Tag: appeals

You Don’t Have to Change Your Fundraising Because of a Complaint

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Complain.

When a complaint comes in, you do not have to change your fundraising.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t change your fundraising.  Let me take that worry off your plate.

Here’s the situation: a complaint comes in, there’s a flurry of anxious emails, people get worried, and sooner or later someone proposes that “we should pull the campaign” or “well, we can’t use that phrase again.”

But if an organization follows those instincts, it builds a habit that will keep the organization small.  It sets a precedent that 1 or 3 people’s opinions can drive the organization’s communication strategy.

Let’s not let that happen!  Here’s what to do instead…

First, realize that a complaint is a fee, not a fine.  (A fee is something you pay in order to do something, a fine is something you pay when you’ve done something wrong.)

As you communicate with more donors more often, you will get complaints.  This isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a sign that you’re talking to more people.  And any time you’re talking to more people, more things happen: more complaints, more gifts, more returned envelopes with bad addresses, more unsubscribes, more unexpected large gifts. 

So when a complaint comes in, let’s not think, “we’ve done something wrong.”  Instead, think, “we’re operating at scale now, and these things are going to happen.”

Second, realize that the complainer doesn’t speak for all donors. 

I’ve heard it called “the most expensive assumption in fundraising” – treating one loud voice as representative of the thousands of donors who you didn’t hear from.  But that often happens when a complaint is received.  You hear things like, “If one person said this, imagine how many thought it but didn’t write in.”

You want to give each complaint the same amount of weight that you give each gift.  Don’t let one complaint be more important than all the gifts that came in.

Finally, right-size your organization’s reaction.

Complaints almost never actually damage an organization, but an organization’s response to a complaint – the breathless drama and worry, the time wasted, the effective fundraising cancelled – has a very real chance to reduce the organization’s impact.

So, build a process that gives a complaint its due.  Don’t escalate it.  Contact the donor and apologize.  Listen.  Ask if they’d like any changes in their communication preferences.  Tell them that their gifts have been incredibly helpful.  Match the energy of the response to the size of the issue.

You are allowed to handle a complaint in 15 minutes and get back to work.

***

Your beneficiaries or cause are counting on you to keep raising money.  That requires communicating with more and more donors.  And communicating with more donors will, occasionally, generate a complaint.  That’s the deal.

You don’t have to change your messaging.  You just need a process, and the confidence that one complaint is not a verdict on your fundraising.

PS — If you’d like to know more about what causes complaints, have a script for how to respond to a complainer, and help setting up a system for handling them, click here to download our free eBook, “The Sanity-Saving Magic of Understanding Donor Complaints.”

Want Your Fundraising to Get Luckier?

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Lucky clover.

Jason Roberts is an entrepreneur and writer who has a simple idea he calls “luck surface area.”  It’s a useful tool for how to think about your organization’s fundraising, and here’s the gist:

The amount of good luck that comes your way is roughly equal to how much you do, multiplied by how many people know about it.

Doing × Telling = Amount of Luck  

I love this idea because it names something we all already intuitively know: the more you do, and the more you’re out there, the more things tend to happen.  (And it’s good to mention that some of those things that happen are good, and some are bad.)

This aligns perfectly with something we see in fundraising all the time: when organizations increase the amount of fundraising they send to individual donors, they receive more “unplanned” (lucky) gifts.

But there’s one thing to watch out for: you can’t just “tell” people what your organization is doing.  That results in the kind of awareness that’s not particularly valuable.  Make sure you are asking people to get involved. 

The asking is where the lucky breaks come from:

  • The donor who upgrades her gift because your e-appeal happens to land on a good day for her
  • The board member who forwards your appeal letter to a friend who’s been looking for a cause
  • The lapsed donor who comes back because you invited her to get involved
  • The major donor who finally takes the meeting because she missed the first three messages

None of those things happen if your organization stays quiet.  They only happen if your organization shows up – often, and on purpose.

(And yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “We don’t want to bother our donors.”  I’d gently suggest that your donors are less bothered than you fear, more forgetful than you’d like, and far more tolerant of additional asks than you think.  But that’s a different blog post.)

So if you want 2026 to be a luckier year for your nonprofit, that means one more email in October.  It means an ask at the end of your spring newsletter, along with a reply card, instead of a hint and a URL.  It means sending a new mailing in February.  It means picking up the phone and calling a donor you haven’t heard from in a while.

Each one of those actions is a small expansion of your surface area.  Each one is another chance for something good to happen.

Simple Test

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Simple test.

Here’s a simple test to run on your next piece of fundraising before you send it:

Glance at it and ask yourself: if you only had a few seconds to scan it and didn’t know your organization, would you know concretely how the world would be a better place if you gave a gift?

