Category: Repeat

Progress, Not Perfection

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Progress.

It’s January, and it’s good to admit that your fundraising in 2026 will not be perfect. 

Everyone will make mistakes and miss opportunities.

But our job is to make progress, not to be perfect.  And progress can look pretty simple:

  • The plan for your top major donors is a little more specific this year
  • You send one more piece of fundraising than you sent last year
  • You spend a little time getting better at subject lines and teasers so that your open rates are higher this year (and next year)

“Raising more money” can feel hard.  Making progress and getting a little bit better at fundraising isn’t.

Pie and Sisyphus

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Downhill walk.

To repeat one of the best lines I’ve ever heard about fundraising:

Fundraising is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for eating the most pie is that you’re asked to eat more pie.

“You raised 4% above projections this year,” the Board says, “let’s aim for 6% over projections in 2026!”

It’s kind of like Sisyphus, doomed to push a boulder up to the top of a hill but always having it slip from his grasp before reaching the top.

But there’s an unsaid part of the Sisyphus myth that was pointed out to me a few years ago: each time the rock rolls back to the bottom of the hill, Sisyphus has a restful, unencumbered downhill walk before he starts again.

So today – when the appeals have been sent, the calls have been made, the emails for today and tomorrow already programmed and ready to go – I hope you are enjoying your “restful, unencumbered downhill walk” as all the money comes in.

Enjoy your walk, and happy new year!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Happy Holidays

This Christmas, we’re thankful for three things about you:

  • Thanks for the work you do as a Fundraiser.  You’re part of the solution, and you’re “bending the arc” towards justice.
  • Thanks for being vulnerable and courageous enough to ask for help.
  • Thanks for giving donors the gift of your fundraising – without you, they can’t do the good they want to do.

Thanks also for your time and attention this year.  We love being a part of your fundraising journey.

Tonight, we’ll raise a glass to you.  And to generosity.  (And, if you had matching funds as part of your year-end campaign, to the Angel’s Share!)

With gratitude for you and what you do,

Jim, Steven and all of the Better Fundraising team

Every Gift is a Sign of Connection

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Gift connection.

It’s a week until the end of the year.

Let’s take just a moment to breathe in the generosity of the season.

Gifts are happening online.  Checks are arriving in the mail.  Gift notices keep coming in.  Excited texts are being sent.

And at the moment each of those gifts was made, there was joy, or inspiration, or relationship, or belief.  Maybe even some sacrifice, and some duty, too.

Every single gift is a sign of a connection to your work and your mission.

Each donor now feels little bit better about themselves and the world, and they helped advance your mission.

I hope you love what you get to be a part of as a Fundraiser.  Here at Better Fundraising, we sure do.

How Things Work

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Owner manual.

I’ve always liked to understand how things work.

Engines, supply & demand, how plywood is made, you name it.

Early in my fundraising career, when looking at detailed fundraising results, I noticed the following three things that go a long way to explaining how mass donor fundraising works:

  1. Appeals raise more than stewardship pieces.  OK, great.  An appeal is the best thing an organization can do increase revenue.  And if an organization wants to raise more money, its annual plan should prioritize sending appeals.  Appeals are also great at getting donors to give again, which is the definition of “retaining” a donor.
  2. Stewardship pieces increase donor retention.  Great.  We need to make sure that every annual plan has some stewardship pieces – but need to remember that they raise less than appeals.

The immediate next question is, “What’s the right mix of appeals to stewardship pieces?”  Back to the fundraising results I went.  I looked at the nonprofits who were out-raising similar organizations while also retaining a high percentage of their donors.  And that’s when I noticed:

  1. The organizations that had the healthiest mix of Revenue and Donor Retention sent roughly 2 appeals for every 1 stewardship piece.  The 2:1 ratio maximized their revenue & impact today, while also retaining donors so that next year went great.

I’ve used that rough ratio successfully for hundreds, probably over a thousand nonprofits since then.  It keeps on working.

