“ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film “Beginning Photography” students into two groups.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.”
The Lesson for Fundraisers
In my experience, the best way to raise more money via email and the mail isn’t to produce great fundraising, it’s to produce more fundraising.
Two pretty good appeal letters will usually result in more money for your mission than one “perfect” appeal letter.
(If you react negatively to the idea of asking more, please read the post I just linked to. It’s written especially for you.)
The “two is better than one” approach is so successful for smaller nonprofits because it forces us to push aside perfectionism and fundraise in the real world, where practice, experience and failure are the best teachers.
You Are Fundraising in a Golden Age
For small organizations, the only real cost to sending out another email is the time it takes to write, format, program and send the email.
This was not possible 20 years ago.
When I was beginning to practice all of this in the 90’s, it cost at least a couple thousand bucks to learn something because email wasn’t feasible for smaller orgs.
Think how much SLOWER the pace of learning was, and how much HIGHER the cost was to learn.
Compare that to today. If you want, in the next three months you could learn what took me three years to learn at the beginning of my career.
You just need to practice. It’s available to you. An organization could start this afternoon, if they want to.
In my first job as a fundraising writer, my mentor regularly and rigorously edited my work.
It was painful.
But I’m forever grateful because he always explained the “why” behind the edits. And over time I became a more effective writer.
In an effort to “pass it on,” here are three edits I made in the last week. Hopefully seeing the “before” and the “after” – and knowing why the edit was made – will help you in the same way it helped me…
Start with the Most Important Info
Original copy: “Today, you have an incredible opportunity. Thanks to the generosity of [company name], your gift will be TRIPLED up to $40,000.”
Edited Copy: “Your gift will be TRIPLED up to $40,000! What an incredible opportunity to increase your impact, thanks to the generosity of [company name].”
Reasoning: Put the most important information first.
The example paragraph contains three ideas: the donor has an opportunity, the matching funds are provided by a company, and the donor’s gift will triple. Of those three, the most important idea *to the donor* is that their gift will triple. Arrange the ideas in the paragraph so that the most important idea is first.
You never want to put important information at the end of a paragraph. A significant percentage of people will scan your letter or email (instead of reading it). And “scanners” often don’t read more than the first few words of a paragraph.
“Don’t bury the lede” is in the Donor Communications Constitution for a reason.
Avoid Ambiguity
Original copy: “Her mom’s ability to work has been impacted by the pandemic.”
Edited Copy: “Her mom hasn’t been able to work as much because of the pandemic.”
Reasoning: Avoid words and phrases that can mean multiple things.
The phrase “ability to work has been impacted” is value neutral; the ‘impact’ could be either good or bad. But the job of this sentence (and the paragraph it resides in) is to provide evidence that a gift is needed today. The edited copy makes it clearer, faster, that the situation is a negative one.
Any time you require a reader to figure out exactly what you mean, you’ve increased the chances they will abandon your email or letter.
Make It About the Reader
Original copy: “We still need your help to reach our match goal.”
Edited Copy: “Your help is still needed, and your gift will be doubled.”
Reasoning: Donors are more interested in themselves than they are in organizations.
The sentence, “We still need your help to reach our match goal” is mostly about the organization. It’s the organization that needs help. It’s the organization’s goal.
But that sentence can be re-written to be about the reader. “Your help is needed, and your gift will be doubled.” And we’ve turned the slightly ambiguous phrase “match goal” into a donor benefit; their gift will be doubled.
Editing your direct response fundraising to make it more about your reader and their interests is a counter-intuitive but proven approach to raising more money.
It’s generous to cross the gap to your donor’s level of understanding instead of asking her to cross the gap to your level of understanding.
It’s generous to write and design your letter/email so that a reader doesn’t have to read the whole thing to get the point.
Both those choices are generous, and will increase how much revenue your fundraising brings in.
There’s another choice that will also increase how much revenue you bring in:
Choosing to make your fundraising about your beneficiaries and about your donors will help you raise more money and do more good.
Here’s why…
Size of Market
There are far more people who care about your beneficiaries than there are who care about your organization.
