talked about how “three bad things happened, two in the short term and one the long term”:

  1. The $100 donors stopped giving.  They just stopped.  Thousands of them gave to one appeal, and none of them gave to the next appeal. 
  2. The organization raised a lot less money.  Their appeals simply raised less than they used to, and the organization accomplished less. 
  3. When the $100 donors were added back into appeals months later, some of them started giving again, and a significant percentage of them never gave again.

One person’s fear that “their donors were going to get burnt out” was given more weight than the behavior of thousands of donors.  Because of that, the organization raised less money and lost many of those donors.

Hearing this story, you can see how that was a big mistake.  But at the time, the person’s worry sounded strategic.  I’m sure the reasoning was something like, “Let’s not burn these donors out.  Let’s let them rest, and then they will give more later.”

That reasoning sounds smart because we all have fears around asking too often.  And the idea that “we can ask less often and will somehow raise more” is very attractive.  So it’s easy to say yes to suggestions like this.

But because of stories like this one, and 30+ years of fundraising experience, at Better Fundraising we’ve learned to assume abundance instead of letting our fears put boundaries around donor generosity.

There’s a great quote from Napoleon, who said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Here’s how that applies to this story and fundraising: “Never interrupt your donors when they’re being generous.”