(It is, of course, a little different in a major donor context where you are in relationship with the donor.  The 2:1 ratio does not apply.)

Here’s one of the things all this makes you realize: you can over-steward your mass donors, and there are real negative consequences to doing so.  If a nonprofit over-stewards its mass donors, it raises less money in the short term and retains fewer donors in the long-term. 

Think of stewardship as “planting seeds” and appeals as “picking the fruit.”  If you plant a lot of seeds, but don’t pick the fruit very often, you have less of a harvest than you earned.  Fruit doesn’t pick itself.

Interestingly, the biggest hurdle to smaller nonprofits sending out more appeals is emotional resistance.  People cannot believe the 2:1 ratio is correct.  They don’t enjoy sending appeals.  They can’t believe that donors enjoy giving in response to appeals.

That’s why much of Better Fundraising’s work is sitting with nonprofit leadership, talking to stakeholders, sharing examples & stories, and helping them be comfortable trying one or two steps of a different approach.

If you’d like to have that conversation, let’s chat.  It’s what we do.  You do the dreaming about the impact you could have if you raised a great deal more in 2026, and we’ll help you have the conversation and start raising more money and retaining more donors!

Presence Implies Importance

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Being present.

If your cause and your nonprofit are always showing up in the lives of your donors, your donors come to believe that your organization is doing important work.

Think about this in your own life: it’s likely there’s a nonprofit that you “run into” all the time because you see their fundraising and regularly hear about the cause they are working on.  And it’s likely that you, perhaps without even realizing it, come to believe that those nonprofits are doing important work.

Contrast this to the organizations that show up in their donors’ lives just once or twice a year.  One of the messages “showing up a couple times a year” sends is that the work and the organization must not be that important.  Because if it were important, they would show up more often, right?

I’m not saying this is fair.  But it sure is true.

What does this mean for you?  It means that if your nonprofit wants to grow, part of your job is to be present in donors’ lives, in a relevant way, often.

The ‘Sequel Approach’ to Successful Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Sequel.

Two weeks ago at the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference, I shared an idea that’s challenging to some fundraisers and organizations:

Many effective appeals & campaigns are “sequels” of previous successful appeals or campaigns.

Here’s what I mean…

Say you send an appeal in March and it works great.  When it’s time to make next year’s March appeal, you make a “sequel” of the successful appeal.  You do that by looking at last year’s package.  You make any copy improvements you can, maybe replace the story with a new one, perhaps make the design a little cleaner.    

Now you have a “sequel” to a successful appeal.  And the sequel is highly likely to raise just as much money as the first appeal, if not more.

Then the following year you make another sequel, making it better yet again, and raising even more money.  And you keep making sequels until your results start to decline, or there’s some other good reason to stop (the program ends, you discover a better idea in another appeal, etc.).

I used AI to generate an image to illustrate the concept.  This is meant to be a nonprofit with their original March appeal on the left, and the two sequels they’ve made…

As you move from left to right (in other words, as you make more sequels), they get better and more interesting than the original successful appeal.  Each year’s appeal raises a bit more money than the previous year’s.  This is what getting really good at fundraising in the mail and email looks like.

Now, let’s compare that approach with the standard approach of, “We have to come up with a new theme for every appeal.”  Here’s what that looks like…

Here we’ve got three totally unique appeals, and each year’s revenue is a bit of a guessing game.

Large organizations and agencies follow the “sequel approach” because it has all sorts of advantages over the standard approach:

  • Revenue tends to grow each year
  • Revenue is more predictable
  • Lessons are learned faster
  • Sequels take less time and effort to create

And of course, when an appeal or campaign doesn’t work, there’s no sequel.  Plus it’s important to experiment every once in a while. 

The thing I don’t like about the “sequel” analogy is that in movies, the sequel usually isn’t as good as the original.  The seventh sequel of an original movie you loved probably isn’t very good. 

