Another helpful idea to start your year with:
As a nonprofit moves forward on its fundraising journey, each piece of communication tends to become more specialized.
Specialization happens because, as you grow and start to measure the performance of everything, you find that the more specialized pieces of fundraising tend to perform better.
But this is hard for smaller nonprofits at the beginning of their fundraising journey. When you don’t communicate to donors very often, each piece of communication tends to “say all the things.” An appeal letter will thank donors for their previous gift, and ask for a gift, and share a story to report back, and update people on the recent programmatic change.
All of those different messages tend to make it hard for individual donors moving fast to know what you want them to do. (This is why Better Fundraising help nonprofits specialize their comms into three main buckets: Asks, Thanks, and Reports.)
And here’s the thing for today: don’t wait to specialize until you’re one of those big, sophisticated organizations – specialize now so that you become one of those big, sophisticated organizations.
Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.