In other words, the “market” of people who would like to help your beneficiaries or cause is a LOT bigger than the “market” of people who would like to help your organization.
I tried to make this point in the following graphic (which I’ve never been completely satisfied with). But seeing it is still helpful:
So as you create your direct response fundraising, remember that it doesn’t have to focus on your organization.
Make the generous choice: create other-centered fundraising. And from a marketing perspective, it’s also the smarter choice.
Your organization will be just as effective at its work if you don’t talk about your organization in your fundraising.
If fact, you will likely be more effective because you’ll be raising more money and doing more good.
Concern for “asking too much” holds back a surprising number of nonprofits from raising more money and doing more good.
This (very long) post is an attempt to show that of course you can ask too much. And that being concerned about “asking too much” is honorable.
But it will also show that, in all likelihood, a smaller nonprofit doesn’t need to fear asking more.
This post is long for a reason. Here’s why. In my experience, the belief that “we are on the edge of asking too much right now” is a core belief at many organizations. The assertion than an organization can and should be asking more often challenges that core belief.
People and organizations don’t change their minds like flipping a light switch, when it comes to core beliefs. It takes time to change a worldview.
This post gives you that time. It lets the idea sink in. It shares a couple of stories. It looks at the situation from a couple of angles.
So let’s get started. Because thinking a little differently about this one issue can help a nonprofit do a lot more good…
Who Is This Post For?
This post is for smaller organizations.
This is for organizations who mail fewer than ten pieces of direct response fundraising (appeals, newsletters) per year, and fewer than twenty-five fundraising emails per year.
This is for smaller organizations with staff or board members who have concerns about donor fatigue.
If your organization fits any of those criteria – and you’d like to raise more money – keep reading.
Story Time
Let me tell you a quick story. I’m telling you this to begin the process of expanding your idea of what’s possible for smaller organizations.
I work with a handful of organizations that send out between twelve and sixteen printed appeals each year, along with between three and six printed newsletters. They also have strong email fundraising programs.
That’s a lot, no? It might even seem like their experience doesn’t apply to your organization and your donors.
But it does. Because they’re concerned about asking too often, too.
Recently, for an organization that sends out twelve appeals a year, we had a meeting to create the fundraising calendar for the year. I noticed there was a gap between two appeals where we could squeeze in another printed appeal.
They wondered if it was the right thing to do. They thought they were on the edge of asking too much.
I asked them, “Have you ever regretted adding another appeal?”
“No,” they replied.
I said, “We’ve analyzed the results of your appeals, we constantly look at your donor retention rates. Have the positives of adding another appeal always far, far outweighed the negatives?”
“Yes,” they replied.
There was a brief period of silence. Then they said…
“OK, let’s do it. When should this drop? Which donors should we send this to?” And off we went.
Even the big organizations are concerned about asking too much.
But – and this is an important “but” – they analyze the performance of their fundraising and they see that asking more often helps them raise more money and keep more of their donors.
And here’s the mind-expanding thing: it’s a statistical certainty that your organization’s donors are also giving to some of those big organizations.
If you think that asking your donors so often would never work for your donors, please know that it works all the time. It’s working right now.
Comes from a Good Place
The concern about “asking too much” comes from a good place.
It comes from a healthy desire to keep your donors. It comes from getting feedback from a couple of important donors like, “you guys are sending me too much stuff.” It comes from wanting to emphasize the positive aspects of their beneficiaries and de-emphasize needs.
Those are good and honorable impulses.
However, if you base your fundraising strategy on only those reasons, you’ll raise less than you could be in the short term and in the long term. And you’ll do less good.
Because you also need to base your fundraising strategy on a tactic that other organizations have found allows them to raise more and do more good.
Your organization should ask itself two questions:
“If other organizations are being successful asking more, why can’t we?”
“If asking more often is an established way to help us do more good, don’t we owe it to our beneficiaries to try it a couple of times?”
A Vestigial Value
There’s another reason “asking less” is perceived to be a positive value.
This reason is a holdover, a memory of when you were a smaller organization. You knew all of the donors. You knew that they were likely to read everything you sent out.
