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Lessons from 25 Year-End Fundraising Seasons

Steven Screen | September 25, 2018Ask

This year will be my 25th year-end fundraising season. (In related news, I have a lot of grey hair.)

That means I’ve been a part of about 250 separate year-end campaigns for different nonprofits around North America.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned. Because we do lots of testing, pay close attention to what works, and have a pretty good handle on what works the best.

But before I do, allow me a brief aside. The thing I’m personally most excited about this year is the four low-cost products we just released. They take complex year-end fundraising campaigns and break them down into simple, easy-to-follow steps. They are written and designed so that you’ll learn what to do, when to do it, and how to say it. I couldn’t be more proud.

Today, I want to share how to think about year-end fundraising. It’s a short set of ideas that put you on the path to happy donors and full bank accounts.

Idea #1 – Your donors love to give, but they are busy

Before you do anything, just think about this for a moment. Your donors love to give! Share this idea with your staff and board. If you want to have a great year, you must remember that your donors love to give, but they are busy!

Most nonprofits think two unhelpful things:

Our fundraising makes people give gifts they don’t really want to give.
Every donor receives every message we send.

Neither of those things are true. And if you think those two things, you will only communicate with your donors a couple times in December. That’s a HUGE mistake.

Instead, remember that your donors love to give, but they are busy. They need to be over-communicated with during this busy season. (And if there’s a donor or board member who has already given their year-end gift, by all means remove them from the mailing list!) But for everyone else, you need to communicate to them often enough to break through all the noise, get their attention, and remind them to give you a gift.

Idea #2 – Think of your year-end fundraising as a service

That’s right. Not as fundraising, but as a service to your busy donors who love to give.

You are reminding them to do something they would love to do.

So what makes a good reminder?

A clear focus on the action you want them to take. In all your communications (letters, emails, your website, social) get to the point very quickly. Ask them to give a special year-end gift before the end of the year.
A clear focus on the deadline. Remind donors, again and again, that their special year-end gift is needed before the end of the year. Deadlines are magic in fundraising, and this is the best deadline you’ll ever have. Mention it early and often!
Remind them what their gift does. This is NOT a reminder of what your organization does with their gift. For instance, if you’re an Arts organization, don’t remind them that their gift ‘supports our programs to promote the arts…” Instead, remind your donors that their gift ‘supports the arts so that our community has a thriving arts scene and culture.’

Idea #3 – The only other ideas to add are reasons to give now

Resist the urge to talk about your upcoming capital campaign, or tell a story about somebody you’ve already helped.

The only other ideas to add are reasons your donor should give a gift right now. Things like:

Their gift will be doubled by a matching grant
Your organization has a shortfall and you need to ‘close the gap’ as quickly as possible
You have a big need for funds early in 2018 and the donor’s gift will help

The Main Point

You can do these things and still write a warm, personal letter or email. Really, it’s a matter of focus. Make sure you communicate the main things in a way that donors who just briefly glance at your letter will still get the point.

So, of course, you can talk about how it’s been a good year. And you can thank your donor for their previous generosity. You can even talk about how pretty the snow is.

But those should not be the main, most noticeable parts of your letter. If you write and design you year-end fundraising following the principles above, you’ll raise a lot more money!

This post was originally published in November 2017.

How to Tell Unfinished Stories

Steven Screen | September 18, 2018September 17, 2018Ask

I’m going to tell you something that is counter to what most nonprofits think.

But it’s tested and proven. Hundreds of times for hundreds of organizations, large and small. Here it is:

If you want to raise the most money, tell a story that is not finished and ask the donor to finish it with a gift today.

That’s a bit conceptual so here’s an example. Most fundraising appeals tell stories that go something like this:

“Lisa was homeless and in dire straits. But thanks to our 4-step program, Lisa is doing great today. Will you please give a gift to help us continue this good work?”

Notice how Lisa’s story is finished? She’s already been helped. The only role for the donor to play is to ‘help the organization continue the work.’

We talk about this in detail in our free ebook on storytelling that we’re launching soon, but that type of story works OK at best. Your best donors might give to it. But most of your donors won’t.

