Category: Repeat

The stories you tell yourselves about fundraising are more important than the stories you tell your donors

Steven  |  Repeat
Bend the arc.

The stories that matter most in your fundraising are not the stories you tell your donors.

The stories that matter most are the stories your organization tells itself about fundraising.

Every organization has a set of beliefs – a set of stories that it tells itself – about fundraising, and donors, and money.

Most of those stories are based on personal experience. On our own upbringings and relationships with money.

And – you know this – some beliefs about fundraising result in organizations that raise a ton of money and accomplish a ton. Some beliefs about fundraising results in organizations that raise less than they could and accomplish less than they could.

I’m thinking about this because I’m getting ready for the Storytelling conference next week.

People who attend or watch the videos are going to learn so many proven tips, tricks and tactics… and be excited about trying them at their organization… and then won’t be able to because the organization won’t like them. Because the proven tips and tactics are in conflict with the stories that the organization tells itself about how fundraising works.

See how the stories your organization believes about fundraising have a direct effect on the tactics and strategies your organization will use in fundraising?

It’s that very thought that caused me to draw the doodle at the top of this post. It’s the “stories the organization tells itself” about fundraising that make the difference between an organization that grows a little… and an organization that can grow a lot.

For example, here are a handful of the “stories” that I’ve seen result in greater-than-normal fundraising growth:

  • A majority of our donors would love to give multiple times per year
  • Helping donors see and feel the Need is part of why our organization exists
  • Our messaging needs to resonate with who we’re sending the message to, not with us
  • Different groups of donors require different messaging; a grant application is different than an e-appeal
  • Each piece of communication will be more successful if it only has one job
  • We’re open to messaging that doesn’t “sound like us”
  • Let’s get great at proven tactics before we try to innovate
  • If we aren’t getting enough “no’s” then we’re not asking enough
  • If we aren’t regularly having major donors give less than what we ask for, then we’re not asking for high enough amounts
  • It’s a generous act to show up regularly in donors’ lives

Think about your organization for a second. If your organization told those stories to itself, would it result in you doing fundraising differently?

Because from those stories would come different plans and tactics. For instance, if you believe most of your donors would love to give multiple gifts per year, you create an annual plan that gives donors the opportunity to give multiple gifts per year.

Bend the Arc

As I look back at the graphic at the top, it makes me think of the quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Every organization’s fundraising has an “arc.” It’s bending up or down. A lot or a little.

And believe it or not, the “stories your organization tells itself” have a lot to do with the trajectory of your fundraising arc.

So I hope you’ll examine the stories your organization is telling itself.

  • If you want to try something new but your organization doesn’t want to, I hope you’ll ask, “What beliefs do we have that result in liking or not liking a tactic?”
  • Then ask whether that belief is helping or hurting the organization in this instance.
  • And ask whether there’s an alternate belief you could try.

If you’ve been on one fundraising trajectory – one “arc” – for a long time, to bend the arc your organization is going to need to change the story it tells itself.

In my experience, if you create your fundraising following the beliefs listed above, you will raise more money.

Improve your organization’s stories about fundraising, and you’ll improve your organization’s fundraising results.

How to Raise Money like an Organization that has Twice as Many Donors

Steven  |  Repeat
Out perform.

So. You don’t have very many donors. But you want to raise as much money as those other organizations that have a lot more donors.

What can you do?

Well, if you can’t change how many donors you have, you can change how much of your donors’ attention you have.

An organization with 1,000 donors can raise just as much money as an organization with 2,000 donors IF it can earn and keep twice as much attention from its donors.

Small But Mighty

For most smaller organizations, in my experience, their “number of donors” is not the main factor that limits their fundraising.

The limiting factor is how much attention, engagement, and loyalty they earn from their donors through relevant donor communications.

So how can you increase attention, engagement, and loyalty? They are a function of your donor communications:

Donor generosity is astounding (which is one of the main lessons of the past 18 months). Trust in it. You can raise more money from your current donors than you currently are. But you must earn and keep their attention with relevant fundraising communications.