You had a personal connection with them. You didn’t want to bother them with too many asks.
But as an organization grows, donors like that are a smaller and smaller percentage of who you communicate with.
A communication strategy of asking twice a year when you have 150 donors and know most of them can work great. But asking twice a year when you have 1,000 donors and know 150 of them will not work well.
Make sure you aren’t applying a lesson from when you were smaller to your current stage of growth.
Isn’t It Weird That “Too Many” is Always “One More” than They’re Currently Sending?
When I first started talking with organizations about this I noticed a pattern:
Orgs that send one annual appeal believed they could never send two appeals
Orgs that send two appeals believed they could never send three appeals
Orgs that send three appeals believed they could never send four appeals…
You get it.
My recommendation: don’t base your understanding of “how many appeals we can send” off of how many appeals you’re sending now. Instead, base your answer on how many appeals high-performing organizations are sending.
The time and money to write, design, and purchase postage for appeals can be a real barrier (which I’ll talk about later).
But the belief that you can’t ask more shouldn’t be a barrier.
It might make your organization uncomfortable to try it. But isn’t a little discomfort worth it for the ability to raise more money and do more good?
Beware Inapplicable Information
As you think about asking more often, you’ll get some pushback. Here are some common examples:
A Board member that says we can’t ask more than we currently are
A blog post (like this one or this one) that says to stop abusing donors with so many Asks
A Major donor that says she doesn’t like appeal letters
When this happens, check to make sure the lesson applies to your organization. For instance:
That Board member who says you can’t ask more likely doesn’t know much about direct response fundraising and hasn’t done it at scale. He doesn’t know what more sophisticated organizations are doing, and his opinion shouldn’t determine your approach.
The linked blog posts above are mainly aimed at super-large organizations. They aren’t written for organizations with two-person development teams who send out three appeals. (And nothing at all against the Agitator – I love them and kind of want to be them when I grow up.) Smart advice for an organization with 200,000 donors is not necessarily smart for an organization with 2,000 donors.
A Major Donor’s communication preferences should be honored for her, but her preferences should not determine your organization’s policy. If she doesn’t like appeal letters, use segmentation to take her out of most of your appeal letters.
The fundraising world is full of good advice, opinions and research. Just make sure it applies to your organization at your stage of growth.
Don’t Fear the Bogeyman
I’ve noticed that when organizations consider asking more, they have outsized fears around the possible negative consequences.
They fear a significant number of major donors will never give agai
They fear a massive number of unsubscribes from the email list
They fear donors will give a gift now but won’t give at the end of the year
We can tell you from experience that these fears don’t materialize.
Three quick real-life examples:
A client sent four printed appeal letters in four weeks, with no greater opt-outs or complaints than normal;
A client sent twenty-four e-appeals over nineteen days, with fewer unsubscribes than normal
A client went from four appeals to seven a year with zero negative feedback.
Will you get a complaint, an opt-out or two? Of course. But they’ll be minimal. And held up in direct comparison to the additional gifts and higher retention rates, it’s a “trade” most organizations would make every day.
Step by Step, Not Overnight
The organizations that are sending out ten successful appeals per year weren’t born that way.
They probably started at two. Then they added a third. Then a fourth. Years later, they were up to eight. And so on. They measure their results. And they keep adding appeals until their data (not one person’s opinion) shows them that they should stop.
If you’re sending three appeals a year, I don’t recommend jumping to eight. But I sure recommend jumping to four or five.
It’s a multi-year process to get to that many appeals. You figure out what types of letters and subjects your donors are most likely to respond to, and add appeals step by step.
The process often looks like the following chart. In “year 1.” the organization is sending three appeals. By year six they are sending out nine appeals and raising a LOT more money:
So if you’re worried that you and your team have to immediately triple or quadruple the amount of fundraising you send out, you can relax.
It really is a multi-year process. You add a couple of appeals. You raise more money. You do more good, and you hire another Development person. Then you’re able to do a couple more appeals. Then you raise more… step by step.