If you want to raise more money — and catch the attention of more people — tell an unfinished story of need like this:

“Lisa is homeless and in dire straits. Will you please give a gift today to help her stay in our shelter?”

Do you see the difference? Lisa still needs help! The donor feels that and sees exactly how a gift today will help Lisa.

Lisa’s story is unfinished, so your donor has a role to play. And your donor sees how her gift will do something simple and powerful — providing a night of shelter — which donors love.

Here’s another way to think about it:

Most nonprofits ask donors to help them do more of what the nonprofit has already done.
What works better in fundraising is to ask donors to help people who have not yet been helped or are currently being helped.

The is one of the fundamental principals we teach in our training on how to Ask powerfully. Use it in your next appeal and watch your results soar!

This post was originally published in July 2017.

How to Choose What to Underline and Why

Steven Screen | September 11, 2018Ask

I’m going to teach you to raise more money by showing you what to emphasize in your fundraising letters.

Because if you underline or bold the right things, you’ll raise more money.

NOTE: for brevity, I’m going to lump all forms of visual emphasis as “underlining.” You might use underlining, or bolding, or highlighting, doesn’t matter. All of those are different tactics. I’m talking about the strategy of visually emphasizing small portions of your letters and e-appeals.

First, let me tell you why your underlining is so important.

Underlining has two purposes in fundraising writing. Almost nobody knows the second – and more important – purpose.

Bolding or underlining signals that a sentence is important. This is true of almost any writing.
But underlining also serves a second, more important purpose. The most effective fundraisers use underlining to choose for your donor which things they are most likely to read.

Because remember, most of your donors won’t read your letter from top to bottom. They will scan your letter – briefly running their eyes down the page. And as they scan, when they see a sentence that has been emphasized, they are likely to stop scanning and read.

It’s this second, more valuable purpose that most organizations don’t know about. So they underline the wrong things.

My Rule of Thumb

Here’s what I try to do. This doesn’t apply to every letter, but I try this approach first on every single letter I review or write:

The first thing underlined should be a statement of need, or a statement describing the problem that the organization is working on.
The second thing is a brief explanation of how the donor’s gift will help meet the need or solve the problem mentioned in the first underlined section.
The third thing is a bold call-to-action for the donor to give a gift to meet the need / solve the problem today.

If you do that, I can basically guarantee that your letter will do well. A MASSIVE number of fundraising letters don’t even have those elements, let alone emphasize them. If you have them, and you emphasize them, here’s what happens:

Donors know immediately what you’re writing to them about
Donors know immediately what they can do to help
Donors know immediately that they are needed!

Because of those things your donors are more likely to read more. And more likely to donate more.

There Are Some Sub-Rules

No pronouns. Remember that it’s very likely that a person reading the underlined sentence has not read the prior sentences. So if you underline a sentence like “They need it now!” the donor does not know who “they” are and what “it” is. The sentence is basically meaningless to the donor. Their time has been wasted.
Not too many. You’ve seen this before; there are four sentences that are bolded, five that are underlined, and the result is a visual mess that only a Board member would read. Be disciplined. I try to emphasize only three things per page, sometimes four.
Emphasize what donors care about, not what your Org cares about. If you find yourself emphasizing a sentence like, “Our programs are the most effective in the county!” … de-emphasize it. Though it matters a lot to you, no donor is scanning your letter looking to hear how good your organization is at its job. But donors are scanning for things they are interested in. So emphasize things like, “Because of matching funds, the impact of your gift doubles!” or “I know you care about unicorns, and the local herd is in real danger.”
Drama is interesting. If your organization is in a dramatic situation, or the story in the letter has real drama, underline it. Here are a couple of examples from letters we’ve worked on recently: “It was at the moment she saw the ultrasound that life in her belly stopped being a problem and became a baby” and “The enclosed Emergency Funding Program card outlines the emergency fundraising plan I’ve come up with.”

And now, I have to share that I got the idea for this post when I saw this clip from the TV show “Friends”. It turns out that Joey has never known what using ‘air quotes’ means – and he’s using them wrong (to hilarious effect). I saw it and thought, “That’s like a lot of nonprofits trying to use underlining effectively.”

