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How to Create a Great Fundraising Offer: What’s an Offer?

Steven Screen | April 4, 2019May 16, 2019Ask

I’m starting a series on Fundraising Offers – the least understood, most powerful way nonprofits (especially smaller nonprofits) can start raising more money immediately.

A strong offer helps your organization:

Raise more money with each piece of fundraising
Be more memorable to your donors
Build stronger relationships with your donors

This post will lay out some foundational ideas, then later posts will show you how to do it.

So first, let’s define what an offer is.

What’s an “Offer?”

A fundraising offer is the main thing a fundraising piece says will happen when the person gives a gift.

Here are some examples of offers taken from my files. Some are good, some are poor – later we’ll talk about what makes an offer effective or not. For now, we’re just working on identifying offers and understanding what they are.

I’ve underlined the “main thing that will happen” that each letter / email / newsletter emphasized:

“Will you join us as we fight poverty”
“Will you help these overcoming women in their journey”
“$1.92 will provide a Thanksgiving meal”
“Please partner with us as we end generational homelessness”
“For every $250 you donate, one child will attend camp this summer”
“Your gifts support the Harmony Experience for all”
“Your gift supports the arts in our community”

Every piece of fundraising communication has an offer.

Some offers are more powerful than others.

Some offers work for almost all organizations (e.g., year-end). Some offers only work for some organizations at very specific times of the year (e.g., opening night at the opera). Some offers are so powerful they can create billion-dollar organizations (e.g., “child sponsorship”).

Your job as a fundraiser is to find the most effective offers for your organization.

Can Changing Your Offer – Changing the Focus of an Organization’s Communications – Make that Big a Difference?

A good offer immediately improves an organization’s fundraising.

Just in the last couple months I helped:

An organization raise over $75,000 with an appeal letter when they’d never raised more than $3,000 with an appeal.
An organization raise $49,000 with an appeal when they’d never raised over $1,500.
An organization raise $5,500 with an email when they’d never raised more than $700.

The massive increases were created by changing their offers, by changing “the main thing the fundraising pieces said would happen when the person gives a gift.”

The organizations that went from $3,000 to $75,000 made a simple change. They changed their offer from:

“Together, we can change a young woman’s life”

…to…

“You can help one local woman go to college”

Doesn’t seem like such a small change could have such a big difference, does it? But by having a strong offer, and making it the main focus of a piece of donor communication, you can absolutely see remarkable increases.

Think of it this way: focusing your donor communications on the right thing immediately improves your organization’s fundraising.

What’s Next?

My next post will focus on why a good offer is so effective. I want organizations to understand why it works so well before I explain how to do it well.

Why? Because developing a strong offer is much more a “way of thinking” than it is a series of steps to follow, or a list of ingredients.

When I’ve given nonprofits or audiences the list of ingredients, they haven’t reliably been able to create strong offers.

To use a cooking analogy, I suspect I’ve been giving people a list of ingredients without providing the cooking instructions.

My fault. So with this series I’m going to “start at the start.” I’m defining what an offer is. Then I’ll describe why offers work so well. Then I’ll give you the ingredients. Then I’ll show you how to use them.

And then you’ll be on your way to creating stronger offers for your organization – and will start to raise more money immediately!

Read the entire series:

How to defend donor-centric fundraising to your boss

Steven Screen | March 28, 2019June 21, 2019Ask

Today’s blog post is a 4-minute video.

It’s taken from a recent free webinar I did where I was doing live reviews of appeals and newsletters. (There’s another one this Friday – you can sign up for free here.)

The video helps explain why donor-centric fundraising is more effective than organization-centric fundraising.

It’s this simple truth – that most donors are more interested in themselves and the things they care about – that explains why classic organization-centric fundraising doesn’t work as well.

So if you want to try donor-centric fundraising, share this reasoning with your boss. It seems counter-intuitive at first. But it makes sense when you think about it – and we have 70 years of direct response fundraising testing to prove it!

Watch the video here.

11 donor-centric sentences you can use…

Steven Screen | March 26, 2019March 26, 2019Ask

Here’s a question I get asked at least once a week:

“I see why it makes sense to write ‘to the donor about their gift’ instead of writing about my organization…

But how do I do that?”

My encouragement is that you can learn the same way I learned: you can take good copy from another organization and customize it for your non-profit.

So here are some sample sentences you can steal like an artist and customize for your organization. All of these sentences are from appeals that performed at or above expectations.

All are from appeal letters. Some of them are opening lines. Some are from the middle, some from near the end.

I’m writing you today with an important request. You are one of our most faithful donors, and I’m going to be very direct.

I’m so thankful to be able to write you about this.

You can really make a difference in the lives of suffering people.

When you give, it’s as if you’re right there beside us, caring for people in the field.

