Tag: appeals

Fundraising Strategy Session

Lisa Sargent  |  Repeat

The following is a hand-picked guest post from Lisa Sargent.  Enjoy, and you can read more about Lisa below.

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As a fundraising copywriter I get asked a lot about strategy.

“How often should we communicate with supporters?”
“Is mail really better – or email?”
“What if our nonprofit can’t do the thing you suggest?”

For all the advice around strategy, you still have foundational questions. And you’re hoping for actionable, achievable answers. Fear not! Today we’ll get real-world answers to my most asked questions – sized for every organization – to help you grow your donor fundraising and retention communications.

Let’s dig in.

Question 1: What should an effective donor communications calendar look like for my nonprofit?

Answer:

First, let me say: I get what you’re facing. Everywhere you look, it feels like someone is telling you that you’re mailing too much or not enough, or the wrong stuff. But no one is sharing what a working (and workable), effective, sustainable, real-life fundraising calendar looks like. It’s time we change that.

I call this basic strategy the “dead simple donor comms calendar.”

Yes, there are variations. (After the basic plan, below, you’ll find two alternatives.) Yes, you may need to adapt these plans depending on the maturity of your donor communications program, the timing of milestone dates/events in your nonprofit, and the capacity/skillset of your fundraising team.

But this entry strategy is a great goal to work towards and, for the record, one of the plans my clients often use.

Basic 3X3 Donor Comms Calendar: [3 newsletters/3 appeals + reminder]
Approx. size of organization working this plan: $3 million+; 2-3 person team (**see Note2) 

Jan/Feb: Donor newsletter
Apr/May: Appeal
June: Donor newsletter
Sept: Appeal
Oct: Donor newsletter
Nov: Holiday Appeal
Dec: Holiday Reminder
Extra Mailings (*see Note1)

My design partner Sandie (aka Designer Sandie) and I have used variations of this to help clients achieve successes such as:

  • an organization that grew its active donors from 2,000 to over 20,000 (increasing to a nearly 70% retention rate), 
  • a nonprofit that grew its direct marketing income six-fold,
  • another that routinely saw 10+ percent response rates to newsletters,
  • another that cross-purposes its comms to attract new supporters, encourage legacy gifts, and promote new services.

*Note1: You will have other pieces happening at the same time. You may be modifying your calendar to incorporate other, special appeals. Bespoke TYs – custom-crafted to each appeal and newsletter – are built into these plans. For today, you’ll see these “extra” pieces labeled as Satellite Mailings at the end of each calendar.

**Note2: When I talk about the team, I mean on the client side. In my case, the other part of the team is me and Designer Sandie, plus the printer of choice [or print management company, etc.] our clients work with.

Here’s a second donor comms plan, one of the variations I mentioned a moment ago, a slightly expanded calendar…

4X4 Donor Communications Calendar: [4 newsletters/4 appeals + reminder]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $8mil organization; 3+ person fundraising team (+ temp helpers for holiday) 

Early Feb: Thank-You Newsletter
March: Special Services Appeal
April: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal
July: Newsletter [includes special gratitude premium]
September: Autumn Appeal
October: Autumn Newsletter
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder
Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

And here’s another for a larger organization, that incorporates multiple special mailings and replaces one of the newsletters with a stewardship mailing:

Expanded Donor Communications Calendar: [3 newsletters/Specialized packs and multiple appeals]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $20mil+ organization; 6+ person fundraising team 

Jan: Winter Newsletter
Feb: Tax Mailing
Mar:  Special Appeal
Apr/May: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal
July: Supporter Survey Pack and Survey Follow-Ups
August: Summer Newsletter
September: Autumn Appeal
October: Special Stewardship Mailing
October: Tax Reminders
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder

Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

Hopefully this glimpse into real-life communications plans shines a light for you on how to chart your own donor communications strategy – and feel confident doing so! 

Question 2: Which is better – email or mail? (The answer everyone wants to know!)

Fast answer: tl;dr – The answer is both, whenever you can.

Full answer [with side story and statistics]:

Not long ago in response to my LinkedIn post about print and older eyes, a nonprofit consultant who is over age 50 – they said so, fyi – wanted me to know “older givers” are tech savvy too. So why was I STILL talking about print? They wanted me to know they immediately throw away everything that comes from nonprofits in the mail!