If you’re offended by that, please forgive me. I see hundreds of appeal letters and e-appeals a year. I developed a sense of humor as a defense mechanism. 🙂

The good news is that learning how to use underlining is as easy as learning to use air quotes!

You can do this. Just remember that most of your donors are moving fast. Underline only what they need to know. That’s an incredible gift to a compassionate, generous, busy donor!

And if you’d like to know how Better Fundraising can create your appeals and newsletters (with very effective underlining!) take a look here.

This post was originally published in March 2018.

Five Tips for the First Sentence of Your Next Appeal Letter

Steven Screen | September 4, 2018Ask

The first sentence of your next appeal letter is really important.

Most readers will use it to decide whether to keep reading . . . or start thinking about whether to recycle or delete your message.

So yeah, it’s important. We’ve written hundreds of appeals and e-appeals over the years, and studied the results. Here are five tips to make your first sentence GREAT:

1. Short and Sweet

Your first sentence should be short and easy to understand. If your first sentence is long, complex, has lots of commas and clauses, and maybe a statistic or two, would you want to keep wading through? Remember, your reader is using it to decide whether to keep reading . . . or not.

2. Drama, Drama, Drama

Fill it with drama or make it interesting to your donor. Drama and tension are two of the best tools you have for engaging their interest. Or make it something that would be interesting to your donor – which is likely something different than would be interesting to you!

The worst example of this I ever saw was a first sentence that said, “Recently we hosted a staff leadership seminar.” Ouch.

3. What’s The Point?

One of the best first sentences is, “I’m writing to you today because . . .” That sentence forces you to get right to the point – which donors really appreciate. You want to know why so few donors actually read fundraising letters? It’s because they know how long it takes most nonprofits to get to the point! So if you and your organization get to the point quickly, your donor will be far more likely to read more.

4. Who Cares?

Another great tactic is to make the first sentence about the donor. Think “I know you care about Koala bears” or “You are one of our most generous donors, so I think you’ll want to know . . .” Listen, most of the other organizations she donates to wax poetic about totally unrelated things or about how great they are. When you write her and talk about her, she’ll love it!

5. Less is More

After you’ve written the first draft of your appeal, you can often delete your first couple of sentences or paragraphs. This happens to me all the time in my own writing, and in appeal letters that I edit for clients. In the first draft, the first couple sentences or paragraphs are often just warmup. They can be deleted and your letter will be stronger because now it gets right to the point.

So next time you’re writing, pay special attention to your first sentence. Keep it short and easy to read. Fill it with drama if you can. And when more people read your writing, more people will donate!

This post was originally published in June 2017.

Weeds In The Garden (Or, “How I learned to stop worrying and love off-target fundraising”)

Steven Screen | August 28, 2018Ask

Almost no piece of fundraising anyone sends out is ever perfect.

As a Fundraiser, you have to get used to having a few “weeds in your garden.”

Weeds In The Garden

That’s what we call them around here. The little things that creep into fundraising because you’re in a hurry. Or because your approval process is a committee. Or because your ED loves a certain phrase.

They happen to me. They happen to you. They happen to everyone.

But they are just weeds. They don’t destroy the beauty of a garden. You have to pay attention to them, of course. But they are just weeds.

Here are a couple quick examples:

The on-point email with the prominent link to an Instagram feed that has no posts that have anything to do with what the email is about.
The brochure or letter with the first sentence that states the year the organization was founded. (Really? We only have people’s attention for a few seconds and how long we’ve been incorporated is the first thing we’re going to share?)
The letter that’s written in clear, easy-to-read prose with the exception of the one sentence that’s 109 words long with 4 clauses that no one besides the writer’s mom will read.

Here’s the Big Idea I want to share…

Weeds Do Not Doom Fundraising!

I’m writing you today to let you know not to stress too much about weeds.

If you’re writing to your donors about something they care about, a couple of weeds don’t make a measurable difference.

If most of your letter is easy to read, don’t worry about the long paragraph put in there by a Program person.