You’ll love how your gift is multiplied by volunteers and donated goods.

I couldn’t wait to write you this letter.

Look at how much good you can do; you can…

Here’s why your gift is so important.

[NAME], you’ve already been so generous, but I want you to know about the incredible need right now – and the opportunity for you to help.

I know you care for each [CATEGORY OF PERSON/CREATURE YOU WORK WITH].

Thank you for taking a moment out of your day to respond to this letter now.

There you go. Modify these for your organization – or just copy them!

Your donors will feel like you’re talking to them about the things they care about. And that’s the surest path to fundraising success.

5 Quick Thoughts to Help You Raise More

Steven Screen | March 21, 2019March 21, 2019Ask

Here’s a quick list of 5 things that should help you raise more money:

1. Letters that look like letters tend to do better.

A “letter” is a proven way to effectively raise money. But if you break the “form” too much – too many photos, too many graphics, a big color banner across the top – it begins to feel more like a brochure than a letter. And brochures do not work.

2. You do not have to be a great writer to be great at raising money through mail and email.

The things that make mail and email fundraising effective are rarely what most people think of as “good writing.” Really, you just need to know a handful of ideas – all of which I’ll be teaching in a free webinar Friday, March 22.

3. When someone at a nonprofit says they are going to “innovate,” really what they should say is that they are “attempting to innovate.”

Not all innovation works. If we explicitly name that going in, we’ll all be smarter about whether attempting to innovate is a good use of time and budget.

4. If you really want to get better at direct mail and email fundraising – as in actually study good teaching, not just read tips – study Siegfried Voegele.

Start with this article by Chris Keating.

5. “Fundraising Offers” are the most powerful, least-understood tactic in fundraising.

The teaching in our industry on Offers, even my own, isn’t cutting it. So I’m working on a better way to teach the organization-upgrading skill of creating a good offer. Watch this space.

Create & Relieve Tension

Steven Screen | March 19, 2019March 19, 2019Ask

The most effective fundraising communications create and relieve tension throughout the year.

“Creating and relieving tension” is a way smart fundraisers can tap into how humans are wired, to increase your donors’ engagement with your organization.

You’ve seen this at work in movies, TV shows and plays. There’s a classic “three-act structure” where there’s an “inciting incident” that creates tension, then there’s drama, then resolution to relieve the tension.

This approach has been used for centuries because it works. But there’s a specific way to do it in fundraising…

What Works Best

If you look at the best-performing fundraising programs – in terms of net revenue and donor retention rates – you’ll notice the following approach. I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself:

They create tension with powerful appeals
The relieve tension with powerful newsletters

There are a few outliers. But when we started Better Fundraising and really dug into the data, we saw that some organizations drastically outperformed their peers.

The high-performing organizations tended to have a mix of appeals and printed donor-centric newsletters.

The Simple Explanation

Great appeals create tension by presenting unsolved problems to donors.

They remind donors that all is not right with something the donor cares about. They leave the donor hanging. The donor does not know what’s going to happen.

That’s why great newsletters relieve the tension by sharing stories of how the problem has been solved.

They “close the loop” for the donor. They show the donor, usually through a story of a beneficiary, that the problem was indeed solved.

This leaves the donor feeling satisfied. Pleased that her gift made a difference. Trusting the organization more.

I Don’t Know Why, but the Data is Clear…

You raise less money when you create and relieve tension in the same piece of fundraising.

The standard theory: when you relieve your donor’s tension, you remove some of her emotional momentum and reason to give.

But when you leave your donor with a little tension, she is more likely to take action. Because by taking action, she resolves the tension.

She can say to herself, “I know that I helped. I know that I did my part.”

Side note: note that in this scenario, the donor is giving to help someone and to “scratch her own itch” – to relieve the tension she feels. She is not giving to scratch the organization’s itch. My personal theory: if more organizations knew that donors gave mostly to scratch their own itches, organizations would make more donor-centric fundraising, and a LOT more money would be raised.

How Does This Help You?

Great question. This whole line of thinking is a bit conceptual. So here are your takeaways:

During your year, you should have a mix of printed appeals and printed newsletters
Your appeals should present current problems to donors – not share a story of someone you’ve already helped, or work you’ve already done (free tips here)
Your newsletters should be full of stories of people you’ve helped and work you’ve already done (just be sure to give credit for those things to your donor)
Don’t try to do both things (share a need and a “story of success”) in the same piece of fundraising. When you do that, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

And Up Next…

Many organizations don’t like to share current problems, or unsolved problems with their donors.

I get it. It’s uncomfortable.

But it sure works better. And I think that the arguments that there’s something wrong with that approach fall apart when examined.

I believe Asking in this way is a form of donor love. Or #DonorLove.