The answer I gave became a feature article called How to Write for Older Donors, in my newsletter. And, so you know, I also use tech and am over age 50… and I advocate for print (direct mail) because results prove me right.

For today I want to share an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book Thankology,which looks at why the answer to the email vs. mail question is always “Do both, whenever you can.” (fyi: all nonprofits described in the previous section on donor comms calendars do digital and direct mail, even the smaller nonprofits).

>> Statistic 1:  The effect of adding a communications channel***

Read as: What can happen when you add mail to an email-only program; or add email to a mail-only program:

A study of 2,000 nonprofits that ran from 2016 to 2019 and published in the Network for Good whitepaper, Our Digital Dilemma, found “a strong relationship between donor retention and consistent multi-channel engagement,” including:

“Nonprofits that increased the number of channels used to engage donors [from one channel to 2+] retained 11.89% donors year-over-year.”

>> Statistic 2: The effect of removing a communications channel***

Read as: What can happen when, for example, a decision is made that “no one wants print” and nonprofit moves from a mail/email combo program to only email:

“Conversely, nonprofits who were using a multi-channel framework but reverted to single-channel saw their median year-over-year retention drop by 31.32%. (A join Virtuous/NextAfter study of 119 nonprofits showed mult-channel donors give 3X more, too.)”

***Note for Statistics 1 and 2:
Network for Good is now Bonterra. I’ve searched for a new link to the Digital Dilemma whitepaper and can’t locate one. If I find it, I’ll update everyone in a future Loyalty Letter. You can, however, get the 2021 Virtuous/Next After study on free sign-up, here: https://www.multichannelnonprofit.com. The study also found that for “donors who give both offline and online…their first-year donor retention rate is two times higher.” 

To sum up?

Based on the research, and results we’ve seen over the years, the best answer is that if you want to keep your donors connected and giving, you’ll do both: digital and mail.

Question 3: For email vs. mail, what about thank-you letters? Do I send both? (What I told L.)

Below is the full text of the question that L. – a reader from a small nonprofit in the UK – wrote me about what to do if she can’t afford to mail everyone thank-yous, and needs to use email-only for some:

L. wrote:

As a small charity, with no real advice to hand, I am really focussing, at the moment, on creating and writing top notch Thank You letters to our donors. The one thing that perplexes me most is whether to email or write a letter and at what level of giving a letter is more appropriate or whether it is entirely acceptable to just send emails (bearing in mind the cost of postage in the UK is absurd).

Here’s my answer to L.:

If donors come to you via online donations, remember you need some kind of disclaimer that mentions you’ll communicate with them by post. (You want the option to do this.)

Gift acknowledgment may fall into the ‘administrative communications’ gray zone for charity regulations, but I’d check those rules first if you haven’t. It’s super easy to add a notice to your donation page, by including a variation of this wording below your opt-in boxes online (again run past your legal team or check charity regs first):

We’ll also keep you updated by post. You can update your communication preferences any time at [link to full email of donor care for your org here]. And for more information you can see our privacy statement here.

Then, for each appeal and newsletter, you can craft one version of a thank-you (TY) for post (mail), and one for email. All of my nonprofit clients send post and email TYs to every supporter who gives (and has given permission to contact). The reason for this is gratitude and acknowledgment firstly, and secondly because we know when donors give by more than one channel (online/post e.g.) they give longer and stronger (see data in Question 2).

With that said, knowing your charity is still small and growing, you could tier who receives both post and email TYs, and who receives email-only.

You’ll know your donors best. But for example, you might consider:

  • all new donors get both,
  • all monthly givers get both when they sign up
  • repeat givers (so, second gift especially which is huge in importance, and beyond if you can)
  • donors who give over a certain threshold/and loyal givers
  • tax-efficient givers
  • in memoriam/tribute givers, in-mems especially who we know have a connection to legacy.

Have a think on thanking these donors with an eye towards stewardship and retention, then as your organization grows, you can consider bringing more people into the double-thank-you strategy.

