This Independence Day we’re reminded of the line, “toward a more perfect union.”
Not perfect, but trying to get better every year.
Just like fundraising.
Happy Fourth!
Happy Fourth!
Category: Repeat
Making Fundraising is Like Making Pancakes
You know how when you start making pancakes, the first couple of ‘em aren’t quite right?
Either the batter’s too thick, or the pan isn’t hot enough, or that little brown ring around the edge of the pancake that you like doesn’t happen.
The point is, you need to make a couple before you get everything dialed in, and then pancakes come out the way you want.
Your fundraising is the same way.
If you’re only sending a couple pieces of fundraising a year, there’s almost no chance they come out the way you want them to. It’s been so long since you made the last one that you just don’t have everything dialed in. It’d be like making one pancake every week.
Contrast that to the rhythm of consistently making & sending fundraising. Plus looking at the results to see what’s working best. And then getting that “sense” of what’s going to work and what isn’t.
Just like with making pancakes, it’s when you get in a rhythm that the magic happens.
The Power of ‘A Little Bit More’ Fundraising
As a fundraiser, it’s tempting to dream about something big and amazing that would change everything for your organization. A surprise million dollar gift. An unexpected bequest. A knockout appeal that shatters previous records.
And, I’ll admit, you can do a lot of good when those big and amazing things happen.
But there’s a simple tactic that nearly every fundraiser can employ that, over time, can be just as powerful. I call it “a little bit more” fundraising.
Here’s the idea:
Whatever you did last year, do a little bit more.
For example, you could do one or more of the following:
- Add one or two additional e-appeals to your communications schedule.
- Add one more direct mail appeal to your calendar.
- Ask your major donors to give a little bit more than their previous gift.
- Ask a few faithful donors to start giving monthly.
If you do a little bit more each year, you’re doing two important things:
First, you’re giving your donors more opportunities to support your mission.
Then, by using one or more of these tactics, you’re being proactive and taking control of your fundraising, rather than putting your hopes in a big, surprise gift or a knockout appeal.
This summer, give some thought to what adding “a little bit more” to your fundraising would look like for your organization. When you work “a little bit more” fundraising into your plan, you’ll see a lift in results without a lot of additional work.
Eight Principles for Effective ‘Design’
While we’re talking about nonprofit Designers and design, let me share something that I found helpful.
Check out the following eight principles for effective design from product designer Taras Bakesevych.
What’s exciting to me is that these principles apply to more than just the “graphical layout and style” of a piece of fundraising – they apply to how you “design” your entire fundraising program.
Here’s the summary:
- Empathy: Good design is rooted in an understanding of your audience.
- Layout: Guide the eye effortlessly across the landscape.
- Essentialism: Simplicity and purpose above everything else.
- Guidance: Design should lead us somewhere.
- Aesthetics: Communicate a feeling.
- Novelty: “True art lies in balancing novelty with familiarity.”
- Consistency: Don’t be confusing; build trust.
- Engagement: Good design is like a good conversation.
Here are a few examples of applying these principles to how a nonprofit designs its fundraising program:
- A fundraising program has empathy for donors by using language that donors understand, and design that resonates with donors.
- A fundraising program focuses on the essentials by keeping it simple for donors, and doesn’t try to teach and tell donors everything about the organization and its approach.
- A fundraising program is engaging by sending out surveys, and asking questions of major donors to discover their passions and interests.
You get the idea.
The whole post is interesting. Taras gives examples for each principle. It’s long, but I can guarantee you’ll quickly find something that could be applied to your fundraising program – whether graphically (#9 is “create a clear focal point”) or structurally (#17 is “craft engaging user onboarding”).
In my job, I get to “look under the hood” of a lot of different fundraising programs. The fundraising programs that are reliably growing tend to be built on all eight of these principles.
How to Succeed as a Designer at a Nonprofit
Someone recently asked me what advice I’d give to Designers working at and for nonprofits.
I gave some “big picture” advice – which I’m told was helpful – so I’m sharing it here with you…
Know that different design contexts have different design requirements
One of the things that happens at nonprofits is that they come up with a design approach and they apply that approach regardless of context.
For instance, say one of the colors in your logo/brand is a beautiful light green. In an Annual Report, you can use that green as the color for a headline or a small block of text to make the page more visually interesting. But in direct mail you should never use a light color for text because it’s so hard to read for older donors, and in direct response fundraising readability is directly correlated with fundraising results.
As a Designer, you’ll be more helpful to your organization (and your beneficiaries or cause) if your design is effective for each particular context than if your design is perfectly consistent across all the contexts you have to design for.
You keep your organization’s design accessible for your donors
The person who wants you to fit a 550-word letter on one page does not know that the resulting “wall of text” won’t be read by anyone but their Mom. The young person who wants the reply card form to be super-tiny does not know that a 75-year-old donor with a touch of arthritis will never be able to write their credit card number in a space that small.
