Make Your Website Accessible

User-friendly interface.

I had the opportunity to work with an incredible fundraiser at a nonprofit I used to work at.  And one of the things he taught me (among many others) was that colors aren’t visible to everyone the same way.

He showed me how, on our website, the two colors used in our organization’s marketing were difficult for him to see.

We realized that our fundraising could reach so many more people who cared about our mission if we made a few adjustments.

Here are some beginning ideas to make your online content more accessible to your donors – especially to your donors with older eyes.

  • Use high-contrast text, and minimize reverse text where possible.  Try a contrast checker to see if the colors you’re using are easily readable and high-contrast.
  • Check to make sure your font is large enough and easily readable.  For online reading, a sans serif font works best.
  • Make your donation form simple and quick.
  • Use alternative text and photo captions that clearly summarize photos and what you want the donor to do.

These are just a few ways to get started.  I’m definitely not a web designer or accessibility expert, but I’ve learned that we can always be looking for ways to improve, educate our teams, and create a culture that prioritizes accessibility in our fundraising.

PS — Want to dig deeper?  Try putting your organization’s website into WAVE.  This tool will evaluate your website’s accessibility according to the Web Accessibility Guidelines.

The Core Four

Core four.

“We want to raise more than 1 million dollars each year from our individual donors.  What should we do?”

That, my friend, is a great question that more small nonprofits should be asking. 

We were curious, so we looked at our clients that had broken the “raise $1mm in a year from individual donors” barrier.

This post shares the four strategies that had the largest effect.  And how using all four strategies at the same time had a supercharging effect…

Optimized Events

They professionalized their events by having a tighter schedule, fewer people on stage, a tighter script, and left the “we have to convince people to give” thinking at home.

Perhaps most importantly, they changed their content strategy.  The first thing they did was to figure out what the ask would be for, and then designed the content of the event to make the ask as powerful as possible.

They raised more money at the event, and their donors had a better time.

Strategic Major Donor Systems

They installed a proven system to manage their major donors.

Major donors were identified and ranked, relationships were cultivated, and the right amount of time was spent on the right donors.

The systematic approach retained more major donors year over year, and lifted more major donors to higher levels of giving.

More Donor Communications

They increased the amount of fundraising sent to individual donors beyond what they previously believed was possible

They saw that they were not going to grow into a larger organization until they embraced one of the key behaviors of larger organizations: communicating more often.

And they started raising more money every year.

Segment Appropriate Messaging

They embraced the wisdom that different audiences should be communicated to differently.  So they spoke differently to a Foundation, and differently in an email to individual donors, and differently to a long time major donor.

This caused consternation among staff, but the organizations started raising more money.

The Flywheel

Those four strategies work together like the proverbial “flywheel” to accelerate growth…

  • Because the event is optimized, more people come back the next year, plus more people invite their friends.  So there are more people at the event, and they tend to give more because the event is well constructed…
  • The major donors are identified, and then systematically cultivated, so the organization has a growing major donor file…
  • Because segment-appropriate messaging is used, each piece of fundraising raises more money because it’s relevant to that audience…
  • Because there are more donor communications, the organization raises more and retains more donors…
  • This leads to more donors going to the event… and the circle continues.

To show you what it looks like when it all comes together, here’s the event performance for an organization that we began serving in 2016:

Gross revenue chart.

Impressive, eh?

Virtuous Circle

Those are the “Core Four” strategies that, working together, create a self-reinforcing virtuous circle that helps organizations experience crazy growth.

Which of the Core Four could your organization improve at? If you’d like help, send an email to info@betterfundraising.com.  Or go here to see how we help organizations like yours!

Net Revenue Available to Program

Revenue.

Here’s a counter-intuitive truth to tuck away:

As a nonprofit’s donor file shrinks, their response rates for direct mail and email will tend to increase.

Wait, you might say… if a nonprofit is losing donors every year, why would their response rates be going up?

Response rates go up as an organization’s donor file is shrinking because the first donors to leave are the donors who are least engaged.  This means that the remaining donors are more engaged – and are more likely to respond to a piece of fundraising.

I saw this earlier today when I noticed that the year-end letter for one of our customers was sent to 18,000 donors this year, versus 23,000 donors last year. 

I thought to myself, “Well, at least their response rate probably went up.”

Lo and behold, their response rate went from 4.1% to 4.7%.