I went on to refer L. to my thank-you clinic on SOFII, free, no sign-up needed, gateway article here: https://sofii.org/article/how-to-write-a-better-thank-you-letter-and-why-it-matters   

Question 4: My head is spinning. Can you leave me with one suggestion to act on for today?

Answer: Yes! Spool up on – and start drip feeding across your communications – the opportunity to give through legacy donations.

By this I mean:  Help show donors how they can leave a gift to your organization in their will.

You’ll find tips on overcoming common bequest giving barriers – plus super easy ways you can start to incorporate legacy giving in your messaging, right here in my blog post, Legacy Logjams and How to Free Them.

The simplest of all? Get a legacy checkbox on your reply form (donation slip, reply device, etc.) It has not, for us, suppressed response to appeals, just so you know.

You can keep it simple:
[   ] Please send me details on how I can remember the work of [your charity’s name here] in my Will.

OR add emotion:
[   ]   I’d like to leave a legacy of love – please post free details to me on how I can leave a gift in my Will to [remember homeless pets, advance breast cancer research, etc].

One of our clients saw their first legacy donation about 18 months after we added these. We can’t prove this made the difference, but they had never mentioned legacy giving to their donors before that. 

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© Lisa Sargent and Lisa Sargent Communications, used with permission. If you adapt or repurpose this content in any format, please be a guardian of good karma and get your proper permissions. And, of course, remember that this information is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as legal advice on any subject matter.

Steven says: “Lisa Sargent is a fundraising expert and the author of Thankology, the best book on thanking donors that I’ve ever read.  You can (and should!) subscribe to her newsletter here.”

Lisa says: “If this mini-strategy session helped you, you can:

Subscribe to my Loyalty Letter newsletter for fundraisers
Connect/follow/say hello on LinkedIn
Check out Thankology (on Amazon or Bookshop)
Find free fundraising resources at lisasargent.com

“Thank you for reading today, and big thanks to Steven, Jim, and The Better Fundraising Co. for sharing a place on their blog.“

How Long is Too Long?

Lisa Sargent  |  Ask
How long is too long.

The following is a hand-picked guest post from Lisa Sargent. Enjoy, and you can read more about Lisa below.

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My job is fundraising copywriting.

So if people don’t read the direct mail appeals I write, you better believe I know it. Revenue, response, retention, those things are going to go down.

Which means I also know – firsthand – that when someone tells you, “No one reads long letters anymore” – it’s rubbish.

But we’re not here to be combative.

Instead, I want you to think about your letters like a working fundraising writer.

So today we’re going to take that “No long letters ever” myth (because it IS a myth) and run with it…

Let’s assume you one day decide your fundraising appeals will not… must NEVER… exceed 1 sheet of paper. (DO NOT decree this in real-life please. It’s a huge mistake. Keep reading.)

Let’s also assume you want to format your letter for maximum readability (readability boosts response fyi). This means:

  • You need 1-1.5” for your nonprofit logo/letterhead
  • You want 1” margins left and right
  • You want ~1” for bottom page margin
  • You need type size set at 12-14 points, in a font that isn’t condensed
  • You need to tab (indent) your paragraphs
  • You need 1-2 lines for a page turn reminder (e.g., ‘continues on other side’; watch my YouTube video w/ John Lepp on this)
  • You need 1-1.5” for your signature block and side 2 sign-off
  • You may (or may not) need an add’l .5 -.75” for footer with your charity number, tax ID, disclaimer, etc.
  • You may (or may not) need a 2” address block.

I am NOT saying you can’t successfully write short. You can. I have. Lots of others, too.

What I AM saying is that after the above, you have about 750 words to get the job done.

Add a paragraph on both sides to ask for a gift, and you’re at, what, 650 words?

In the wrong hands these letters get real boilerplate, real quick. In real-life, this works so much better:

Make your fundraising appeals as long as they need to be to:

  • Tell your story with emotion, clarity, resonance, truth, and urgency, present a strong offer, and provide repeated calls to action.
  • Format for readability.
  • If you use photos (Designer Sandie and I often do), you also need space for photo captions.

