Category: Repeat

Repeat What Works

Steven  |  Repeat
Repeat

After a difficult year, and a not-so-simple start to 2021, we’d be excused for wanting to wipe the slate clean.

But does starting over with a clean sheet of paper work for fundraising?

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?  But it’s usually the wrong thing to do.

The best way to move into 2021 is by looking at what worked best in 2020 and copying it.  Even during the pandemic, many organizations saw better than average results.  Some set records.  So, it would be a shame to not repeat what worked, right?

You can save yourself a LOT of time by doing this, AND you’ll raise more money doing it.  Why?  Because your donors voted with their wallets and told you that some of your fundraising last year was really effective.  It caught and kept their attention.  They wanted to get involved.  And it moved them to action.

If you think of your fundraising as a series of experiments, some of your experiments worked better than others.

So, your fundraising this year should include more of the things that worked well.  Take some time to identify those successes, and repeat them:

  • Copy the offers and creative approaches that worked.
  • Use those offers and creative approaches in other scenarios.
  • Find relevant, real-time opportunities for your donor to give today.

As you move into the new year, spend a couple of minutes brainstorming the reasons your donor gave last year.  And if you give her those same opportunities, she’s likely to help your cause again.

The Habit

Steven  |  Repeat
Habits

There’s a habit your organization can develop that will result in raising more money and keeping more of your donors each year.

It’s the habit of regularly using the mail and email to stay in relationship with your donors.  

Here’s why the habit of regularly sending mail and email to your donors is so powerful…

The habit of regularly Asking your donors to do meaningful, powerful things with a gift through your organization results in more gifts.  Donors in motion tend to stay in motion.  Donors at rest tend to stay at rest.

The habit of regularly Reporting to your donors shows and tells them that their gifts make a difference.  Donors who know their previous gift made a meaningful difference are more likely to give to you again than donors who don’t.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors always works better than “going dark” for weeks or months at a time.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors via letters and emails is more effective than Social.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors always works better than sending nothing.

Getting in the habit of regularly sending out mail and email, paying attention to the results, always works better than any other approach.

It’s a habit you must develop 

First, you must get past the idea that mailing your donors more than a couple times a year will somehow result in the mythical “donor fatigue.”  If you need help with that, look here.  Or here.

Then you have to realize that each piece you send out is not precious.  Each piece you send out is an overwhelmingly positive incident that raises money, keeps you in touch with your donors, and learning opportunity.

Then you just have to practice.  You need repetition.  Sending out mail and email is like any other skill; you get better with practice.

Show me an organization that has developed a habit of regularly mailing and emailing its donors and I’ll show you an organization that has deeper relationships with its donors and keeps more of its donors every year.

RIP FIB

Steven  |  Repeat
fundraising is beautiful

Today’s post is a bit of an outlier.  It’s kind of personal, kind of bad news, but kind of good news.

The news is that after 112 episodes, Jeff Brooks and I have officially ceased our podcast, Fundraising Is Beautiful. 

I’m sad just typing that sentence.  The podcast is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.  (More on that below.)

The good news is that the episodes are currently available to you to listen to.  Right here, right now, for your listening pleasure. *

I’m confident that listening to any of them will make you a more effective fundraiser. 

But we’ve got a lot of episodes!  You might wonder where to start.  So here are three episodes that a lot of people found entertaining and/or helpful:

Final Thoughts on FIB

If you’d like to read more about why we decided to call it a day, read Jeff’s great post about it.

And here’s my favorite tweet about its demise . . .