Because you’ll raise more money if your readers can quickly tell why their gift is needed and what it will make possible.

If you want to keep your organization around the size it is now, send out fundraising that takes readers a long time to learn what is being asked of them and what their gift will do.  Because the only people who will read long enough to find out are your “true believers.”

But if you want to grow, a different approach is needed.  To make your organization more accessible to people who aren’t “true believers,” you need to make it easy for a reader to understand, in around 5 to 7 seconds, why their gift is needed today and what their gift will make happen.

We have a tactic called “two letters in one” that we use to make the main idea accessible to anyone who glances at your fundraising and to give more of the details that a “true believer” might want, when they read more.

Because your ability to grow your mail and email revenue – and ultimately your organization’s impact – is unlocked when you send fundraising that activates everyone on your list.

What If Apple Advertised Like a Nonprofit?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Smart phone ad.

Here’s a fun thought exercise for you.

What if the companies that make phones (Samsung, Apple, Motorola) had to make TV commercials selling phones using the same messaging approach that many nonprofits use?

First of all, there would be no 30-second commercials.  All the commercials would be 5 minutes long because someone at the company would say “we need to tell people everything about us before they will buy a phone from us.”

All the commercials would start by sharing what year the company was founded in.

The commercials would not talk about phones you could buy right now.  They would only talk about phones they already sold a few months ago.

Each commercial would painstakingly detail how the phone was made and list any subcontractors.  “Our previous model was so effective because we thoroughly vet our high-quality partners; the display was made by Samsung, the camera module was made by Sony, the display was made by LG, and our supply chain delivered all components to be lovingly assembled by Foxconn, our Chinese assembly partner.”

The ads would avoid naming any specific features of their phones, and would instead use concepts like “your purchase, like a pebble thrown into a pond, will cause ripples in your communicating power.”

There definitely wouldn’t be any urgency, because the CEO thinks urgency makes him look needy.

And at the end of these long commercials, the company would mention that their phones were available, but certainly not ask you to buy one today, that would be rude.

If that’s what commercials for phones were like, when a phone ad came on TV, people would switch shows or leave to go to the bathroom.

But, weirdly, that’s the approach fundraising letters take all the time!    

My hope is that this thought exercise helps people see how deeply flawed the standard nonprofit approach is.  When looked at in another context, when our fears around money and vulnerability aren’t part of the equation any longer, the standard approach just looks silly.

This blog, and Better Fundraising, have been growing for more than 10 years because our data-driven approach works far better than the standard approach.

If you’re reading this, and any of the fictional phone company approach resembled your organization’s approach, click here and say hi.  Your donors have what we call “pent up giving” and you can be raising more money from them starting next month!

Email and Snail Mail: in the way or on the way?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Snail mail.

As a follow up to my recent post about why organizations are still using email and snail mail to raise money, there’s one other idea I want to address.

This is for the people and organizations who are annoyed that they have to do fundraising in email and the mail.

This is like getting annoyed at having to go through Oregon when driving from Washington to California.

Oregon isn’t in the way, it’s on the way — if you want the fastest route.

Can you drive around Oregon and get to California?  Sure, but it’ll take longer and be more expensive.

Can you get lucky and have someone give you a ticket on McKenzie Scott Airlines so you can fly to California?  Sure, but the chances are pretty slim.

Fundraising in email and the mail isn’t “in the way” of a nonprofit raising more and having more donors; they are “on the way” to raising more and having more donors.

Why Use Email and Snail Mail?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Mail.

There’s a conversation we’re having more and more as young people enter the fundraising profession and older people on Boards are replaced with the next generation.

The conversation always starts with a question that goes something like this…

“Why should a nonprofit like ours get good at raising money via email and the mail, both of which seem like ‘legacy’ communication methods?” 

We could talk about this for hours, but if this is coming up for your organization, let me give you a couple of quick reasons these tools are still so useful to so many nonprofits.

  1. Email and the mail help small organizations scale.  There are only so many people you can personally know, and only so many people who will go to your event.  So the ability to communicate effectively with thousands of people at once is necessary in order to scale (particularly to break the “raising $1m annually from individual donors” threshold.)
  2. Email and the mail make your organization more resilient and less fragile.  Two ways.  First, you want to have the skill of fundraising and being in relationship with donors even when you can’t meet with them.  (We all saw what happened to event-driven organizations during the pandemic.  Ouch.)  Second, having a good mail and email program spreads your revenue across the entire year, so you’re not so dependent on the world running smoothly (no wars being started, no natural disasters) the month of your event.
  3. The mail and email help you identify new mid- and major-donors.  You watch giving patterns, you identify prospects, and you raise up your next generation of majors.  (A friend of mine used to run the individual donor program for a national organization with hundreds of thousands of donors.  He said, “Yes, we raise a lot of money with the mail and email, but our real job is to identify major donor prospects.”)