If your event is mostly about the problem you’re trying to solve, and how the donor’s gift tonight will solve it, you’re fine if some Board Member with 5 minutes to talk drones on for 10 minutes about their childhood.

If you get the main stuff right, you’ll do fine. Do the best you can at having a strong offer. Get to the point quickly. Be repetitive.

But know that donors are overwhelmingly generous. Know that they LOVE giving gifts to your organization.

Want to know why?

Because It’s About HER Garden, Not Yours

Why don’t donors care much about weeds in the fundraising materials you and I make?

Because our donors don’t care that much about OUR gardens. They care about THEIR OWN gardens.

If we write to her about what she cares about, she’ll read our emails and letters. She’ll come to our events. Because every gift she gives you is a rose in her garden. It’s something she’ll celebrate. And every time she hears from you with news about something they helped accomplish, she’ll feel better about your organization and about herself.

This, by the way, is why so many donors still respond to off-target, overly-educated, organizational-centric fundraising. They see through all the poor writing and jargon to the thing they care about. The generosity of donors never ceases to amaze me.

Ultimately, it’s ok that all of us Fundraisers have weeds in our gardens. Because our donors know that life is messy. It’s imperfect.

But if we consistently write to our donors about what our donors care about, weeds don’t matter. They’ll keep us around. Because our fundraising success is much less about how we present what we do, and much more about how good we are at helping donors see that a gift helps her do what she wants to do.

The Most Important Information in Appeals and Newsletters

Steven Screen | August 21, 2018August 17, 2018Ask

Information hierarchy.

In a nutshell, some information is more important than others. And you want to communicate the most important information first.

When you create fundraising plans, you need to know what’s more important.

Then you need to make sure your fundraising clearly communicates the most important ideas first.

What’s most important depends on what you’re creating.

When You Are Asking

This happens in appeal letters, e-appeals, at events, and in 1-to-1 asks with major donors.

The most important pieces of information are:

There’s a problem right now
The donor can solve the problem!
The solution to the problem, and its cost
The need to respond now

Almost everything else is secondary. Absolutely, you can include other things – but the four things above are the most important elements when Asking your donors for support.

When You Are Reporting

This happens in donor newsletters, e-newsletters, and 1-to-1 reports to major donors.

The most important pieces of information to communicate are:

There was a problem
The donor solved it!

I know that seems overly simplistic. But it’s true. If your newsletter communicates those two items, your donor will know two powerful things: their gift was needed, and their gift made a difference!

When your donors know those two things, they are far more likely to give to your organization again – because they trust you.

Make It First, Make It Last

As you work on your next piece of donor communications, know what’s most important.

Then make damn sure the most important messages are the first and last messages your donor sees. Those are the portions of your fundraising that a donor is most likely to remember – they are the most important positions, so put your most important messages there.

It takes discipline. And it will feel weird at first. But it works like crazy!

How To Raise More Money Without Sending More Mail

Steven Screen | August 7, 2018Ask

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Brady Josephson (@bradyjosephson) from Next After. Brady and Next After are the main people I pay attention to in digital fundraising. They are scientists, creating hypothesis and then rigorously testing to see what works in fundraising today. I love their approach, and I’ve witnessed it work for a nonprofit that we both serve.

Direct mail isn’t dead, and it won’t be for a while; but its upside is limited, and there is a general decline. That doesn’t mean you need to stop what you’re doing and invest in a Snapchat strategy – please don’t.

It does mean that you should be looking at ways to use online communications and cheaper, digital strategies to get the best return from your direct mail spending. That’s integrated fundraising, and it can be quite valuable.

Our data — from our client benchmark group — shows that offline donors who simply receive email communication give 90% more than offline donors who don’t get emails.

And if those offline donors give online as well, then their giving is over 3x more than people who only give online or offline.

It’s these numbers and data points that show the need to integrate your fundraising, or send the same or similar message to donors both online and offline. There may be a fear that it’ll be overly expensive or they will cannibalize each other, but that’s just not true. They help one another.

We call this multichannel fundraising strategy “horizontal integration,” as you are trying to do the same thing across channels:

Now that’s great – and you should be doing this – but today I want to talk about a new strategy for you to try: vertical integration.