  • There’s @jeffbrooks and @stevenscreen being innovative.  The only people in the world *not* starting a podcast.
    @toastfundraiser

If you’re still reading, let me share a couple things I learned while doing the podcast:

  • I’m a better writer, public speaker, and teacher for having done the podcast.  Those things are learned behaviors, and you’ll get better with practice.
  • Having to explain and teach what you know will make you better at what you do.  I’m a better Fundraiser for having done it.
  • Jeff rubs his fingers together while talking and it makes a scritchy noise.
  • There’s a whole set of topics that are of great interest to consultants… but aren’t of interest to Fundraisers trying to help their organization raise more money next month.  And the universe of consultants is quite small compared to the universe of people trying to help their organization get better.
  • Helpful podcasts with titles that sound like clickbait will get more listens.  People are interested in specific topics and actionable tips on how to get better.
  • The sound quality of some of the very first episodes is… dodgy.  As in we were apparently recording with lousy mics.  Near squirrels.  In some kind of tube.  I’m more than a little embarrassed about that but came to realize that it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that we started.  We fought the resistance.  And beat it 112 times.

To anyone starting a podcast or a blog, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not because it will raise your profile or anything like that.  But because of what you’ll learn, what you’ll realize you know, and because it will make you better.

Thank You, Jeff

Grateful and humble thanks to Jeff for making Fundraising Is Beautiful with me for 10 years.  I’m honored to have done it with you and learned from you.  Thanks for all the laughs, the rants, and your friendship.

Fundraising IS beautiful.

* Lots of great episodes are available right now, but our team is still adding some of the older ones – so keep checking back!

Your Fundraising Communications Should Create a Virtuous Circle

Steven  |  Repeat
virtous circle

Of all the graphics we’ve created, this one gets requested most.

Our “Virtuous Circle” graphic was created to make it easy to see how the simplest building blocks of fundraising work together to create a powerful system. 

But we’ve never fully explained it, step-by-step, in writing. 

So buckle up.  And know that all of this all stems from one of our core principles: doing fundraising in a way that serves donors is your surest way to raising more money. 

A “Virtuous Circle” is…

A “virtuous circle” is a chain of positive events that reinforces itself.  A positive thing happens, which leads to another positive thing, which reinforces the system and strengthens it over time.   

Some fundraising programs are virtuous circles – they’re successful at getting donors to give, then they reward those donors, then those donors give again, etc.  These systems raise more money both in the short term and in the long run. 

But most fundraising programs aren’t constructed to be rewarding for donors.  They’re constructed to be rewarding to the nonprofit itself (organization-centric content that makes internal audiences feel great) and easy to execute (not doing the hard work of designing for donors, writing to their level, doing only one thing with each piece of communication, etc.).

So rather than a system of positive events that reinforce each other, the system loses revenue and leaks more donors than it should.

Let’s look at how you can ensure that your fundraising program is a virtuous circle – and not a vicious circle.

Ask

The Virtuous Circle begins at the top with Ask because most fundraising relationships begin with an ask.

An effective Ask is also the beginning of serving your donors well.  A good Ask serves donors by simplifying complex issues and making it easy for donors to make a meaningful difference. 

After your donor gives a gift, she feels great.  She gets that hit of dopamine that makes her feel warm and connected.  She’s just affirmed to herself that she’s the type of person who helps people in need, and that she supports causes that are important. 

It’s an incredibly powerful moment.

But it often starts to go sideways immediately because…

A Gift is Different than a Purchase

When your donor makes a gift, she feels great that she gave it.  But she doesn’t know whether her gift will have an impact… or not.

This is where it’s vital for nonprofits to know that a charitable gift is different than a purchase of goods or services.

Why?  When you make a purchase, you receive a good or service in return.  You then judge whether your purchase was a good idea – or not.  Was the meal worth it?  Was the laptop a good purchase?  Was the jacket made well, or did it fall apart after a year?

But when you give a charitable gift, you don’t receive a good or service in return.  So you don’t have any evidence that your gift made an impact… or not. 

But!  Your donor does receive one thing in return: she receives your donor communications. 

Therefore, one of the core jobs of your donor communications is to show and tell your donor that her gift to your organization made an impact.  Not to convince her that your organization is effective, not to convince her that your organization does lots of good, but to convince her that her gift made a difference.

So she’s given you a gift.  What should you do?

Thank

You do what your mom or grandmother taught you: you thank her.