But the opposite is true in fundraising: the seventh “March appeal” raises tons more money than the original, because you’re so much better at it and have learned so many lessons.

Let me really bring home the benefits of this approach for you: if you have a small handful of successful sequels to use every year, it means you have a steady stream of increasing revenue plus the time to work on other things.

As you look at your fundraising calendar for 2026, what appeal or campaign can be a sequel of a successful appeal or campaign you did this year?

‘Papa, we HAVE to get you an eyebrow pencil!’

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Eyebrow pencil man.

Last year, a few days before I was travelling to speak at a conference, my kids asked me what it was it was going to be like when I gave my speech. 

I told them there would be several hundred people in the room, I’d be on a stage, that my face would be on a couple big video screens to that people in the back could see me, and that I was thankful that I don’t really get nervous for these things any more.

My (amazing) 15-year-old daughter’s immediate reply was as follows:

“Ohmygosh, Papa, we have to get you an eyebrow pencil!”

She said this because, as my hair has gone grey, my eyebrows have more or less disappeared.  They’re there, just super faint.

So I’m sitting at our dinner table getting fervent advice – from a person who genuinely cares about me and wants me to succeed – that boils down to “for your speech to be successful, people need to be able to see your eyebrows.”

And you probably already know this, but similar situations happen in fundraising all the time…

Fundraisers who have taken the time to write an effective piece of fundraising get feedback from a caring stakeholder who wants the fundraising to succeed.  But the person giving the feedback doesn’t know the discipline of direct response fundraising, or the behavioral science at play, or the difference between institutional and individual donors.

So the feedback is usually based on personal preference, rooted in a general nervousness about fundraising, and presented with logic.

And through no fault of their own, the feedback is about as helpful as me hearing that I “have to” get an eyebrow pencil:

“You know, we have to mention the name of the program.”

“This doesn’t have any stats in it, we have to include some stats so people know how effective we are.”

“We have to phrase it like this because that’s the term experts use.”

“Well, we have to make it shorter because nobody reads long letters.”

Yet each of these “have-tos” make the letter or email raise less money, not more. 

Of course, you and I pay attention to feedback because we want to be team players.  The feedback is coming from bosses and key stakeholders, and it’s vital to remember that they are all trying to make the fundraising work better.

So what’s a Fundraiser to do?  Socialize the idea that there’s a science and profession of direct response fundraising.  Share drops of knowledge from this blog and other data-driven experts (Jeff Brooks, Julie and Brett Cooper, Lisa Sargent, John Lepp, Kristin Steele & Samantha Swaim, Tom Ahern, Clay Buck, Erica Waasdorp).  Slowly, but surely, we’ll spread the knowledge and science around.

In the meantime, be kind.  Educate your team on the actual, proven “have-tos” for success in the mail and email.

And by the way, I gave my keynote at the conference without using an eyebrow pencil.  The presentation was still a success.  🙂

The Path is not Hard to Find – But it is Hard to Start Walking It

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Path to success.

If your nonprofit wants to raise $1 million three years from now, ask nonprofits who are currently raising $1 million what they did three years ago. 

Here’s what you’ll find: the path to where you want to go is knowable and has been travelled before.

There are outliers of course, but for instance…

  • There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will install a major donor management system
  • There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will say, “Our email and direct mail fundraising could use some help, we’re going to bring in an expert” (this is what we primarily do here at Better Fundraising)
  • There’s a stage where an organization that wants to keep growing will add a line in their budget for “Donor Acquisition”

There are a small handful of strategies that we’ve seen work again and again.  They can often feel awkward for smaller organizations because they don’t have personal experience with the systems or approaches.

But again, the path is knowable and has been traveled before.

Don’t look at the Big Organizations and say, “Oh, they can only do those things because they are big.”  Those Big Organizations used those strategies to become big. 

So the first question a nonprofit needs to ask is, “What does the path look like?”  The second (and often harder) question is, “What changes and sacrifices do we need to make to get on the path?”