So. Want to raise money like an organization that has twice as many donors as your organization has? Click on the links above – they’ll show you how you can modify your donor communications to earn twice as much attention, engagement and loyalty.

But the first step is to believe that you can be raising more money from your current donors. An abundance mindset is what unlocks an organization’s ability to raise money like an organization twice its size!

The Recipe for Recall

Steven  |  Repeat
Recipe.

My last post was a formula for how (and why) to get on your donor’s “automatic recall” list.

A formula is a concept – a helpful idea… but it’s not specific and actionable. And our goal here is to be specific and actionable.

So let’s get tactical. Here’s a “recipe” for smaller nonprofits for how to get on your donor’s automatic recall list.

The Classic Recipe

There’s a tried-and-true fundraising communications recipe used by nonprofits for 70 years that really works:

  • Regular relevant appeal letters
  • Regular relevant newsletters

The key here is the “regular” part. I’d say “regular” means at least six mailings over the course of the year, with more appeals than newsletters.

Today, organizations are layering in email fundraising in addition to their direct mail:

  • Regular relevant e-appeals
  • Regular relevant reporting stories

(Notice I’m not mentioning e-news. E-newsletters tend to be organization-focused and, while not negative, tend to be less helpful than Asks and Reports at helping donors reach automatic recall.)

The key, again, is the “regular” part. I’d say “regular” means about eight e-appeals and twelve reporting stories per year.

If you’re at a smaller nonprofit and those numbers seem overwhelming, please don’t worry. You can succeed with fewer communications. Plus, direct mail and email are only a part of your overall fundraising strategy.

That said, those numbers should give you a sense of what’s possible. Larger nonprofits communicate far more often than that, and they:

  • Raise a remarkable amount of money
  • Effectively identify new major donors
  • Experience the opposite of the mythical “donor fatigue” – they see high levels of donor loyalty

Every one of those bullet points is available to your organization. (Your donors aren’t any different from theirs.)

And if you’re sold on the idea of communicating more often, but doing so is a capacity / human resources issue, check out Work Less, Raise More. There are trainings that will help you create effective fundraising in 30 minutes.

Finally, know that the “recipe” mentioned above is a proven system in use today because it’s effective at helping organizations do two things:

  1. Raising money with each mailing (or email) so that you can do more of your mission
  2. Building “automatic recall” over time, which increases revenue over time by increasing your number of major donors and legacy gifts

You can communicate with your donors more than you think you can. It’s a habit you must build.

But it’s a habit you want to build, because donors in motion tend to stay in motion, and donors at rest tend to stay at rest.

Are you on their Automatic Recall list?

Steven  |  Repeat
Recall.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for “rules” that help me understand how complex systems work.

So when I saw this recently I knew I had to share it:

Automatic Recall = Relevance x Repetition

In other words, the ability of a donor to immediately recall your organization is a product of the relevance of your messages and the number of times they’ve heard your messages.

That’s a great bon mot to explain why we’re always encouraging you to communicate with your donors more often.

Automatic Recall

To be on a donor’s “automatic recall” list means she can name your organization, without prompting, when she’s asked for the organizations she donates to.

It means that if she suddenly came into some extra funds – an inheritance, a bonus from work, etc. – your organization would be one of the first that come to mind to give a gift to.

It means that if she receives a letter or email from your organization, she’s more likely to open and read it.

Not every organization a donor donates to will make it on her automatic recall list. For example, when your nephew does a peer-to-peer fundraiser and you donate $25, that organization will most likely not be on your automatic recall list.

As fundraisers, one of our goals is to get on the automatic recall list of as many of our donors as possible.

So how do we get on that list?

Relevance of Your Messages

How “relevant” are your fundraising messages to your donors?