And that’s just three reasons.  There are all sorts of other reasons, like “lots of majors still give via the mail” and “mail & email keep you in touch with Majors who don’t answer your attempts to get in touch” and “you aren’t dependent on the whims of the social media algorithm because you own the relationship.”

The mail and email are proven and effective; that’s why they’re still in use!

They Didn’t Believe It

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Yes you can.

I’ve written many times about how an organization’s beliefs about fundraising play a major role in how much money they can raise. 

Case in point:

“The ‘stories an organization tells itself’ about fundraising have a greater effect on how much money they raise than the stories they tell their donors.”

Well, I have a new one for you.

I just returned from the fantastic Elevate conference, which is focused on helping nonprofits use their events to raise more money and cause more connections. 

While at the conference, I had a conversation with a group of nonprofits who were extremely skeptical that they could raise money using the mail and email.  It was clear that these smaller, event-driven organizations did not believe that it was possible to communicate powerfully enough in a letter or email to inspire a person to give.

Here was my advice to them.  Don’t worry about the power of a letter or email to communicate your work.  Instead, believe in the power of how much a donor cares about what your organization is trying to accomplish. 

The donor’s desire to do something to help is so strong that a letter or email is all many donors need to send in a gift.

In the mail and email, you don’t need to convince donors.  You need to believe that they already care, then give them a timely invitation to help fund compelling work that’s happening soon.

Are You Preaching to the Choir, or Sending Out Invitations?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Preach to the choir.

What is an appeal letter for?  What’s the reason appeal letters exist?

(I ask this because if you know more about what a tool actually is, you’re more likely to be successful using it.)

An appeal letter is not for the donor to “learn more about the nonprofit.”  All the donors receiving the appeal already gave to the organization.  They already know enough to have donated.  They don’t need to know more.  Don’t preach to choir.

Here’s my take, based on the appeals that are working the best for Better Fundraising’s clients: the job of an appeal letter is to let donors know about compelling work the nonprofit plans to in the next couple of months, and to invite the donor to get involved in that work by giving a gift today. 

“Knowing more about your organization” is not stopping any of the donors receiving your mail from giving another gift.

What’s stopping them is the lack of a timely invitation to get involved in compelling work that’s happening soon.

Writing for TV and Writing for Fundraising

Connor Owen  |  Repeat
Editing.

Working in television would likely be a writer’s dream… and probably a nightmare. Tight deadlines.  Limited budgets.  Constant revisions.  Wait – that sounds like life in a nonprofit, too! 

Maybe you have more in common with a writer in Hollywood than you realized.  You’re both up against a deadline.  You’re both dealing with executives speaking into your copy.  So, what else could we learn from our fellow writers in Southern California?

For some television shows, after their first few episodes, there is a quick realization that they are focusing on the wrong characters.

Let me tell you two quick stories where this happened.  

First, let’s look at The West Wing.  This show was originally intended to focus on the staff who worked inside the West Wing, not the President.  Main characters were set to be the Chief of Staff, Communications Director, Press Secretary, and everyone who makes the White House work.  They did not plan to have the President as a prominent character with lots of storylines.

But something happened after the first episode.  At the tail-end of the Pilot, Martin Sheen stepped in front of the camera as the President of the United States and delivered a handful of lines.  Soon after, his role in the show grew! 

Why? 

Because the writers and producers of the show were smart enough to realize that when the President showed up, viewers loved it!  So, story lines for the supporting cast were decreased, and the President’s story lines increased.

The same is true of the show Family Ties.  Michael J. Fox’s character was supposed to be a supporting actor to the lead actors who played his parents.  But after a few episodes, executives realized that Fox was why people tuned into watch.

So they made a shift, and Family Ties became centered around Fox’s character.

Now, how does this relate to your fundraising?

Think of your programming like characters in a television show.  You likely have one or two programs you focus on (these are your lead actors).  And then you have a few other programs (or supporting actors) you feature here and there.

As you write about different programming in your fundraising, your audience responds differently.  The really smart orgs that are growing are listening to that data, just like successful television executives, writers, and producers.  They might even shift what was once a supporting actor into a lead actor role because of how well it performs!

So, as you send your appeals and newsletters, be sure you’re tracking your data to see which programs your audience loves responding to.  And if the data says you need to feature one more than another – do it!  You’ll love the results. 

PS: If a show like Family Ties missed the fact that they had a star in Michael J. Fox who needed more story lines, maybe you have a program out there that needs featured in more of your appeals and newsletters!  Follow the data, and watch your fundraising results increase!

PPS: Not tracking your data?  You could start now.  Download our proforma so that you can know exactly how every fundraising communication you send is performing, helping you raise even more money.