You can read about how to Thank your donors effectively here and here.

But Thanking is only the beginning of the process.  Think of it this way: most donors are “buying” two things with their gift: the feeling they get when they give the gift, and that their gift makes a difference. 

Even when you’ve Thanked a donor, she still doesn’t know whether her gift made a difference or not.  She doesn’t yet know whether her gift to your organization was a good decision.

So you need to…

Report

Reporting is how your donor sees, reads and feels that her gift made a difference.

Very few organizations Report back to donors well.  Many organizations don’t realize they should do it.  Some organizations want to do it, but instead of Reporting they make organization-centric communications that do more bragging than they do Reporting.

And because many donors never find out whether their gift made a difference… many of them never donate again.   

Don’t you feel like your donors deserve to be Reported to?  Doesn’t it feel like Reporting is a good way to serve your donors?

And there’s something in it for you, too.  If you report powerfully to your donors, you’ll retain more of your donors year over year. 

The Benefits

You Asked your donor to make a gift.  You Thanked her well so that she feels appreciated.  You’ve Reported, so she’s seen and felt that her gift made a difference.

You’ve “closed the circle,” and a host of good things are about to happen to your organization:

  • Your donors will trust you more because you Reported to them (when most of the organizations they donate to didn’t Report).
  • Because your donors trust you more, they’re more likely to give to your next appeal.  So your future appeals raise more money.
  • Because your donors give more often, you’re more likely to keep them for longer.
  • Because you keep your donors for longer, you raise more money in the long term.

Implementing the Virtuous Circle

Implementation looks like this:

  • For Major Donors you have a relationship with, you take each donor linearly through the circle.  You Ask them.  When they give, you Thank them.  You Report back to them.  Only after Reporting do you Ask them for another gift.  Of course there are occasional exceptions, but the idea is to take each donor through the steps, in order.
  • For Mass Donors, you need an ongoing stream of communications throughout the year that is a mix of Asks (appeals, e-appeals) and Reports (newsletters).  Of course, Thank every donor who gives a gift.  You need multiple Asks and Reports spread throughout the year because a) donors don’t open every piece of mail or email you send them, so you don’t know what they’ve seen, and b) it’s not cost effective to take each donor through the steps in order like it is with Major Donors.  Think of it this way: a stream of several appeals and newsletters throughout the year isn’t perfect for anybody, but based on all our testing, we know it’s what’s best for your mass donors as a group.

Repeat

If you’ve taken your donors through the Virtuous Circle, you can Repeat the circle.  You’ve earned the right to Ask your donor again.

And you’re going to raise more money. 

Because the system most organizations are putting their donors through is either “Ask, Thank, Ask” or “Ask, Thank, Brag.”    

But with the Virtuous Circle of Ask, Thank, Report, your organization will have a communications program that treats donors the way they should be treated – and this program raises more money.

This Maya Angelou quote sums it up best:

  • “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Because your donors don’t get every piece of communication you send. 

They don’t remember (or even read) most of the words that you say.

But if your donors can feel that your organization is about more than just their donation – that your organization will go the extra mile to make sure they know their gift made a difference – that’s when the magic happens.  It’s when your donors start to feel like maybe your organization exists to help them be great, instead of being just another charity that wants their money. 

The Virtuous Circle makes donors feel valued and important by centering your communication strategy and program around your donors and their needs.  And when you serve your donors’ needs, you tend to raise more money. 

The Easy Way to Raise More Money and Keep Your Donors

Steven  |  Repeat
repeat

Really simple – but powerful – idea for your nonprofit…

If you communicate to your donors more through the pandemic, you’ll be more likely to retain your donors.

Your communications have to be relevant, of course. They can’t be all about your feelings about the pandemic and downturn. They can’t be about what the pandemic is doing to your staff or your partners.

Your communications need to be about your cause or beneficiaries. And they need to be about your donors.

Here’s The Big Idea

You know those “big” nonprofits who send out 14 pieces of direct mail and 75 emails a year?