This is where you can leverage the unique benefits of each channel to add to the value of the other channels and, in the end (or later on in another channel), total revenue overall. So with that, here are…

Two Proven Strategies to Raise More Money Without Sending More Mail

1. Show Facebook Ads to Your Direct Mail Donors

In this experiment, we spent just under $1,000 on Facebook ads and targeted half of the direct mail file. As long as you have an email and/or phone number, you can create a pretty targeted audience in Facebook to show ads to. This is one reason why I’m a big fan of Facebook ads.

Anyways, these ads were shown two weeks before the direct mail piece dropped, and for two weeks after. The ads weren’t focused on donations but focused on other benefits like a free online course.

Here were the results:

Those that saw the ads gave 154.5% more than those that did not.

No more mail. Very little cost. Pretty big lift.

And then someone who saw this experiment at our Nonprofit Innovation and Optimization Summit decided to run this experiment for themselves.

They spent just under $700 Canadian — so, practically nothing — and showed video ads 1 week before the drop date and 3 weeks after. Again, the focus of the ads was not donations.

Here were the results:

Those that saw the ads gave 25.4% more than those who did not.

The $690 investment in Facebook ads resulted in about $10,000 more revenue. Not bad.

2. Create ‘Priming’ Content Leading Up To Your Ask

Great stewardship and year-round communications are important, but using focused content in closer proximity to your drop date and key asks can help boost results. This concept is called ‘priming,’ and it can be very effective.

Take this experiment, where we send out a personalized postcard to half of the donor file with a link to a custom thank you video two weeks before they were to receive an appeal. The result?

Those that received the postcard were three times more likely to give, with a 204.09% increase in conversion/donation rate.

Postcards are pretty cheap, and if they can help you get that type of lift it could be well worth it. Well worth testing, at the very least.

In another experiment, we tried something similar but used digital content to ‘prime’ donors. Over a few weeks leading up to year-end, articles focused on the need for funds, the impact they’ll have, and how generosity is good and useful were created and published on the organization’s blog.

It’s key to note that those articles did not have a link to a donation page or any ask in them at all. And here were the results:

Those that saw the priming content gave 185.3% more than those who did not.

So even if you don’t have the budget to send a personalized postcard, you can certainly publish an article or content that shows the need, impact, and generosity.

It’s key to note that in each experiment, the content was created/sent two weeks before the key ask date. If you prime too early, it can lose its effect as donors won’t remember (subconsciously); and if you don’t do it soon enough, then you may not have enough time to expose the donor to your content.

So…

Absolutely you should be looking at how you can horizontally integrate your fundraising with a big emphasis on email (getting and sending). But you should also explore vertically integrating your fundraising to make the most of cost-effective digital tools and channels to boost offline and total revenue.

Good luck!

— Brady Josephson (@bradyjosephson)

What To Do When Your Organization Feels Like “The Best Kept Secret in Town”

Steven Screen | August 1, 2018Ask

A lot of small nonprofits feel like they’re “the best-kept secret in town.”

They’re established. They do good work. But they’ve never experienced real growth.

This post is about a big idea for those small nonprofits.

I’m going to start out with some strong – maybe even bitter – medicine. And I’m not going to sugar-coat it. Because in my experience, all the tactics and best practices in the world won’t help much until a small nonprofit learns this lesson.

So here it is…

If you feel like the best-kept secret in town, it’s usually your organization’s own fault.

Specifically, it’s your communications that are causing your organization to remain secret.

Something about your communications is not resonating with anyone outside your core group of donors. Or outside of the people you can personally reach.

So you need to change what your organization communicates to donors and to potential donors.