From nearly two decades of measured results like conversions, click-throughs, average gifts, and response rates, I can tell you this:

Many of my best-performing appeals are 6-page letters. (Yup. Recently, too.) Many others are 4-page letters.

Several of these include multi-year control packs (a.k.a. banker’s packs, that have yet to be surpassed in terms of results and response).

Some are 2-pagers. None are postcards. And again, all of this is based on actual results.

Top emails? 450 to 750+ words. (More on that in a minute.)

So if your team is agonizing over short letter vs. long, have them focus instead on what no one really wants:

Inline
Credit: Photo (c) Lisa Sargent, Thankology [design: S. Collette]

No one wants a 4-page letter crammed onto 1-page/2-sides;

No one wants 8-point type with yawning wide line measures that skyrocket eye fatigue and create an Impenetrable Wall of Text (what do I mean? see above);

No supporter wants boilerplate EVER. They want emotion, a strong offer, life, authenticity, connection, urgency, love. 

Write the above into all your creative briefs before you mandate letter length, and watch your fundraising appeals improve.

For your emails? 

You can absolutely write longer (as in 450-750 words). But remember to keep it top-heavy: 

  • You have 1-2 lines to get to the point. 
  • Make your first call to action (i.e., Ask) within 140 words. (My best-performing emails do this in the first 90 words or so.)
  • Front-load your subject line (best parts first)
  • Below first call to action you can expand your story, and add repeated calls to action after that
  • Check out NextAfter’s research around plain-text emails (and, really, their entire Digital Research Library: great for experimenting with format) 

Now here’s one last tip, exclusively for Better Fundraising Co. blog readers (that’s you!)… just to really shake things up… one last letter that should really be just one page long.

Meet the one letter that’s really one page: Your donation thank-you letter.

In my book Thankology (on Amazon or Bookshop) there’s an entire chapter called “Clear thinking on the format fog: The core pieces your thank-you pack needs.”

The nutshell version is this:

Almost all the time, your donation thank-you letter should be a 1-page, 1-sided letter, specific to the appeal or newsletter or occasion that prompted it.

Why? Two reasons.

First, because you want the whole, wonderful thing to be visible when your reader opens the letter. Your longer appeal letter, remember, did the long-as-it-needs-to be job.

THIS letter, your thank-you letter, gets the short and sweet spotlight: All the love and gratitude magic right there on one page.

Second, because if it’s longer, you run the risk of it looking like an appeal. Want to add a photo? Why not pop in a little photo card? (Added benefit: your supporter has a mantle-worthy keepsake to remind them of their connection to your cause, and your lovely thank-you.)

Remember: Appeal letters are longer. Thank-you letters, almost always, are not.

Now the next time someone tells you, “Your letter always has to be one page or else,” you have a smarter, results-based way to look at things.

Go forth and write that appeal with great heart… as long as it needs to be!

* * *

Steven says: Lisa Sargent is a fundraising expert and the author of Thankology, the best book on thanking donors that I’ve ever read.  You can (and should!) subscribe to her newsletter here.

Did this post on letter length help you? If yes, you can:

Thank you for reading today, and big thanks to Steven, Jim, and The Better Fundraising Co. for sharing a place on their blog. J

© Lisa Sargent and Lisa Sargent Communications, used with permission. If you adapt or repurpose this content in any format, please be a guardian of good karma and get your proper permissions. And, of course, remember that this information is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as legal advice on any subject matter.

Test First Class Postage This Fall

Bill Jacobs  |  Repeat
First class mail.

The following is a hand-picked guest post from Bill Jacobs.  Enjoy, and you can read more about Bill below.

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One of the disturbing USPS trends – other than raising the cost of postage every year – is the bulk delivery of appeal letters with nonprofit postage.

Over the past year, when I’ve checked my mailbox for the appeal letters I’m seeded on, I’ve noticed that I receive all my nonprofit appeal letters on the same day. ALL OF THEM.

Now, I know that the official drop dates of these appeals are not the same. They could be weeks apart. Yet, time and time again, all the appeals land in my mailbox the same day.

And that is a disaster.

Not only are your appeals competing with other organizations, but you are also competing with your own appeals that dropped weeks before.

