Repeat Archives | Page 3 of 16 | The Better Fundraising Company

‘That one really stuck out’

Steven | April 30, 2024April 22, 2024Repeat

We created our first appeal for a client a couple of months ago. It was a success, and here’s what one member of their team said as we talked about how the appeal performed:

“It really stuck out. It was different.”

I thought, “Great!”

Because the best-performing fundraising sticks out from:

The other fundraising in a donor’s mailbox and inbox that day, and
From the organization’s own fundraising

Why you want your letter to stand out in your donor’s mailbox is obvious: your letter is in competition with everything else your donor receives that day.

But why you want to occasionally stand out from your own fundraising is more subtle.

Here’s what can happen: when an organization sends out fundraising that always looks the same, donors begin to identify it as “fundraising” and don’t open it. (This is the explanation we came up with at the agency I was working for 20 years ago when we noticed that organizations that used similar outer envelopes multiple times in a row tended to raise less and less money.)

Here’s a quick example: in the 80’s or 90’s an organization figured out they could use small brown paper lunch bags as envelopes. They would put the appeal/reply card/reply envelope in the bag, seal the bag, stamp and address it, and send it out. Those appeals raised far more money than usual.

For a while.

Within a year or two, those packages started raising less and less money. Pretty soon they started performing like appeals sent in a regular (and less expensive!) #10 envelope.

Why? People figured it out. They knew what it was. They didn’t open the bags more than they opened anything else. They lost interest.

All this tells us is that it’s good to stand out… and that sooner or later you’re going to need to change again.

This is why organizations will use a mix of different types of envelopes and colors over the years. And will use different messages over the course of a year. (This is just one of the reasons for the approach of Asking strongly in appeal letters, then Reporting back to donors in newsletters that look and sound different; the packages and messages you send to donors regularly look and sound different.)

You can and should create “fundraising assets” that you can use again and again. For instance, you might send a “gift catalog” every October that you only tweak slightly from year to year. But you shouldn’t send the same type of message, on the same type of letterhead, in the same type of envelope again and again and again.

Show me an organization whose mail all looks basically the same, with the same type of messaging, and I’ll show you an organization that’s leaving a lot of money on the table.

Practice

Steven | April 11, 2024April 10, 2024Repeat

When you’re in a band, it’s much more enjoyable to walk onstage when you know how to put on a good show.

But when your band performs its first shows, you don’t know yet how to put on a good show. You need to perform a lot of shows before you get good, before you have that “earned confidence” when you walk out in front of a crowd.

It’s the same thing with your fundraising materials; it’s much more enjoyable to send out a letter when you know it’s a good appeal.

But when you send your first appeals, you don’t know yet how to write or design a good appeal. You need to send a lot of appeals before you get good, before you have that earned confidence that “this appeal is going to raise a lot of money for us.”

Just like with the band, you have to practice before you get good.

The incredible thing is that in fundraising, you don’t need confidence when you start! Your audience is friendly to your fundraising. Your donors care about the cause you’re working on, and they want to help!

It is on you to get started, though.

Time to get in touch with your printer…

Steven | April 9, 2024March 25, 2024Repeat

Here’s a quick public service announcement: the sooner you get in touch with your printer about your fall mailings, the better.

A lot of mail is going to be sent:

In the couple of months before the election by both sides
In the couple of months after the election by the losing side

So contact your printer now. Tell them your drop date, your mail quantity, your paper needs.

When you start hearing stories about nonprofits not being about to send out their mailings on time this fall, your future self will thank you!

Podcastapalooza!

Steven | April 2, 2024April 1, 2024Repeat

Interested in listening instead of reading?

I’ve been a guest on a number of podcasts lately, and here are the top three if you’d like to take a listen…

Build Good with Mike Duerkson

This conversation was mostly about fundraising offers – what they are, how they make your fundraising more inclusive (and raise more!), and how to build one for your organization.

Here’s a 3-minute clip that got a lot of attention.

Confessions with Jess and Cindy

Just released last week – such a fun conversation! This was mostly about the business-side of The Better Fundraising Company. Listen to this one if you’ve ever thought about being a consultant to nonprofits or starting a business in the nonprofit world.

Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell

This episode is about “what to do when your fundraising results are flat” and we get tactical! We cover:

The beliefs that prevent us from fundraising effectively
Why donor fatigue is a myth
How to communicate to donors in the best way possible
Why getting complaints is actually a GOOD thing – and how to reframe them

Happy listening!

Make Your Website Accessible

McKenzie Mitchell | March 28, 2024March 18, 2024Repeat

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

Steven | March 14, 2024March 12, 2024Repeat

“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:

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

Steven | February 8, 2024February 5, 2024Repeat

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

Steven | January 25, 2024January 24, 2024Repeat

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

Steven | January 4, 2024January 3, 2024Repeat

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.