I call it #DonorToughLove, and I’ll write about it next…

You Must Earn Your Donors’ Attention (they don’t read the whole thing)

Steven Screen | March 12, 2019March 12, 2019Ask

Most nonprofits, without realizing it, make a big assumption when they write their fundraising.

They assume their donors will read the whole thing. The whole email. The whole letter.

That’s a really unhelpful assumption.

Here’s a heatmap of a 1-page direct mail letter. It shows what a donor’s eyes tend to look at, and in what order it happens:

We could spend a lot of time talking about what this means for your fundraising writing and design. But there’s one main lesson I want you to take away…

You Have to Earn and Keep a Donor’s Attention

You cannot assume your donor will read the whole thing.

Well, you can. But you’ll raise a lot less money.

So first you have to earn your donor’s attention. That’s having a great teaser on your envelope. Or a catchy subject line for your email. You need to get good at those things.

For your mass donor fundraising to excel, you need to be better at earning attention than you need to be at describing your organization or your programs.

That might feel like a “sad truth.” But it’s a really helpful truth if you want to raise more money and do more good.

How to Earn Donor Attention

There are three main ways to earn donor attention. You need to make your fundraising:

Interesting to donors. This almost always means talking about your beneficiaries and your cause more than your organization and your programs. Remember: your donor first got involved because of your beneficiaries or cause, not because of your programs.
Emotional. Emotions are what keep us reading. You want to constantly be using the emotional triggers: Anger, Exclusivity, Fear, Flattery, Greed, Guilt, Salvation.
Dramatic. You want your fundraising to be full of drama and conflict.

Here’s an example. You already know that your first sentence of any fundraising appeal is super important. Take a look at these two:

“[NAME] Theatre is dedicated to producing high-quality, daring productions that take on challenging topics.”

vs.

“I’m writing you today about something you care about – and it’s in danger.”

I can basically guarantee you that more people are going to keep reading the second example. It’s written directly to the donor, it’s about something she cares about; it’s emotional, and it’s dramatic.

The first example – from a real letter from my files – is a classic example of telling the donor something the donor probably already knows and doesn’t really care about.

Note: Arts organizations often say that their fundraising can’t be emotional or dramatic because they don’t have babies or puppies to raise money for. I think the first example above shows that Arts organizations can absolutely be dramatic and emotional in their fundraising – they just need to think about it differently. After all, if a Theatre can’t get dramatic, it’s probably not that great a Theatre!

The Big Lesson

Your donors are moving fast. They don’t read the whole thing, watch the whole thing, or listen to the whole thing.

You need to get great at getting and keeping their attention. Study it. Know what your donors care about and then borrow tactics from advertising and social media to get your donor’s attention. And remember; we have 70 years of best-practices for earning and keeping donor attention. Smart fundraisers have learned a LOT over the years. Tap into it!

Because if you can earn your donors’ attention, they are more likely to keep reading.

And if you can keep your donors’ attention, they are more likely to give you a gift.

Effective Fundraising Feels Aggressive to Insiders

Steven Screen | February 19, 2019February 14, 2019Ask

We’re doing a series of short posts called Mastermind Lessons.

The Fundraising Mastermind is transformational consulting for nonprofits that we do with Chris Davenport of Movie Mondays and The Nonprofit Storytelling Conference.

Here’s the first of the top-level lessons that every nonprofit needs to be reminded of, more often than they think.

To internal experts – that’s you, your programs staff, your leadership – effective fundraising appears overly aggressive and simplistic

That’s not the way it appears to donors. But it often appears that way to internal experts.

This is a constant theme for organizations at the Mastermind. They get pushback like this from their internal audiences (and sometimes wonder this themselves):

“This is too aggressive, we’ll offend people.”
“But I would never talk like this.”
“But this doesn’t mention X and Y and Z; donors need to know those things!”
“This isn’t the language we use. The correct term is [INSERT JARGON].

I even wrote this story because it’s such an incredible example.

So what’s the reason this happens to almost every organization? Despite, you know, 70 years of fundraising best-practices that simple, direct fundraising works better?

It’s because of a truth that most organizations don’t know about or can’t fully wrap their minds around…

You Are Not Your Donors

The phrase “You Are Not Your Donors” should be written – in 100pt Courier – on the main door into every fundraising department.

Then everyone going in that door, everyone who creates your organization’s fundraising, will remember that:

Your donors are different than staff
Your donors don’t know as much as staff knows
Your donors don’t want to know as much as staff knows
Your donors care about different things than staff cares about
Your donors think about your cause less than staff does
Your donors only interact with your fundraising for a few seconds – you don’t have time to be complex!

I say this all the time, but of course there are a couple of donors and a board member who know as much and care about the same things that your staff does. And that very small group of donors should be talked to differently than when you are talking to everybody.