One of the keys to direct mail appeal response is getting the envelope opened. And it creates immense competition when a dozen appeals arrive on the same day in a donors’ mailbox.

It’s no wonder response rates to direct mail appeals are plummeting.

So it’s imperative this fall that you test using more expensive first-class postage to give your appeal a chance to be opened.

Otherwise, anything you mail with nonprofit postage can expect very low response rates.

* * *

Steven says: “Bill Jacobs is a fundraising analyst and founder of AnalyticalOnes.  I’ve learned more from Bill about analyzing fundraising data and knowing what to do next than from anyone else in my entire career.  You should subscribe to Bill’s blog, Data Stories!”

This post was originally published on May 6, 2024.

You Must Earn Your Donors’ Attention (they don’t read the whole thing)

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Attention Span

Most nonprofits, without realizing it, make a big assumption when they write their fundraising.

They assume their donors will read the whole thing. The whole email. The whole letter.

That’s a really unhelpful assumption.

Here’s a heatmap of a 1-page direct mail letter. It shows what a donor’s eyes tend to look at, and in what order it happens:

Click image to see a larger version.

We could spend a lot of time talking about what this means for your fundraising writing and design. But there’s one main lesson I want you to take away…

You Have to Earn and Keep a Donor’s Attention

You cannot assume your donor will read the whole thing.

Well, you can. But you’ll raise a lot less money.

So first you have to earn your donor’s attention. That’s having a great teaser on your envelope. Or a catchy subject line for your email. You need to get good at those things.

For your mass donor fundraising to excel, you need to be better at earning attention than you need to be at describing your organization or your programs.

That might feel like a “sad truth.” But it’s a really helpful truth if you want to raise more money and do more good.

How to Earn Donor Attention

There are three main ways to earn donor attention. You need to make your fundraising:

  1. Interesting to donors. This almost always means talking about your beneficiaries and your cause more than your organization and your programs. Remember: your donor first got involved because
    of your beneficiaries or cause, not because of your programs.
  2. Emotional. Emotions are what keep us reading. You want to constantly be using the emotional triggers: Anger, Exclusivity, Fear, Flattery, Greed, Guilt, Salvation.
  3. Dramatic. You want your fundraising to be full of drama and conflict.

Here’s an example. You already know that your first sentence of any fundraising appeal is super important. Take a look at these two:

“[NAME] Theatre is dedicated to producing high-quality, daring productions that take on challenging topics.”

vs.

“I’m writing you today about something you care about – and it’s in danger.”

I can basically guarantee you that more people are going to keep reading the second example. It’s written directly to the donor, it’s about something she cares about; it’s emotional, and it’s dramatic.

The first example – from a real letter from my files – is a classic example of telling the donor something the donor probably already knows and doesn’t really care about.

Note: Arts organizations often say that their fundraising can’t be emotional or dramatic because they don’t have babies or puppies to raise money for. I think the first example above shows that Arts organizations can absolutely be dramatic and emotional in their fundraising – they just need to think about it differently. After all, if a Theatre can’t get dramatic, it’s probably not that great a Theatre!

The Big Lesson

Your donors are moving fast. They don’t read the whole thing, watch the whole thing, or listen to the whole thing.

You need to get great at getting and keeping their attention. Study it. Know what your donors care about and then borrow tactics from advertising and social media to get your donor’s attention. And remember; we have 70 years of best-practices for earning and keeping donor attention. Smart fundraisers have learned a LOT over the years. Tap into it!

Because if you can earn your donors’ attention, they are more likely to keep reading.

And if you can keep your donors’ attention, they are more likely to give you a gift.

This post was originally published on March 12, 2019.

Creating Tension or Revealing Tension?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Tension.

I was speaking with a founder of a nonprofit recently, and she said something that was so good I knew I had to share it with you…

We were talking about sharing the needs of beneficiaries in appeals and e-appeals. I shared that we believed in sharing those needs, even though sometimes doing so made donors uncomfortable. Her reply was fantastic:

She knew those stories sometime caused tension in donors, she said.

Then she continued…

“When we nonprofits tell a story that shares the needs of a beneficiary, we don’t create the tension that the donor feels. The story just reveals the internal tension the donor holds between how the world is and how they believe the world should be.”

