How I Think About What an Appeal Should Be About

“When you first sit down to write an appeal,” he asked, “how do you figure out what the appeal is going to be about?”

Let’s see, I said.  In a nutshell: I look for a part of the organization’s work, it has to be something I think donors would understand quickly and want to fund, and it needs to be happening soon.

“Wait.  You don’t think about the organization itself, or its vision or mission?”

Not really.  When you’re fundraising in a letter or an email, you don’t have time to educate readers about an organization.  Go look at the results of appeals that explain entire organizations, or spend a lot of time talking about its mission or vision – they don’t work very well.  So I try to identify a part of an organization and just focus on that part, with the purpose of making the appeal and the ask easier for donors to understand.

“So you don’t think about the organization’s programs?”  

Not really.  I guess I look inside the programs to see if there are any activities or outcomes that I think individual donors would easily understand and be interested in.  But I don’t think about entire programs, because programs are usually complex and take time to explain – time I don’t have in a letter or email.

“You said that ‘it needs to be happening soon’ – what do you mean by that?”

When you look at the results of lots of appeals, you notice something interesting about time.  This takes a second to explain.  When an appeal focuses on things that have already happened – like telling a story about a person who has been helped in the past – the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on the timeless or continual nature of the organization’s work (e.g., “will you give a gift to help us continue our work”) the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on things that need to happen farther in the future, like “next year we want to…” and “we’re trying to end homelessness in our county,” the appeal raises less money.

But when an appeal talks about something specific that is happening soon, say in the next 6 weeks or so, the appeal raises more money.

There are great places to talk about the past, and to go deep on an organization’s vision for the future, like newsletters or annual reports and vision statements.  But it’s clear that if you want an appeal to individual donors to raise the most money, you want to talk about the near future.

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In my experience, appeals that follow this approach raise the most money.  This is evidenced by Better Fundraising’s experience, over and over and over, when we help organizations shift from their approach to the one I explain above.  They start raising more money immediately, and they start retaining more of their donors each year.

In my next post, I’ll mention the pushback that almost always comes to this approach, and why it doesn’t hold water.