If you’re becoming more comfortable with the idea, “hey, maybe we could send one more,” then I’m thrilled for you. Because for smaller organizations who are only asking their donors a couple of times a year, the ability to ask more often is the easiest way to raise more money.
Don’t Send Everything to Everybody
Please know that most organizations that send ten appeals per year don’t send all ten to everyone.
Segmentation is your friend.
To give you an example, here are some super-simple segmentation recommendations for an organization that sends out ten appeals:
To your mass donors, send all ten of your appeals.
To the major donors you’re actively in relationship with, send two appeals.
To the major donors you’re not in active relationship with, send six appeals
To your monthly donors, send three appeals and be sure to customize them to acknowledge their faithful monthly giving.
For every appeal, feel free to pull any single donor or any small group of people out. Examples: your Board, a major donor you’re preparing a major ask for, or a person who just notified you that they’ve put your organization in their will.
Knowing that you don’t send all ten of those appeals to everyone is often tension-reducing, shoulder-lowering news for smaller organizations!
Add Functionality and Skills as You Grow
As organizations Ask more often, they tend to add new skills to their fundraising repertoire. These are skills and processes like:
Setting up their CRM to automatically send a printed receipt within 24 to 48 hours
Using segmentation (as mentioned above)
“Reporting” to their donors so donors know their gift made a difference
Use more direct response fundraising best-practices, then regularly measure and analyze results.
Do you need to do all those things if you’re moving from two appeals a year to three? No.
But do savvy nonprofits add those functions over time because they are proven to work?
Yes.
More Practice = More Money
Just “asking more” isn’t a magic bullet.
If you send eight appeals full of organizational-centric fundraising that “sounds like us” and tells stories of people you’ve already helped… it’s not going to go well. (You’ll still raise more money than you were before, but you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.)
So for smaller organizations to send more appeals, they also need to get better at appeals.
If you’re a small organization, you have three incredible things going for you:
Pent-up giving. If you’ve only been asking a couple of times a year, you have what we call pent-up giving. The next appeal you send will raise money almost regardless of what’s in it. Why? Your donors have been wanting to do more but you haven’t asked them to.
You get better at appeals the more you practice. Creating effective appeals is a learned behavior, and you’ll absolutely get better with practice.
You’re living in a golden age for learning fundraising. There’s so much free, high-quality information out there. Subscribe to our blog. Follow Jeff Brooks. Read The Agitator. Follow Lisa Sargent, Tom Ahern, Mark Phillips and T. Clay Buck. Read Erica Waasdorp’s book. Follow Next After. Look up the Agents of Good. I’ve been doing this stuff for twenty-seven years and regularly get better at it thanks to these fine people.
But You CAN Ask Too Much
The way to tell whether your organization is asking too much is to do some math. And I’ll give you the two main ideas below.
It’s good to note that sophisticated organizations use a host of tools and analysis to know when they’re asking too much. But as we’ve made clear, this post is not for them.
So here’s how to know if your organization is asking too much…
The first idea is to do a Cost/Benefit Analysis to see how much of the additional revenue from an additional appeal is “new revenue” – or is revenue that’s “stolen” from the appeal that mails right before it or after it. Once you calculate the new revenue, you figure out the relative cost of that new revenue compared to other appeals and to all of your other fundraising options.
In my experience, you don’t have to worry about this until you get to at least ten printed appeals and newsletters (total).
The second is to measure and monitor the retention rates for your donors. Each different segment of your donors (New Donors, Monthly Donors, Major Donors, etc.) has known strong/acceptable/weak retention rates. If you find that a particular segment’s retention rate is dropping, one of the culprits can be asking them too often.
If you’re at a nonprofit that is small enough that you’re not measuring retention rates by segment, you almost certainly can (and should) be mailing more.
Most small organizations don’t need analysis to know whether they can add another appeal or two. In my experience, I start to pay attention to the analysis when reaching ten appeals per year. And then really start digging into the details at about twelve or fourteen appeals per year.
If you’re mailing less than eight appeals per year, my recommendation is that you can add two appeals without thinking twice.