I love that! It jives with how I’ve always felt: great-performing appeals remind a donor that “something’s not right in the world, but it could be if you help.”

And it hints at why sharing the need is so effective in appeals and e-appeals: it taps into something the donor already knows and feels.

No education is needed. No programs or processes need to be discussed.

It’s like a shortcut to the donor’s heart. To what she cares about most.

Your donors want to make the world a better place. So share “stories of need” in your appeals and newsletters. (Save your “stories of triumph” for your newsletters and other Reporting tactics.)

Use a story to remind your busy donors that the problem your organization is addressing is affecting people right now, today. And that their gift will make a meaningful difference.

When you do, more donors will exercise their values by giving a gift through your organization.

And later – in separate communications – be sure to remind your donors of the good that their gift and your organization has done. Because if you’re going to reveal the tension, you should also reveal the triumph.

Organizations that only do one or the other aren’t raising as much money and doing as much good as they could be.

This post was originally published on October 5, 2021.

News Speed vs Nonprofit Speed

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Send main fast.

There’s a lot of unease in fundraising right now.  It kind of feels like anything could happen this year. 

So yesterday, while helping an organization review their plan for the rest of the year, I reminded them of the following principle:

If something happens in the world that causes your organization or beneficiaries to be in the news, create and send fundraising fast.

You want to have the first e-appeal in your donors’ inboxes, not the seventh. 

This is when it’s good to remember that your individual donors operate at the “speed of news,” while most organizations operate at the “speed of nonprofit.”

“News speed” is fast.  Things change every 24 hours.  The news points your donors’ attention in different directions almost every day.

“Nonprofit speed” can often be sloooow.  Need to get an appeal out?  It could take 4 weeks…

The reason it’s important to move fast when your nonprofit or beneficiaries are in the news is that the news provides awareness for your situation, and your fundraising will always raise more money when there is more awareness. 

So when something happens in the world that you should be fundraising about, move fast.  Stop, “do not pass go,” write & send that email today.  

And if my Monopoly reference hasn’t done it already, let me further date myself: back in the ‘90’s and early 2000’s I served multiple national organizations that had “emergency appeals” pre-printed and sitting in storage.  When an emergency happened, all we had to do was quickly write a few lines of copy about the disaster.  The copy was lasered on the front page of the letter.  The letters would be in the mail 24 hours later.

The nonprofits went to the expense of pre-printing letters because we knew that losing even a day would mean raising less and helping less.  This is hard for smaller organizations with less time and money to spend on fundraising.

But everyone can write and send an e-appeal.

The news moves fast.  If the news focuses attention on your organization or beneficiaries, you should move fast, too.

Kudos for the Wrong Thing

Steven Screen  |  Ask
You are awesome.

Every nonprofit has its own preferences.

The preferences are things like “we use this particular phrasing to describe our work” or “we talk about the people we serve in this particular way” or “we believe donors should support us because of X and Y.”

All good things. 

But one of the hard parts about creating effective fundraising at smaller nonprofits is that the fundraising is evaluated according to the preferences of the nonprofit.

For instance…

When you create an appeal that uses the particular phrasing that the staff likes, you get kudos from the staff.  The piece of fundraising gets approved & sent.

When you create a newsletter that thoroughly describes a program, the program staff give you kudos.  The newsletter gets approved & sent.

When you write something that gets your ED’s “voice” exactly right, the ED gives you kudos, and the piece of fundraising is approved & sent.

The problem here is obvious to anyone who has been reading this blog for a while:

  • Fundraising that makes staff feel good is probably going to raise less money – when a donor is looking at an email on her phone, how she feels about the message is more important than how staff feel about it. 
  • Thoroughly describing a program is probably going to raise less money – when a donor is looking at a newsletter, how it makes the donor feel about her previous giving matters more than how thoroughly the program is described.
  • Getting your ED’s “voice” right is a total crapshoot – when a donor is reading an appeal, how quickly he knows it’s relevant to his life & values matters so much more than how faithful the writing is to the ED’s “voice.”