But when you are talking to everybody – your appeals, your newsletters, your emails, your e-news – then the truths above apply.

And by the way, if you wrote “You Are Not Your Donors” on the fundraising department’s door, it would remind your staff that the fundraising you create has a specific worldview that is different from your staff’s worldview.

Because as Fundraisers, it’s part of our job to teach this truth to everyone in our organization.

This part of our job doesn’t get talked about much. But it’s valuable. Because the organizations that embrace this truth tend to raise more money and keep their donors for longer!

To Get a Donor to Give, Remember WHY They Give…

Steven Screen | February 7, 2019February 6, 2019Ask

Short post today with an important tip.

Which sentence do you think would raise more?

“Right now, our Uplifting Kids program needs your support.”

Or…

“Right now, a local child needs your help.”

I can basically guarantee that asking a donor to “help a local child” will raise more than asking a donor to “support a program that works with local children.”

Why?

What I’m trying to illustrate here is “asking for support of a program” versus “asking for help for a beneficiary or cause.”

This is important because most of your donors likely got involved with your organization because they cared about the beneficiaries your organization helps, or the cause your organization is working on.

They did not likely get involved with your organization because of your programs.

The Lesson

When you’re Asking donors (and non-donors) to give a gift, you need to remember why they give.

As a rule, most donors give first and foremost because they care about your beneficiaries or your cause, not because they care about your organization or your programs.

Are there exceptions to this rule? Of course. There’s always a major donor or a board member who loves your program. Or a Foundation that gave you a grant because of something specific about your programs.

To those segments of your audience, talk about the program itself.

But when you are talking to “everybody” – in your appeals, e-appeals, at events, on your website – talk about a beneficiary or your cause.

For Example…

The most helpful example I share of this is an appeal letter that said,

“Right now, programs like Uplifting Kids need your support!”

That is a perfect example of “asking for support of a program.” Just think about how much less power that has than something like, “Right now, a local child needs your help!”

The organization that wrote the “…programs like Uplifting Kids need your support” has been a client of ours for four years. We basically never talk about their programs any more. And their appeals and events raise between 2x and 8x of what they used to.

So focus your donor communications on why your donors gave in the first place, not on your programs!

‘If you send this appeal letter you won’t get invited to any holiday parties’

Steven Screen | January 31, 2019January 31, 2019Ask

A client just told me a fantastic story that I have to share.

It’s a perfect – and funny – encapsulation of the fear that many nonprofits have about fundraising.

Here’s the Story…

Their organization helps smart, underprivileged young women go to college. It’s an incredible program.

They’ve sent out a couple of direct mail appeals here and there. Each would raise between $2,000 and $3,000. This revenue was always a pleasant surprise to the organization because they raise most of their money through a couple of events.

Last fall, they hired me to write a year-end appeal for them.

When the organization’s Founder reviewed my appeal draft, she was worried. She thought it was too aggressive. Too bold. “We don’t ask for support like this,” she thought.

So she showed it to her Board. Same reaction there: the appeal was too aggressive. One Board Member was really worried. She said to the Founder…

“If you send this letter out, you’re not going to get invited to any holiday parties!”

That is so bad it’s good.

Let’s take a look at that reaction. The person who said it was afraid that a fundraising letter would somehow offend donors. And that the offense would be so great that the donors wouldn’t invite the Founder to any of their holiday parties.

In what world would that actually happen?

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the Board Member’s feelings. They are real, and they matter. It can feel weird and risky to ask for money. Direct mail is a weird medium.

But the Board Member’s reaction was based in fear. And fear is a lousy way to determine communication and fundraising strategies – especially given we have 70 or 80 years of best-practices in the field of direct mail fundraising to base our decisions on instead. Thankfully, the Founder said, “You know what? We’re paying an expert to do this. We should do what the expert says.”

How Did the Letter Do?

The letter raised over $75,000, and money was still coming in when the Founder told me this story.

That’s approximately 25 times more than their previous letters raised.

There were zero complaints. And the Founder was invited to just as many holiday parties as she normally was.

I share this to help nonprofits understand a couple powerful ideas:

Effective direct mail might make you uncomfortable, but it’s not for you. It’s for your donors. And your donors experience the letters differently than you do.
There are 70 or 80 years of best-practices in direct mail fundraising (most of which also applies to email fundraising). Those best-practices became best-practices because they bring donors closer to your organization, not drive donors away.

So please, as you create your fundraising this year, don’t base your reactions in fear. Fear of effective fundraising almost cost this organization $70,000! And that’s in just one letter. Think about all the other letters they’ve sent over the years.

Don’t let that happen to your organization. Follow the best-practices. Ask boldly. Your donors will love hearing the difference they can make, and you’ll raise more money!