Because here are the things your donor cares about, in order of importance:

  1. Themselves — even the most generous among us tend to care more about ourselves, our families, our jobs, whether we’re living up to our ideals, etc.
  2. Your Beneficiaries or your Cause — something about your beneficiaries or cause piqued the interest or passion of your donors, and your donors were interested in your beneficiaries or cause before they ever heard of your organization.
  3. Your organization — your organization is a tool your donor uses to 1) live up to their ideals, and to 2) help the beneficiaries or the cause.

So to be the most relevant, your fundraising messages need to be about the donor reading or hearing it, then about the beneficiaries or the cause, and then about your organization.

If your fundraising is mostly about your organization – or if most things in your fundraising are shared in the context of your organization – you’re not scoring well on “relevance.”

Which means you’re not on your way to getting on many people’s “automatic recall” list.

But if you ARE crafting your fundraising messages to be mostly about your donors and the beneficiaries or cause, you’re halfway to breakthrough success…

Repetition of Your Message

Do your donors see your messages often enough to remember them?

The more times your donor sees a relevant message from you, the more she is likely to have a favorable impression of your organization.

That’s not going to happen with two or three appeals a year, plus a handful of emails.

And remember, you can always communicate with your donors more than you think you can.

Do You Want to Grow?

Most everybody already has a few donors that would put your organization on their automatic recall list.

In most cases, those folks have you on automatic recall because of proximity; they tend to be family members, or that group of initial donors who helped the organization get started, or friends of the founders or staff, or longtime community members.

But if you want to scale your organization or ministry, you need to increase the relevance and repetition of your fundraising communications.

Doing so will result in raising more money right away, and in the long run. It’s win-win.

Fundraising, Football, Conflict and Keeping Score

Jim Shapiro  |  Repeat
Scorecard

As Steven mentioned in yesterday’s email, I’ve been a football coach for a very long time. And for the record, my helmet when I played was not leather. 🙂

I’ve noticed some fun similarities between football and fundraising: 

  • There’s a season for both football and fundraising.  (But the best performers in both arenas practice all year long.)
  • Regardless of whatever the “hot new tactic” is, the fundamentals matter a LOT.  In football it’s blocking and tackling; in fundraising it’s things like your offer and donor segmentation.
  • Both have skills you can learn.
  • Both have teams that include people with different skills and responsibilities.
  • Both use data to measure success.

Fundraising, Football, Conflict & Keeping Score

Finally – but worth spending a moment on – there’s conflict in fundraising and in football.

On the surface, the conflict in football is more physical.  But there’s also conflict over who gets to play and who doesn’t.  There’s conflict between coaches over what plays to run.  (The game is often more draining mentally than physically.)

The same is true in fundraising.  There’s conflict between staff over the content and frequency of fundraising.  In smaller organizations there are often disagreements between Board and staff over fundraising methods.

The reason I bring this up is because football has one clear advantage over fundraising in this arena: keeping score is a lot easier.  When you try something one week, the scoreboard tells you right away whether it worked or not.

“Keeping score” and knowing whether your fundraising worked or not is more difficult – but it’s more important!  The coach in me is constantly encouraging organizations to measure their performance more closely. 

A question I ask all the time is, “What is your retention rate for your major donors?”  Too many organizations don’t know.  They haven’t “kept score” to see whether their fundraising efforts are effective at keeping their major donors around!  (And their Majors are often giving more than 80% of the total revenue an organization receives from individuals!) 

My encouragement to nonprofits goes back to one of the similarities between football and fundraising that I mentioned at the top: keeping score (measuring the performance of your fundraising) is a skill your organization can learn. 