Their ROI went up, too: from 6.7:1 to 7.1:1

Hooray… right?

Nope.  They raised $20,000 LESS in net revenue.  (Remember, they sent the letter to 5,000 fewer donors.)

This is one of those times when two metrics that matter – ROI and Percent Response – went up.  But the metric that really matters – Net Revenue – went down.

The organization’s Board is happy that their ROI went up.  Weirdly, they are more proud of the increased ROI than they are worried about raising less money. 

Listen, I love to maximize ROI.  Probably more than the next guy.  But what matters most is Net Revenue.

I used to serve a brilliant fundraiser that always used the term “Net Revenue Available to Program.”  He’d never shorten it to “Net Revenue.” 

His insistence on using “Net Revenue Available to Program” was an outward sign of an inward focus that I took to heart: our primary job as Fundraisers is to end the year with as much money as possible to send to the programs in the field. 

Because you can maximize ROI and Response Rate all you want, but Net Revenue is the only thing you can send to the field.

The Squiggle

Squiggle.

What you’re looking at is called “the squiggle.”  It was created by Damien Newman to describe the product design process.

I think the squiggle pretty well describes most people’s fundraising journey, too.  Moving from left to right, all of us…

            Start our journey careening wildly to figure out how fundraising works…

                        We begin to develop an understanding of how it all works…

                                    We understand and refine our practice.

It’s good to remember that we all go through the beginning chaos. 

For instance, ten years ago we had a client who had met their budget for the year by Thanksgiving.  Their Board asked us, “Since we’ve already met budget, shouldn’t we stop fundraising for the year?  And since we won’t be sending our year-end letter, could we mail it during next summer when we will need the money?”

After some internal snickers… we had a great conversation with the Board.  Because of that conversation, the Board moved to the right on the squiggle.  They’ve continued to learn and have become an incredible fundraising asset to the organization.  (And they are still a client today.) 

They just needed a little help from someone who was farther along on their fundraising journey.

In my own career, I’ve written about when my mentor asked me, “Why are you writing about the organization?”  That was a moment of insight and I moved closer to the clarity and focus I have today.

I mention all this because we’re ALL somewhere on the squiggle.  And the longer I’m on my fundraising journey, the more compassion I have for people at the start of theirs.

So in the spirit of passing it on…

If you’re in the Uncertainty / Patterns / Insights zone, what’s one thing you are doing this year that will help you move forward?

If you’re in the Clarity/Focus zone, what’s one thing you are doing to help another Fundraiser join you out there?

And wherever you are, are you compassionate towards the others on this journey with you?

The “Research,” “Concept” and “Design” labels on the bottom of the original graphic were removed to keep the point as simple as possible.  Thank you to Damien Newman for allowing the graphic to be used on the Creative Commons license.

Four Reasons to Have a Direct Response Fundraising Program

Reasons why.

Do you ever wonder why your organization is doing all the dirty work of direct response fundraising – the briar patch that is direct mail letters and emails and landing pages and coding and tracking response rates?

You might especially be wondering this if you’ve done the math and seen that 80% to 90% of your revenue from individual donors comes in from a tiny percentage of your major donors.

If that’s you, here are four reasons smart nonprofits of all sizes still do this type of fundraising today…

Major Donor Identification System

Sending mail and email – and watching the results carefully – is one of the main ways organizations reliably identify new potential major donors.

That’s because many major donors will begin their relationship with you by making a small gift. 

Organizations then use their direct response fundraising program to identify those potential major donors.  They set up systems to:

  • Notice when gifts above a certain size come in
  • Use wealth-screening software (and occasionally good old-fashioned Google research) to determine which of their smaller donors has the capacity to give larger gifts

There are “hidden major donors” on your file right now, today.  Are you using the mail and email to find them?

Anti-Fragile

One of the goals of mature nonprofits is to have multiple revenue streams.  In other words, they don’t want their lifeblood coming from just events, or just grants, or just major donors, or just earned-revenue.

Because if you have just one main revenue stream, the organization is fragile.

A few months into the pandemic I talked to a national organization that was $15,000,000 (!!) behind their budget for the year.  Their fundraising was overwhelmingly based on regular, small events with wealthy donors. 