It is the Designer’s job to think about these things on behalf of your donors to make it easier for them to understand and support your organization.
And if you keep your organization’s work more accessible, your organization will raise more money.
Be a partner to the writer
The best design in the world cannot compensate for lousy copy. So if the letter you’re asked to design doesn’t have a good offer, or takes too long to get to the point, or sounds like a Ph.D. dissertation, say something.
Speaking as a copywriter, I’ve had hundreds of ideas that sounded great in my head but just didn’t work on the page. The most helpful Designers told me so, and helped me see why.
Note to anyone working with a Designer: if you don’t treat the Designer as a partner, and give their feedback real consideration, you won’t get to work with that Designer for long.
Design for donors, not yourself
The most effective Designers always keep in mind that the primary audience for their design work has different preferences and needs than the Designer does.
This is hard to do.
For instance, most Designers at nonprofits are at least 20 years younger than the core audience for their work: the average age of a donor in the U.S. is their late 60’s, and I’d guess that most Designers at nonprofits are younger than 40.
For a Designer, this means that your donors are more likely to emotionally resonate with a different design approach than you are. Real life example: most donors at most organizations are more likely to respond to a letter that looks like a telegram than they are to a letter that looks like the cool titles on a hot new Netflix show.
Design for your audience.
Be your own advocate & Ask questions
OK, this is two pieces of advice, but they are related.
The tough thing about working in the nonprofit world, especially at smaller nonprofits, is that there’s little training for Designers. So in most cases, you are responsible for your own growth.
The best thing you can do to help your mission and your career is to learn about the nuts and bolts of fundraising. You will have to ask for time and budget to buy books, to take classes, to go to a conference.
And you can ask questions that your organization likely hasn’t asked before, like “what kind of design will resonate best with our donors?” and “How should our look and copy vary from context to context?”
Ask an experienced nonprofit Designer or Creative Director to be a mentor, whether it’s just for one coffee or it’s monthly for years. This profession is full of generous people. Sitting here writing this, I can think of nine people who helped me over the years, and I don’t ever remember being turned down.
If you advocate for yourself, and you’re curious, you’ll cause your organization to raise more money. Designers who do this are worth their weight in gold.
What’s your job?
I’ll end with a picture from the cover of my favorite book on design, Type & Layout…
The designers who are communicating are gifts to their organization and beneficiaries, and will always have their plates full of interesting work.
About Younger Donors…
The next time a person at your nonprofit says, “We need to get younger donors!” have them read this:
Top 5 Mistakes: Chasing Younger Donors.
The post is from Bill Jacobs at Analytical Ones. Bill’s been analyzing nonprofit databases and fundraising effectiveness for 25 years, and he knows what he’s talking about.
He lays out the two main arguments for why nonprofits should not chase younger donors, and I’ll add three more:
- The research I’ve seen indicates that older donors tend to give more than younger donors. So all things being equal, a 70-year-old donor is more valuable to an organization than a 35-year-old donor in the near-term.
- Older donors give you a greater chance of receiving a legacy gift. Last I heard, the average legacy gift in the United States was North of $40,000. So a 70-year-old donor is more valuable to an organization than a 35-year-old donor in the long term, too.
- On average, most donors don’t stay on a nonprofit’s donor file for more than 5 years. So even if you do manage to acquire a bunch of 35-year-old donors, the vast majority of them will have stopped giving 20 years before they’ve entered their prime giving years.
Read Bill’s post and have a couple of these numbers handy the next time someone brings up younger donors.
In fact, Bill’s whole “Top 5 Mistakes” series is great. Easy-to-read, short and data-driven, what’s not to like?
And I think we all know this, but I’ll say it to be safe: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with younger donors. Welcome them! But unless your cause is massively attractive to young people, trying to acquire younger instead of trying to acquire older donors is not a good financial decision.
Change the Recipe, Change the Results
When a nonprofit is first founded, its fundraising letters / emails / personal asks tend to have high response rates and high average gifts.
But in my experience, the response rates and average gifts tend to go down as the organization grows.
Here’s my theory to explain this…
The recipe for fundraising right after an organization is founded is remarkably simple and goes like this:
- The founder talks about whatever “the situation” is that caused him/her to start the organization
- They describe what needs to be done to help, and how it will help
- They ask the donor to give a gift to fund what needs to be done
Works like crazy.
But as a nonprofit ages and expands, it develops its own programs, approach, and expertise. It develops an organizational ego.
In a nutshell, this results in fundraising that talks more about the organization itself than it used to. The recipe changes to:
- They talk about the work they are already doing
- They describe how they do that work
- They ask the donor to give a gift to fund their ongoing work
This fundraising recipe does not raise as much money. It lowers donors’ awareness about whatever “need” the organization exists to serve because “the situation” is rarely mentioned. And it lowers response rates and average gifts because the fundraising is mainly focused on work that has already been completed – most of the compelling reason to give a gift today has disappeared.