Quick story to provide context. I once served an organization where we ran a test. We started increasing the number of mailings (appeals and newsletters) to a group of their donors. We measured the results rigorously.
We got to the point where we were mailing those donors twenty-four appeal letters and twelve newsletters each year before the data told us that we were mailing too much.
24 printed appeal letters and 12 printed newsletters!
Do I recommend you send that many mailings? Of course not.
But doesn’t hearing that make you think you could be asking your donors a couple more times each year?
Human Resources Matter
Hopefully you are now open to the idea that your organization could be asking more.
It’s entirely another thing to write, design, print and send or email the additional asks. These things take real time, energy and money.
If you’re a small shop and working at max capacity, what do you do?
This issue must be addressed, but it’s not what this particular post is about. But here are some quick ideas to help you see how it’s possible:
You can repeat your strongest appeals and e-appeals. If last year’s year-end appeal worked great, you can use it again this year with only the slightest modification. If you run a spring campaign that works well, you can likely run a fall campaign that uses the same words, phrases and paragraphs. Don’t feel like you have to re-invent the wheel each time. Savvy Fundraisers purposefully repeat things that work. Assets, not art projects.
Sign up for the program at Work Less, Raise More. The trainings there (more being added each month) will help you produce effective fundraising very quickly.
Steal like an artist. There are no new ideas in fundraising. Take an idea or tactic that another organization uses successfully, revise it to fit your organization and your context, and you’ve made a new thing.
I want you to be free of the “donor fatigue” bogeyman. (Actual sightings happen about as often as actual sightings of a Sasquatch.)
The organizations that we’ve helped communicate more have never regretted it:
They found they were overestimating the negative consequences of communicating too much
And they found they were underestimating the generosity of their donors
So if you’re an organization that is wrestling with whether to ask more, you could be asking more.
You have pent-up giving waiting to be unleashed.
You could be doing more good!
Acknowledge your concerns – they come from a good place.
Show me a smaller organization that moves past their fears about asking too much and I’ll show you an organization that is about to raise more money, keep more of its donors, and make “the leap” to the next level of growth and impact.
“Urgency” was one of the reasons so many organizations’ direct response fundraising raised so much money during the pandemic.
Fundraising that was urgent tapped into donors’ wishes to do something to help right now.
But sounding urgent all the time is tiring. Fundraisers are tired of it.
So a lot of nonprofits are dialing back the urgency.
And they are going to raise less money.
This is a plea to keep the urgency in your fundraising work this year.
You Might Be Tired of It, But Donors Aren’t
You might be tired of sounding urgent all the time, but your donors aren’t.
Remember, you and your organization read every word of every thing you send out. Sometimes you read it twice or three times because you’re involved in creating it.
But most donors read less than half of the things you send out. And they don’t usually read, they scan.
So they haven’t heard it nearly as many times. Just because you and other stakeholders are tired of it doesn’t mean donors are tired of it.
Urgency is a Signal
It’s always good to remember just how many appeals your donors see on a daily or weekly basis.
My sense is that donors use the urgency of a message to help answer the question, “Does this organization really need a gift today?” If the copy and design are urgent, you have a greater chance to break through the clutter, a greater chance that the donor will pick your organization to support.
Or you can reduce the urgency and blend in with all the other appeals on her desk and in her inbox.
Stop Being Urgent When Urgency Stops Working
Keep using urgency until urgency stops working. Let your donors decide; don’t make the decisions for them.
And as I mentioned earlier, you’ll get tired of it faster than donors will, because you pay more attention and you see it more often.
Be Urgent Even If It Doesn’t Feel Urgent to You
Some organizations are so used to their work – are so used to the new world we live in – that their work doesn’t seem that urgent any longer.
But I bet what happens today and tomorrow is urgent to your beneficiaries.
And I bet it feels urgent to the vast majority of your donors, too.
Don’t Hide the Need Behind Boilerplate Copy and Pastel Design
If your organization or beneficiaries have a need, don’t hide that need from your donors.
Your organization exists in part to share the need – to make more people aware of the need so that more people are motivated to meet the need.