Because they had not developed a direct response fundraising program (they told me they thought fundraising through the mail was “icky”), they did not have a way to stay in relationship with their donors when they couldn’t meet in-person.  Unfortunately, they and their beneficiaries suffered because of it. 

The more income streams you have, the less fragile you are, and the more prepared you are to fundraise in uncertain times. 

Stay In Touch

Most people reading this blog will have major donors that you’re not in relationship with.  They make a gift or two every year, but they’ve resisted your attemps to build a personal relationship with them.

And you have people who receive your mail and email… but you’ve never met them.

Your direct response fundraising program is how you build relationship with those donors. 

This becomes more important as you grow.  If you have 500 donors, you likely know 30%-50% of them.  But if you have 5,000 donors, you likely only know 10%-15% of them.  That means your direct response fundraising IS the relationship for a large percentage of your donors.

Unless you’re an organization that has a natural source of publicity and a cause that people regularly think about, it’s extremely difficult to grow your donor file without a direct response fundraising program.

And Hey, You Can Raise Real Money!

Many of Better Fundraising’s clients raise the majority of their revenue through the mail and email.  Maybe they haven’t spun up a grants department yet, or their major donor program is just getting off the ground.

But they are raising between $4 and $10 for every $1 they spend in the mail.  

In addition to the three reasons above, they are raising serious revenue to power their nonprofit or ministry. 

The Goal

The goal with your direct response fundraising program is to establish a system where your organization stays in relationship with donors as you grow… and identifies & cultivates more major donors… and becomes less fragile… and raises money while doing it.

That right there is why savvy organizations are investing in their direct response fundraising programs.  And it’s why Better Fundraising loves helping organizations build the systems and repeatable processes that help them be successful in the mail and email.

Helpful Assumptions for 2024

Improvement.

Let’s make some assumptions about your fundraising in 2024…

  • You can assume that your donors could be giving you more.
  • You can assume that not every donor opens up every piece of communication you send. 
  • You can assume that your communications don’t arrive perfectly timed with when your donors feel like giving gifts.
  • You can assume that your donors are adults and they can handle a little more fundraising from you. 

All reasonable assumptions.

Now, if you assumed all of those things, what would you do?

You’d send more fundraising than you did in 2023.  And you’d raise more money.

Fundraising to Individual Donors at Its Simplest

Keep it simple.

In our experience, effective fundraising to individual donors comes down to two things:

#1 — Sharing why the work of your organization is needed.  What is it that’s going on in the world today that needs to be fixed?  Who is hurting that needs help?  What could we be doing better if only there were more support?

Share this and donors remember why your work is so important.

#2 — Sharing with donors the impact of their previous giving.  What change did the donor help make?  What’s better now because of their giving?

Do this and donors feel like their gift to your organization made a difference.

When an E.D. wonders why the fundraising isn’t working so well, the first thing to do is look to see whether the fundraising comms are effectively communicating these two ideas.

When a fundraising plan or fundraising communications are not working well, it’s usually because these two ideas have been crowded out by information about the organization itself.

But if you build your communications plan to share these ideas, multiple times per year, you’ll raise more money than you would ever expect.

The success of the simplicity will astound you.

Three Easy-to-Understand (but Hard-to-Do) Steps to Better Fundraising

Three Steps.

This post is meant to be a primer for how to use measurement to improve your fundraising. 

The concepts are easy to understand, but it’s real work for smaller nonprofits to install the systems and track the results.

I’m sharing this because, at the beginning of the fundraising journey for a Fundraiser or nonprofit, these things are non-obvious.  When you’re starting off in fundraising, it can feel like a situation where you “send a few things out and see which way the wind blows this year!”

But the more you know, the more you realize this fundraising life is a deeply-understood system.

OK.  There are three main stages to this…

# 1 – Measure the Metrics

You want to measure the performance of each piece of fundraising you send out.  This means tracking metrics like: gross revenue, net revenue, percent response, ROI, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. 

That list is not meant to be exhaustive.  The idea is that there are standard metrics for email, direct mail, major donor proposals, radiothons, etc., and you want to figure out and track the standard metrics for the types of fundraising you do.    

Organize your results.  (We offer a free spreadsheet to help you get started.)  You’ll quickly see that some fundraising activities are more effective than others. 

#2 – Measure the Results Annually

If you think of each year’s-worth of fundraising as an experiment, you want to know the results of each year’s experiment.