Here are a few of the main metrics we advise nonprofits to track on an ongoing basis:

  • Overall donor retention rate
  • Major donor retention rate
  • # New Donors each year (broken out into New Donors and Reactivated Donors), and the total acquisition costs.  Use those numbers to calculate the Cost Per New Donor.
  • For each piece of direct mail: # Sent, # Gifts, Production & Mailing Cost, Gross Revenue.  Use that info to calculate % Response, Net Revenue and Return on Investment (ROI).  Of those, Net Revenue is the most important (not ROI).
  • For each email: # Sent, # Open, # Clicks, # Gifts, Gross Revenue.  Use that info to calculate % Open, % Clicks, % Conversion and Net Revenue.
  • In addition to tracking the metrics for each impact (email, letter, etc.), we also “roll up” the results for each campaign so we can track campaign efficacy.

That’s just a start, but it’s a good start.  If you learn the skill of tracking your performance and then “basing future decisions off of past performance,” your organization gets better faster at fundraising.  As a result, you’ll have a larger impact! 

The Olympics and Year-end appeals

Steven  |  Repeat
Olympic

I watched a little of the Olympics last week and noticed how the champions at the Olympics have a lot in common with the champions of year-end fundraising.

What do they have in common?  The “champions” practice and compete all year long – not just when the spotlight is shining on them

There are a lot of nonprofits that send out a year-end appeal – and maybe one other appeal during the year.

That would be like the South Korean archery team just picking up their bows a couple times a year.  They’ll never reach their potential.

Instead, the archers practice all the time.  They enter several smaller competitions.  All building towards the Olympics.

Similarly, the nonprofits who want to “reach their fundraising potential” when the spotlight shines on them at year-end practice all year long.  They work on perfecting their Spring Appeal.  They sweat over every word of the Ask at their event.  They send out one e-appeal a month, track the results, and see what their donors are most likely to respond to.

They practice.  Because how do they expect to get better at something they only do once or twice a year? 

And because they’ve been practicing the whole year, they SHINE when the spotlight hits them.

They raise record-breaking amounts of money at year end.

You know those swimmers who break the world record as they win the gold medal?  That could be your nonprofit with your year-end fundraising – but you have to put in the practice.

If you haven’t been practicing this year, I suggest you start.  You’ll raise money this fall, and you’ll raise more money at year-end because of it.

And if you or anyone on your staff is worried that you’ll be asking too much, read this.

One More Thing…

You know how you probably won’t think about archery again until the next Olympics?  And how you probably won’t even think about archery in the meantime?

The archers don’t have a choice about that.  They don’t control what’s on the viewers screens.

But your nonprofit has a choice. 

If you choose to send more letters, and send more emails, you’ll be on your viewers’ screens a lot more often.

And then you won’t be forgotten.  Your donors will get to know you better.  You’ll build relationship.  And because of that you’ll raise more money and do more good.

Everything You Send Makes You More Effective

Steven  |  Repeat
Practice

All your bad appeals and e-appeals are useful and essential steps on the journey to great appeals and great donor communications.

No small nonprofit arrives on the scene sending out fantastic fundraising.

Nobody starts a nonprofit or ministry because they want to send out mail and email.

So you have to believe that a) “each piece of mail or email your organization sends out is an experiment and an opportunity to get better” and b) you’ll engage your donors and raise some money, too.

That’s a pretty good 2-for-1, no?

What simple email could you send out this afternoon that would be another “step on your journey” to great appeals and great donor communications?

Got Complaints? Get Specifics.

Steven  |  Repeat
Complaints

It’s easy to get fired up when someone comes in and nervously says, “Oh my gosh, we’re getting so many complaints!”  Panic sets in!

But rather than escalating the fear, get specific.  We recommend creating a report that is just as specific as a report on giving. 

Main Info:

  • Time period?
  • How many complaints were there?
  • How many gifts came in?
  • # of “Please remove me from your mailing list” compared to normal?
  • # of “unsubscribes” compared to normal?

For each complaint:

  • What is the person’s name or email address?
  • Are they a donor or non-donor?
  • If they are a donor, are they a mass donor or a major donor?
  • What was their complaint?

In my experience, reports that there were “so many” complaints and that “donors are really hating this appeal” have an outsized, negative affect on organizations. 

