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About Younger Donors…

Steven | May 21, 2024May 15, 2024Repeat

The next time a person at your nonprofit says, “We need to get younger donors!” have them read this:

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

Steven | May 16, 2024May 14, 2024Repeat

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

Steven | May 7, 2024April 23, 2024Repeat

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

Steven | May 2, 2024April 23, 2024Repeat

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.
1. 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?

‘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.