Here’s the result of a nonprofit evaluating its fundraising based on its own preferences: more kudos are given to pieces of fundraising that raise less. 

One of the lessons that nonprofits learn as they grow larger & better at fundraising is that the preferences of the staff are most likely different than the preferences of donors.

Once organizations realize that, they begin to give kudos not for “matching internal preferences,” but for results like “percent response” and “net revenue” and “average gift size.”  They pay less attention to staff preferences, and more attention to donor preferences (as gleaned from fundraising results).

Design So Donors Can Read, and They Will Thank You by Giving More

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Fineprint.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

One part of our journey as an organization was learning how to design fundraising materials that donors could actually read.

I remember one day a colleague a few years older than me called me up to say, “Can you please make the font bigger? Donors are having a hard time reading the print.”

I took a quick look at the piece she was talking about, shrugged, and said – “It’s fine!”

At that point I was still in my thirties, and it WAS fine… for me.

When I started to learn more about designing for readability, I wished I could have that moment back so I could respond differently.

Making things readable for donors is fundamental for them being able to respond with a gift. If they can’t easily read it, they won’t give.

My organization started to pay more attention to readability, and we adjusted three main things:

  • We made the font bigger — minimum of 14pt for everything
  • We stopped using reverse text (white print on a dark background)
  • We used black font for body copy and dark, saturated colors for headlines

These design choices were fairly simple to implement, but we had to be smarter about our copy choices because the formerly-used option to just “make the font smaller” was no longer on the table when we had too much copy.

Our donors responded in a way that let us know we were on the right track.

I even had a board member’s wife tell me, “Finally you printed something big enough that I could read it!”

Making these few design tweaks improved the readability of our fundraising pieces and helped increase giving without raising our costs. That’s a win!


Read the whole series:

How a Strong Fundraising Offer Changes Everything

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Can you help?

I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit where I had minimal involvement with fundraising.

But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to start writing their direct response fundraising, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise. This experience challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked. But we started raising a LOT more money.  Let me share my journey…

The first thing that made an impact was developing strong fundraising offers for our direct mail appeals.

This meant we started being clearer about what the donor’s gift would do or promising what would happen when they made a gift, like “your gift of $50 will provide a food basket for a child while they are on school break.”

For years, we had been sending out appeals asking people to give but we weren’t that specific about what their gift would do. We asked people to give to help children in a certain country get an education. Or give to help support a church planter.

It sort of worked. The donors who were close to the organization and the mission would respond. But people who didn’t know the organization as well just didn’t seem to respond to our direct mail appeals.

“If they understood how important this is, they would give,” was a common phrase.

But how to get donors to understand?

When I started to learn more about fundraising offers, I brought back some new ideas, and we started approaching our appeals differently.

We started digging into the line items of budgets.

We started asking our program team detailed questions about how many people were participating in different programs, and every last detail they could give us.

This research meant we could put a dollar amount to doing a specific thing. And we could ask the donor to give to do that thing.

Instead of “give to help children in (country name)” we now had “give $35 to provide a backpack full of school supplies for one child in (country name).”

Instead of “give to support a church planter” we now had “give $5 so a church planter can reach one person.”

And suddenly our appeals started to raise more money.

The main change was that we were showing donors the difference they could make for one person with a specific gift.

I remember the first appeal we sent out with one of our newly developed offers. It was year-end — not a time of year you want to fumble things. I was… worried.

I remember saying to my boss, “What if this doesn’t work?”

“You know… it’s possible it won’t work,” he said. “But let’s still try it.”

Having a boss who was open to trying things differently was a gift. (I know bosses don’t always respond like that!)

But what it came down to was this… we could keep doing things the way we had always done them and get similar results. Or we could take a calculated risk based on best practice recommendations from an expert and raise more money for our mission.

And when things are only “sort-of” working, taking a calculated risk based on expert recommendations is a smart thing to do.

My organization went from raising around $10,000 from our direct mail fundraising appeals to raising $30,000, 40,000, and even $50,000 from our direct mail fundraising appeals.

Change can be scary, especially when you’ve been doing something the same way for years. But if you can work through the fear with your team, Better Fundraising can happen for your organization as well (see what I did there?).