In my experience, there are four main ideas that small organizations have that ensure they remain “the best kept secret in town”:

The reason that the Founder/Board/ED/Staff love the organization is the same reason that donors support the organization. This results in donor communications that are organizationally-focused. Effective donor communications – the kind that helps your organization grow so that it’s not a secret anymore – are focused on what donors care about. And donors are not experts like you are. They tend to care about and be motivated by different things than core stakeholders.
Your communications need to be professional and you need to sound like experts. This results in complex communications that only a subject-matter expert would read. These are the organizations that send letters and emails written in perfect grammar, by PhDs, that a donor needs extensive experience in your field to really understand. To have a broad appeal, you want to get good at talking to donors, about things donors care about, in language that donors use.
You can’t “bother” your donors very often. This results in not enough direct communication with donors about what their gifts can do and have done. I’m talking to you, Mr. Organization-That-Sends-Two-Appeals-A-Year. For people outside your core, you need to communicate with them more often than you think, in order to keep their attention.
Your organization should not stand out too much, or say things that get attention. This results in not being willing to fight for attention. It is a crowded fundraising marketplace! All those donors you’d like to have? They are busy doing other things and you have to work get their attention! Use drama. Use bold colors. Use emotion. Use matching grants. Use multipliers.

These four ideas, taken together, result in a lot of deserving organizations staying a secret. All of these ideas are held by organizations for rational reasons. But these four, in particular, do not stand up to rigorous examination or testing.

In fact, they have been proven NOT to work.

My encouragement to you is that you jettison these ideas and replace them with proven ideas. Like donor-centeredness. And repetition. And vulnerability.

Those ideas free you up to fundraise with confidence. They free you up to communicate more with your donors – and love it. Because you remember that when you fundraise, you’re adding value to your donors’ lives, not taking it away, right?

Then you’ll no longer be a secret. And then you’ll raise more money and do more good!

If you’d like help gently showing the ineffective ideas the door, and help building a real culture of philanthropy (and starting to raise more money right away), get in touch!

“They are not your donors, you are one of their charities”

Steven Screen | May 24, 2018Ask

While at the AFP International conference in New Orleans last month, I heard a quote from Mark Phillips of Bluefrog that stopped me in my tracks.

“They are not your donors; you are one of their charities.”

I wish more organizations would hear this and take it to heart. Because if they were to do this, their fundraising would get better immediately. Here’s how…

You realize that your nonprofit is in a constant battle with other nonprofits for the attention of your donor.

I find that most nonprofits act as if they are the only organization soliciting their particular donors. They assume they don’t need to attract each donor’s attention. They assume the donor will read everything they write. None of those assumptions are good ones.

Nonprofits need to realize that they are constantly competing for the attention (and dollars) of their donors. They need to work harder to get donors’ attention.

For example, this is why organizations that send out 8 appeals and 4 donor-focused newsletters are more likely to raise more than organizations who send out 4 appeals and 12 e-newsletters: the organization that communicates more relevant information more often is likely to get more attention and more donations from their donors.

So, are you communicating relevant information to your donors often enough? Are your email subject lines good? Is the envelope for your appeal mysterious? Is your writing interesting and clear? Are you actively trying to earn their attention … or just sending stuff out?

You realize you have to earn repeat donations from your donors

Your donor is hearing from a LOT of nonprofits she loves, about causes she loves. What are you saying to her to earn her next donation?

First of all, have you told her powerful stories about the impact she’s made, so that she knows her previous gift made a difference? Do you have a newsletter that regularly shares those stories?

And when you Ask, are you making a weak appeal for her to “partner” with your organization or to “become a supporter”? Or are you asking powerfully for a current need and positioning her (not your organization) as the hero?

You relentlessly focus on donor retention

Now that you know your donors “like to give around,” you become focused on keeping as many of them and their donations as you can.

So you measure donor retention to figure out what percentage of your donors you keep each year – and then you try to keep more the next year.

Why? Because “donor retention” is pretty much the same thing as “donor satisfaction.” And satisfied donors are more likely to give to your organization next year, and give more the following year, and put you in their will, etc.

Are you measuring donor retention? And are you trying to improve it?

Now it’s Your Turn

What can you do, today, that will help you keep your donors?

Is there a major donor you can call? Is there a newsletter you can start? Is there an appeal you can make stronger?

I promise you that if you work like crazy to get the attention of your donors, if you earn their repeat donations, and if you measure and focus on how many of your donors you keep, you’ll be raising more money in no time. And for a long time!