The urgency of the last year helped a lot of organizations stop hiding the need behind boilerplate industry jargon and lovely pastel design. They were clear about the needs facing their beneficiaries. They used urgent oranges and klaxon reds.
And it worked like crazy.
If your beneficiaries or cause are facing needs right now, don’t let up. Especially because after a year of this, the edges are fraying and the seams are showing for a lot of children … and families … and organizations.
So now, as even the media is moving on from the pandemic and won’t be reinforcing your fundraising messages, baking urgency into your fundraising is more important than ever.
When we work with nonprofits for the first time, we run into a situation again and again.
We present fundraising we’ve created for them and someone will say…
“But… this will make us look like all those other organizations. How can that be good?”
(Perhaps weirdly, when I hear them say it, I know we’re on the right track. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
There’s a deep vein of distrust of fundraising that “looks and sounds alike.”
Many small- to medium-sized nonprofits I know actively work hard to make their fundraising look and sound different from other fundraising they see.
They want their fundraising to be unique.
Unfortunately, in their pursuit of uniqueness, most nonprofits cause themselves to raise less money than they could.
The best way to illustrate this is through a simple analogy. I want you to think about cars…
What Cars Can Teach Us About Fundraising
From one perspective, there’s a remarkable amount of uniqueness among cars. There are two-door cars, there are four-door cars. There are trucks. There are family cars. There are sports cars. There are different colors, there are different curves. Massive differentiation.
But from another perspective, all cars all “look and sound alike.” They all have four wheels. They all have windows on the front, back, and sides. They all have doors. They all have steering wheels. They all have mirrors so you can see behind you. Cars are all the same!
That “sameness” is a result of 100+ years of trial and error as the car industry identified the common set of attributes that a car needs to have to be functional and successful.
And after a car has those attributes, it gets customized to become unique.
The same is true for direct response fundraising…
The “sameness” of successful direct response fundraising is a result of 70+ years of trial and error as the fundraising industry identified the common set of attributes that an appeal or e-appeal needs to have to be functional and successful.
And after an appeal or e-appeal has those attributes, it gets customized to become unique.
The trick is to know what the attributes are. And to start with them.
These are things like “an appeal needs to be easily readable by a 75-year-old” and “the writing has to work for people who read and for people who scan.”
Those – and a host of others – are the windows, the steering wheels, the four wheels.
What happens too often is that nonprofits design cars that have five wheels, no windows on the left side, and the steering wheel in the back.
Can you get somewhere in that crazy car? (In other words, will you get some donations?) Sure. But you’re not going to make it as far as you could.
So What Do I Do?
I wrote this to help the organizations who “don’t want our fundraising to look like those other guys” to have another way to approach this situation.
Here’s my advice:
Know that doing direct response fundraising (appeals, newsletters, e-appeals, etc.) is different from other types of fundraising.
Learn the “attributes” and best-practices
As you create your direct response fundraising, focus first on the attributes that will increase your chances of success.
Then (and only then) focus on how those attributes look and sound coming your organization.
All successful direct response fundraising tends to look, sound, and feel the same. When your fundraising starts to sound like other professionally-produced fundraising, it’s a sign of success, not failure.
Uniqueness in fundraising, in and of itself, usually leads to raising less money.
But you know what’s unique and successful? Your organization sending out fundraising that has all the attributes of successful direct response fundraising. You are the only organization in the world who can do it. And when you do it, your donors will respond far beyond your expectations.
Today’s post shares an email exchange with the Executive Director of an organization on the East Coast.
I’m sharing this with you because the ED had a very common fear: if he highlighted a low dollar amount in his appeals and e-appeals he would cause his donors to send in lower gifts than usual.
This fear often happens to organizations who are using a strong fundraising offer for the first time.
The email exchange below helped the ED set aside his fear enough to try what we were recommending. And our conversation helped him understand two helpful ideas:
The “offer amount” is different than the “ask amounts.”
Having a lower “offer amount” will not result in high-value donors giving lower amounts of money.
I’ve placed the emails in the order they were sent. I’ve edited them lightly for clarity and to anonymize the organization.