I don’t enjoy this truth, but it’s still true: fundraising to individual donors that talks about “powerful work that’s already done” will cause less money to come in than talking about “powerful work that needs to be done now that the donor can help make happen.”
Organizations that stick to the original recipe will grow faster.
Individual donors tend to give because there’s work that needs to be done. Not because the organization is already doing the work.
How to Take a Successful Email to the Next Level
Say you’ve sent out an appeal and it was successful. And you’re sold on the strategy of “sending it out again at the same time next year.”
It’s like you’ve discovered a new “tool” that works really well, and you’re wondering how to get the most out of it.
Let me tell you a story to tell you how we normally do it…
A decade ago we were serving an organization that helps mothers and children who are experiencing homelessness.
They didn’t have any fundraising planned for summer, and we didn’t want them to “go dark” for a couple of months. So we asked them if they did anything for the children of their beneficiary families when it was time for them to go back to school.
Turns out the organization provided each child with a new outfit, new shoes, and a backpack filled with school supplies. (This organization knew that kids who had been homeless had experienced more than enough trauma, and didn’t want the kids to feel like “the poor kid on the first day of school.” We love them for this!)
The organization was low on budget, so direct mail wasn’t an option. We put together an e-appeal that asked donors to provide an outfit and backpack for a child.
It worked great.
And we worked under the assumption that if more people saw this offer, more people would give. So here’s what we did in the subsequent years to turn a successful piece of fundraising into a full-blown campaign.
- Year #2, we sent the email again and we did a direct mail letter with the same offer. We raised even more.
- Year #3, we sent the email and letter, and added a 3-email series on the last 3 days before the first day of school. We raised even more.
- Year #4 we did all of the above, plus updated their website to feature the campaign for the entire month of August. We raised even more.
- Year #5 we did all of the above, plus we asked a major donor to provide a match. We raised even more.
- Year #6 we did all of the above and used the campaign as a way to increase major donor giving over the summer. We raised even more.
Today, this campaign is a pillar of the organization’s fundraising plan. In addition to raising several buckets of money, it raises awareness about what happens to kids who experience homelessness. It’s brought new donors into the organization. It brought some donors deeper into the organization’s programs.
And it all started with one email that worked.
So if you send out something that works, do two things:
- Notice what the campaign asked for. In this case, it asked donors to provide a new outfit and backpack with school supplies for a child.
- Then ask yourself how you can get that same ask in front of even more people, even more times, at the same time of year.
After you go through this process a few times. you’ll have multiple proven campaigns with predictable, increasing revenue. These campaigns become very real “assets” that reliably raise money year after year.
Send the Same Thing at the Same Time to Save Time
When you send out a fundraising letter or email that works great, I want you to do something: plan to send out the same message, in the same format, at the same time next year.
Think about how much time you could save!
And wouldn’t you love knowing that what you send next year is going to work great?
If you’re not already using this strategy, here are some examples of letters / emails / campaigns that nonprofits we serve are successfully repeating each year…
- March “Send a kid to the museum for a day”
- Late January “Monthly donor recruitment” campaign
- July “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride”
- Early August “Back to school”
- Late October “Thanksgiving meals”
- Early May “Send a kid to summer camp for a day”
- Summer “Provide clean water for a family”
- Early November “Christmas Newsletter”
- Late October “Fall gift catalog”
- Early March “Easter appeal”
- September “Persecuted Church” campaign
- Early June “Summer Book Drive”
- Early May “Help a graduating student with disabilities get a job interview”
All of the above letters / emails / campaigns are reliable performers where the nonprofit can count on raising a bunch of money.
They all started when we sent a letter or email, noticed that it did particularly well, and we decided to “do it again next year.”
Specifically, we sent the same message (with the same “offer”), in the same format, at about the same time. The writing and design was updated only as much as absolutely necessary.
When you use this strategy, four powerful things happen:
- You do less work because it takes less time to “update last year’s letter / email / campaign” than it does to “create a new letter / email / campaign from scratch.”
- You have more energy for other projects because of the “lighter lift” required by mail and email fundraising.
- Over time, your annual plan fills up with proven winners, so your annual revenue becomes more predictable
- You start raising more money every year because you get better and better at knowing what makes each letter / email / campaign work well.
- For instance, say you’ve done a “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride” letter for three years in a row. You notice that one of those three letters raised more than the other two. You open the PDF of the one that worked best and use it as the “template” for the next “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride” letter. You’ve learned from your experiments and you’ve leveled up!
So… look at the results of your fundraising pieces from last year. Did you do anything that you can “do again” this year with minimal updating?
Or if you’ve been “repeating” letters, emails and campaigns for years, what did you learn from last year’s fundraising that you can use to make this year’s fundraising more effective?