But then when specifics are reviewed, like a light being turned on in a dark room on a scary night, it’s usually just a couple of complaints.  And half of them are from non-donors. 

Quick Advice

In addition to having a report that requires specifics, keep these things in mind:

  • Don’t Overreact.  You know how sometimes, when you send out an appeal or an e-appeal, there’s an initial flood of gifts and you know you have a winner on your hands?  When that happens, does your organization immediately change your budget for the year and spend more money?  No.  You wait for all the results to come in and then decide what to do.  Follow the same process for complaints.  When complaints come in – which they will – wait for all the results to come in and then decide what to do. 
  • Context Matters.  A complaint from a long-time donor should be listened to.  Complaints from non-donors should basically be ignored.  Seven unsubscribes doesn’t deserve any attention if you normally get six.  
  • Count Everything.  If you’re talking about the number of complaints, you also need to talk about the number of gifts.  It’s counter-productive to focus on the five complaints that came in without viewing them in the context of the one hundred and sixty-seven gifts that also came in.

Don’t Let Complaints Hold Your Organization Back

Many organizations feel like they are held back from raising more money by complaints. 

However, I don’t think it’s the complaints that hold the organization back. 

It’s the organization’s reaction to complaints, and fear of complaints, that holds them back.

Make sure your organization is comfortable with a few complaints.  Because the occasional complaint is a “cost of doing business” for fundraising organizations. 

Set up a simple system to track and evaluate complaints.  Like that light going on in a dark room, you’ll find the specifics far less scary than the emotions.

How to Make Good “Fundraising Bets”

Steven  |  Repeat
Statistics

At the beginning of your fundraising career – or when you start doing more direct response fundraising than you have in the past – you need to make “bets” on what you think your donors will be most likely to fund.

You’re writing an e-appeal and wondering, “Should I talk about this program, or that program?”

You’re writing an appeal letter and wondering, “Should I ask donors to fund this, or to fund that?”

Each decision is a bet.

The more bets you make, if you pay attention to the results, the better you’ll get at making bets. And ultimately, the better you get at making bets, the more money your e-appeals, appeals, newsletters, and events will raise.

The way to get better at this is for your organization is to practice. 

Let me give you an example.  It’s an outlier for most of us, but it makes the point.

My mentor spent his career doing direct response fundraising for some of the biggest nonprofits in the country in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, including most of the national Christian nonprofits.

True story: by the end of his career, he had sent so many pieces of direct mail, to so many of the lists available, that he could make accurate predictions for how each letter would perform.

He would hold the mockup of the letter in his hand, look at the offer, and look at the writing and the design.  Then he would look at the mailing list that it was being mailed to.  Cultivation, acquisition, didn’t matter – he could tell you with relative certainty how many people would respond, what the average gift would be, etc.

I walked into his office once and he was concentrating so hard he didn’t notice me for a couple minutes.  He was as “in the zone” as it’s possible to be.  I watched him write some numbers in the margins of a printed-out spreadsheet, then I asked him what he was doing.

He said, “I’m writing down my predictions for how each letter to each mailing list is going to perform.” 

Here’s the amazing thing: he was usually correct to within a 10th of a percentage point on response rate, and within a dollar or two on average gift size.

It was remarkable.  It was otherworldly.

He was able to do it because he had done it so many times before.  He was very, very good at making “bets” for what an organization should talk about, how they should talk about it, and who they should talk about it to.

And when he was wrong – when one of his predictions didn’t match up with what actually happened, he would say, “Huh, I wonder what I missed?”  And then he’d look at the letter and the list to figure out where he had gone wrong, so that his next bet was more accurate.  So that his next bet raised more money for whatever nonprofit he was serving.

You and your organization can get great at knowing what to talk about, how to talk about it, and who to talk about it to. 

But you have to practice.  A lot.

It’s not a gift, not a talent, not an ability.  It’s an acquired skill.