Hi Frank,
Great meeting today. At the end of our time together it was suggested that we have the offer for our first appeal be based on the cost for one of your team members to learn Spanish.
I would not focus the offer on this. Given the list of powerful activities you guys are doing this summer (working in hospitals, caring for the poor, volunteering in food banks, etc.) I think that learning Spanish is not the most impactful thing in the list that’s included in the letter.
In our experience, the best place to focus the offer is on an outcome or action that your donors will immediately see and feel the value of.
So I’d be working to find the cost to serve in a hospital for a day. Or to serve the poor.
I think those things would be more likely to result in a gift.
Steven
Note: I know from experience that it’s important (and even vital) for members of their team to learn Spanish. However, most donors would be more likely to value the acts of service performed than they would value learning the language that allows for the act of service.
What I’m trying to do is focus the fundraising on the outcome (the act of service) as opposed to focus the fundraising on the process (learning Spanish in order to provide the act of service).
Hi Steven,
I totally get that point. However, the reality is that we don’t pay much of anything for a team member to serve in a hospital or a soup kitchen. All we pay are the travel costs to and from our HQ for the summer assignment. The real costs are the language study which involve sending a team member abroad to learn the language in the actual culture.
This year, we are spending $20,000 for the team members to do language studies. But since the language study is not the real motivator to donors, could we perhaps say something generic like “The average cost of supporting a team member in a summer of service to others is $400.” ($20,000 divided by 50 team members)
What do you think?
Frank
My Reply to Frank . . .
Hey Frank,
Totally get it.
I like how you broke down the cost per team member to arrive at the $400 number. (It’s always a great service to your mass donors to help them see impact.). However, I wouldn’t recommend using the $400 amount because it’s too high. To have the most success, the amount we use needs to be low enough (usually below $50) so that any donor can afford it.
Here’s what I’d do; divide the travel costs for the team members who serve at hospitals/soup kitchens by the number of days served. That gives you the “cost per day of service” for a team member in those places.
Two reasons:
As mentioned earlier, the type of service offered in hospitals and soup kitchens is far more interesting to donors (in my experience) so it would be crazy not to focus a donor’s attention there.
Because all your organizations pays for is the travel, the “cost per day” is going to be really low. That will feel like a great deal to donors – which is always a good thing. I would even say something like, “Their food and lodging costs are covered, all we need to pay for is their travel and they’ll serve people for the entire summer! And if we write the letter correctly the funds will be undesignated and can be used for all of the team members this summer and anything else your organization needs the money for.
That’s my reasoning. Does it hold water with you?
Frank replied…
Okay. The approximate travel costs for all of the team members is $15,000. If we divide this by 35 (the number of team members doing the service work), and then divide that by 40 (number of work days), that comes to a little over $10 per day, per team member. Since the $15k above include some other things besides travel from HQ to the different cities, e.g. lunch money, commuting expenses to the work sites, etc., I think we could simply say it costs $10 per day to support a team member in their service.
I understand the pitch you want to make. My concern is that we’ll get lots of $10 gifts, but very few larger gifts that will make the mailing profitable.
Can you help ease my concern here?
My reply…
Your concern is reasonable, and I think can ease it.
First, let me call out the difference between the “offer” and the “ask amounts.” The offer is “$10 provides one day of service.” The offer shows donors a) what their gift will accomplish and b) how much it costs to make a meaningful difference.
The gift ask amounts — how much we ask for — will be higher than the offer amount. For example, the suggested gift ask amounts on the reply card will be something like “$30 to provide 3 days of service” and “$70 to provide a week of service” and “$300 to provide an entire month of service.”
When you have a low offer amount and higher gift ask amounts, a couple things happen:
More people give because the barrier of entry is so low. If we’d gone with the “$400 supports a team member for a summer” offer – that’s a high barrier of entry and fewer people would have given.
At risk of repeating myself but to make a point: if we provide a low offer amount then almost all donors will see that they can make a meaningful difference with even a small gift. This will increase the number of people who respond.
We have tons of experience seeing that the majority of donors will give about the same amount that they gave last time — or higher. (Will you get a couple $10 gifts? Sure. But the overall revenue is consistently higher.)