Your results can be measured with metrics like: donor retention rate (overall and by segment), revenue retention rate, the “cost to raise $1” for each of your primary income streams, your total net revenue available for programs, etc. 

Organize your results so you can see year-over-year trends.   

#3 – Learn the Levers

The next step feels like magic: you look at the info from the first two steps and quickly notice which fundraising activities make the biggest difference.

You see things like, “When we do more of X, less money comes in.”  Or, “When we do less Y, we keep more of our donors.”

Let me give you two real-life examples (both of which I’ve seen many times).  I’ll share what the organization noticed when they looked at their results, and then what they found when they looked back at their year:

  1. An organization noticed that they had raised about the same amount over the course of the year with what felt like less effort.  The looked back and noticed that they had cancelled their e-news early in the year.  Previously, they believed their e-news was a necessary part of their fundraising activities.  Today they’ve realized that the time they were spending on their e-news could be better spent in other areas. 

  2. An organization was pleased to find that they had raised more year-over-year, and that their donor retention rate had increased from 55% to 60%.  They looked back and saw that they had sent two more appeal letters, and four more e-appeals, than they’d sent in previous years.  The organization realized they could be asking their donors to help more often, and that doing so would have a positive effect on their fundraising. 

Once you track your fundraising activities, and review the effects of them each year, you see what works and what doesn’t.  Do that for a lot of nonprofits, for a lot of years, and you build a depth of knowledge about what levers work best in different situations.

I realize it’s tough for people at the beginning of their fundraising journey to know what to do, let alone actually find the time to do all of it. 

That’s exactly why this blog exists.  We’re trying to share everything we’ve learned over the years about which levers to pull, and which levers to stop pulling, so that your fundraising journey is a little faster and a little smoother.

(Fun Fact: the original name for Better Fundraising was “Better Fundraising For All.”  That’s because we believe that all of this information should be shared with all the small- and medium-sized nonprofits who can’t afford a big agency, instead of being kept as part of some “secret sauce.”)

For today, figure out which of these three steps your organization should be working on.  And figure out the next actionable step you could take.  Now, we’re all in the middle of year-end fundraising at the moment, so you might not get to it in the next couple of weeks.  But write it down and set aside some time in your calendar to make it part of your plan for 2024. 

Take just a few steps forward, and you’ll be surprised at how much more effective you’ll become.

Why your direct response fundraising should be like a Hallmark Christmas movie…

Hallmark

This post is back by popular demand in honor of Hallmark Christmas movies starting TOMORROW! — Sarah

Something strange happens to me at the end of October.

I’m a smart, logical, educated person who appreciates arts and culture.

But at the end of October when Hallmark Christmas movies start playing 24/7, I turn into… someone else. Someone who will watch movie after movie with essentially the same characters and the same plot. Someone who tears up at the end of the movie when the lovers FINALLY kiss and then a gentle snow begins to fall.

Sigh. It’s so sappy.

But I’m a direct response fundraiser, so I notice something else.

A Hallmark Christmas movie reminds me of effective direct response fundraising. It’s formulaic. You know what’s coming next. The plot is easy to follow. And you may tear up because, gosh dang it, it’s emotional!

And it works.

Every year, they make more of these movies because people – like me – are watching them!

Sometimes we try to make our direct mail fundraising appeals into something more like a Cannes Film Festival entry. Complex. Ironic. Edgy. Different.

But that just doesn’t work as well.

If you want to appeal to the highest number of donors, your direct mail fundraising should be more like a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Here’s the basic formula:

  • Tell them why you’re writing to them
  • Share the problem that needs to be solved
  • Tell how the problem could be solved
  • Ask the donor to give a gift to solve the problem
  • Go into more detail about the problem and solution
  • Include a story that illustrates the problem (optional)
  • Ask them to give again
  • Signature and title
  • P.S. Ask them to give again and include the deadline.

Listen. I get it. Near the end of every single Hallmark Christmas movie, I grumble and complain and wonder why I watch these silly movies.

Then the snow starts to fall and there’s a magical kiss and I’m a puddle on the floor.

There’s something about that feeling…

The direct response formula isn’t a secret. Simple. Easy to follow. Emotional. Maybe a little bit of magic… These things help donors get to the point where they will write a check to make something good happen.

Follow the formula with your next direct response fundraising appeal or email and let me know how it goes!