They don’t send so many pieces of fundraising because they’re big organizations.

They became big nonprofits because they send out 14 pieces of direct mail and 75 emails a year.

Wait, What?!?

Here’s what happens:

  • Your organization sends out a couple more fundraising appeals and emails than normal
  • You pay attention to results, and your organization learns more about what works and doesn’t work for your fundraising
  • Your organization gets more efficient at creating each piece of fundraising
  • Soon each piece raises more money and costs less to make
  • Now your organization is raising more, doing more good, and getting bigger

You get bigger because you start mailing more and learning more.

It’s All About Reps

The way to get better at direct response fundraising (your appeals, e-appeals, newsletters, etc.) is to practice.

You need more reps.

More practice + pay attention to results = learn more about what works

Learn more about what works + more practice = more money

So, during the incredible fundraising opportunity we’re all living through, figure out how to get more practice.

With time not spent on other things, could you send out two more e-appeals this month? (And don’t worry about “donor fatigue,” instead worry about being relevant.)

With time not spent on other things, could you get a couple powerful e-reports out? (You know, so your donors know that their gift to your organization makes a difference, so that they are more likely to give you a gift the next time you ask?)

Get more reps in. Pay attention to results. If the myth of donor fatigue is stopping you, throw that idea out the window, it’s useless.

Practice.

Get better.

Do more good.

Pandemic Fundraising: What to Expect and How to Succeed in the Months Ahead

Steven  |  Repeat
download

Every once in a while, we give you a free resource to help you raise more money.

It seems like a good time for that, doesn’t it? Because there’s a LOT of fear in the fundraising world.

So this free resource gives you what you need to guide your organization through the next few months – because we want your organization to be healthy after the pandemic!

Download here for free.

First, you’ll get a graphic that shows what will happen to your fundraising over the next few months. (It’s not possible to know the exact timeframe, but it’s absolutely possible to know the shape & pattern that donor behavior will follow.)

Second, you’ll get a document that shares – based on experience – how to communicate and fundraise your way through this.

The pandemic and economic downturn are doing grave harm to a lot of organizations. But you can minimize the impact and even come out ahead on the other side.

Some organizations are going to have incredible years – even organizations not overtly connected to the pandemic.

It all depends on the choices you make in the coming hours, days, and weeks. It’s up to each organization – to your organization – on how to respond.  

Please download this guide. It has our best experience and advice, taken from past crises and downturns, to help your organization succeed.

Hindsight IN 2020

Steven  |  Repeat
Hindsight.

“They say a wise man learns from others’ mistakes. I learn from others’ successes, why pay attention to the mistakes?”
~Behdad Sami

Thousands of smart fundraisers have gone before you. The best advice we can give small-to-medium-sized nonprofits for 2020 is to find out what successful fundraisers have done in the past and apply it to your organization’s fundraising.

If You See a Tactic a Lot, It’s Probably Working

One thing to pay attention to: if you see a tactic a lot from professionally run organizations, the results from it are probably great.

For instance, here’s a list of things we see (and use) all the time because they work great. Many organizations don’t like these tactics, but they work great:

  •  Telemarketing
  • Printed gift receipts with reply cards and reply envelopes
  • Appeals that boldly share stories of Need
  • Direct mail
  • Letters and emails that are highly repetitive
  • Fundraising messaging that’s so simple it makes expert internal stakeholders uncomfortable
  • Having detailed plans and revenue goals for Major Gifts Officers, with high accountability
    We learned each of these (and many more) from the successes of fundraisers who have gone before us.

They taught them to us because, out of all the available options, they worked the best.

So rather than reinventing the wheel, always look first to hindsight.

And of course, hindsight shouldn’t be the only place you look. But it’s the only proven resource that small-to-medium-sized nonprofits have, because testing and innovating are expensive.

Two Powerful Things

Here are two powerful things that FAR too few organizations (particularly Boards and leadership) do:

  1. Take time to ask the question, “For organizations at our stage, who has been successful at this before, and how did they do it?”
  2. Then trust the results of successful fundraising done before, more than trusting what internal stakeholders think will work, or what they like or don’t like.

