Just a Little Practice

At last week’s Nonprofit Storytelling Conference I led a session where – during the session itself – I had people write and send a fundraising email.

Think about that for a second: before they walked in the room the people did not know what their email would be about.  It wasn’t on their plan for the year.  Yet they wrote it, sent it and raised money. 

Here are a couple quick results…

• One person sent an email to her email list of 3,300 people.  She received 4 gifts in the first 5 minutes.  The highlight was a major donor replying and saying, “I didn’t know this was going on, how much do you need?”  The email raised $67,000 in one day.
• One person sent an email to 2,500 people, got a 48% open rate, generated 59 gifts, and raised $5,500 in two days.
  • This one’s an amazing story; the email we worked on during the session was emailed just 8 hours after their previous fundraising email.  That previous email generated zero gifts.  Talk about proof that changing your messaging can create massive increases in fundraising!
• Another person sent her email to her “marketing” list – meaning it was only marketing contacts, none of them were donors – and acquired 5 new donors in the first day.

None of that money would have been raised, or those new donors acquired, without the bravery of the people who sent out their emails.  (There is money and new donors out there for your organization every day, too.)

My goal for the session was to have people raise enough money to cover the cost of their trip to the conference.

But really, my goal was for them to see how relatively quickly you can write and send an email and raise money.  Because the thing holding most small nonprofits back from raising money is the fear around just reaching out to donors with an opportunity for the donors to fund something meaningful.

In weight-lifting or sports it’s often called a “rep” – doing a thing and learning from it, in order to make it easier for you to do it in the future.  Just getting a smaller nonprofit to get a “rep” of writing a simple email, sending it out, and tracking the results is a great step on their way to being in touch with their donors more often and raising more money.

Most smaller nonprofits are so afraid of fundraising “too often” that they never get enough practice to create great fundraising.  For instance, there’s just no way to get great at sending fundraising emails when you only send a few a year.   

This is the painful developmental stage that stops 97% of nonprofits from ever raising more than $1m from individual donors in a year: they don’t send many clear asks to donors, so they don’t build the skill of asking well, so their appeals don’t work very well, so it’s remarkably hard to scale past a few hundred donors.

Fundraising is a skill you get better at with practice.  Helping people get over their fear in order to get some practice was the main goal underpinning my whole session. 

If you’re reading this, and you think that you or your nonprofit could get better with some practice, I encourage you to start practicing.  Write and send out an e-appeal today.  Or add one more e-appeal to your year-end fundraising, try something a little different, and track the results.

The same stream of generosity that the organizations in my session tapped into is available to you, too.