Because in our experience, the successes of others won’t look like what you’re doing now.

At first blush, you’ll probably think it won’t work for your donors.

You probably won’t even like it.

But it will likely work.

So go to sofii.org and browse the results. Pay attention to the results-based teaching we do on this blog. Follow people who have a ton of direct response fundraising experience – people like Lisa Sargent, Jeff Brooks, Tom Ahern, Agents of Good, Mark Phillips of Bluefrog, and Simon Scrivener.

If you have the budget and time to innovate, that’s great! Please do it and share!

And if you’re a cash-strapped smaller nonprofit, learn from the past successes that the experts above are constantly sharing!

Are You Learning from Your Experiments?

Steven  |  Repeat
experiments.

I tweeted this out last month, and it got a lot of love (well, for me anyway):

You ran a bunch of fundraising experiments in 2019 – have you learned everything you can learn from them?

And the appeals, e-appeals, and newsletters you sent out are not the only experiments you ran. Your whole fundraising program is an experiment. Your major donor program is an experiment. Your direct response program is an experiment.

Here are some example questions, and what they attempt to measure:

  1. What percentage of your donors did you retain in 2019 versus previous years? This will help you know, overall, how well your fundraising program performed last year.
  2. What percentage of your major donors did you retain in 2019 versus previous years? This will tell you how good your program is at retaining major donors – you know, your most important group of donors. Want to really get into the data? Measure the amount of major donor revenue you retained. That will show you if you’re retaining your highest value donors (which is best). Or if you’re just replacing lost revenue with new revenue each year. (H/T to Veritus Group for popularizing this idea.)
  3. Of your appeal letters, which one had the highest net revenue? Which one had the highest response rate? These will help you answer which appeals you should ‘repeat’ and do again this year – and which ones you should not do again this year.
  4. For each mailing, what’s your response rate by recency? For instance, if you send your appeals to all donors who have given a gift in the last 24 months, what’s the response rate and net revenue from the 18-24-month group? That will tell you whether you should continue to mail to those donors.

With the answers to questions like these, you can make the types of changes that smart organizations use to raise more money every year.

And if you make all the needed changes to the best of your ability, it’s like compound interest. 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. That’s where organizations see the big growth.

And it’s basically free money! It’s just measuring experiments that you’ve already run and using data to make your 2020 fundraising decisions.

Instead of “Hindsight is 2020,” I propose “Use hindsight in 2020!”

Why does Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat work?

Jim Shapiro  |  Repeat
Ask Thank Report Repeat.

I remember receiving an email from a woman I met at a conference where I spoke. She ended her email to me with this comment:

“Because of your knowledge, I’ve been kickin’ a** in fundraising, and it will only get better as we make more money, add more staff, and implement more of your plan!”

Reading this made me ask myself, “Why does Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat work so well?”

Here are just some of the reasons:

  1. Fundraising is not a talent issue – it’s a knowledge issue. Almost anyone can learn the fundraising fundamentals I teach. The key is that they must have the willingness to learn.
  2. Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat puts the donor at the center of the fundraising conversation. The system honors the donor and their stewardship decisions, and it gives them the credit for making the world a better place because of their donation.
  3. You’ll communicate more often to your donors when using Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat. The system requires you to Ask with clarity, Thank promptly, and Report back emotionally. Doing these things means you’ll communicate to your donors more often, which is an excellent thing for most nonprofits.

As you run fast into the year ahead, I encourage you to consider learning more about Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat. Embracing it will help you leverage the fundraising power behind this simple, donor-centered communication rhythm.

Want to know more? Get Jim’s recorded webinar and start learning how you can raise more money and steward important donor relationships during this crucial fundraising season.

To help you with your major donor fundraising this year-end, we’re running a series of Jim Shapiro’s most helpful posts.

We hope it provides you with some tips and tactics that skyrocket your major donor revenue during this important fundraising season.