I hope that helps. We wouldn’t recommend this technique if we didn’t have a LOT of experience with it working.
Finally, to make this technique work even better, we will customize the gift ask amounts that each donor receives based on the size of their most recent gift. This is done by taking each donor’s last gift, then calculating the appropriate-sized gift ask amounts for that donor, then printing those amounts on each donor’s reply card.
Does this help? Does it prompt any questions?
Frank was still slightly worried that focusing the letter on a low offer amount ($10 provides a day of service) would result in lower-than-normal gifts. However, he was willing to try it once.
And thankfully the appeal was a great success. It raised more money than it ever had before, completely funded the program for the year, and even raised additional undesignated funds.
After a string of successes, the organization now looks for low offer amounts for every appeal they send.
I realize that focusing on a low dollar amount is counterintuitive. But organizations who switch to this approach with their mass donors reliably raise more money than they previously did.
If you’re interested in trying this out for your organization, get in touch!
After a difficult year, and a not-so-simple start to 2021, we’d be excused for wanting to wipe the slate clean.
But does starting over with a clean sheet of paper work for fundraising?
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But it’s usually the wrong thing to do.
The best way to move into 2021 is by looking at what worked best in 2020 and copying it. Even during the pandemic, many organizations saw better than average results. Some set records. So, it would be a shame to not repeat what worked, right?
You can save yourself a LOT of time by doing this, AND you’ll raise more money doing it. Why? Because your donors voted with their wallets and told you that some of your fundraising last year was really effective. It caught and kept their attention. They wanted to get involved. And it moved them to action.
If you think of your fundraising as a series of experiments, some of your experiments worked better than others.
So, your fundraising this year should include more of the things that worked well. Take some time to identify those successes, and repeat them:
Copy the offers and creative approaches that worked.
Use those offers and creative approaches in other scenarios.
Find relevant, real-time opportunities for your donor to give today.
As you move into the new year, spend a couple of minutes brainstorming the reasons your donor gave last year. And if you give her those same opportunities, she’s likely to help your cause again.
I wrote this blog a few years back but it’s more relevant now, than ever. The summary is that there’s an easy way for you to raise more money in 2021 with very little work.
It’s worked for years, and it worked again in 2020. Even in the midst of the pandemic…
Every one of our clients who Asked their donors for support more often in 2020 (compared to 2019) raised more net revenue than they did the year before.
And there were almost zero negative consequences. To be more specific, there was a complaint or two, a worry from a board member, and some unsubscribes from their email lists.
But those negatives were completely overwhelmed by the additional donors that were engaged and extra money that was raised. In short, donors wanted to help.
The nervous fundraisers, EDs and organizations who weren’t sure whether they should do this were handsomely rewarded with more net revenue for very little cost.
There were no breakouts of “donor fatigue.” No massive numbers of people unsubscribing.
These organizations just raised more money, did more good work, and learned more about their donors.
Which now sets them up for an even more successful 2021.
Let me put it this way…
The easiest way to raise more is to Ask more often.
This means adding another appeal or two. Or more e-appeals.
Not replacing what you’ve been doing. In addition to what you’ve been doing.
Here’s an easy way to add an Ask:
Look at your fundraising calendar for 2021
Look for a gap where your donors don’t hear from you for a while
Think back through your most successful appeals and e-appeals last year (other than year-end)
Pick the most successful appeal that’s appropriate to send during the “gap” in your calendar, then create a version of that appeal to send in the gap
What you’re trying to do here is add another appeal with the least amount of effort possible.
Almost no one believes me when I say, “The easiest way to raise more money is to Ask a couple more times this year.”
Almost every organization has an awful, no-good, very-bad, organization-shackling assumption that they can’t Ask their donors any more often than they already are. Especially after the year we’ve had.
But it’s a bad assumption. Let your donors make the decision not to give. Don’t make it for them.
So please, try it. You can even just try it with an e-appeal so there’s basically no cost. Track the results. Look at the expenses, the revenue, your retention rates, everything. You won’t see the negative consequences you fear.
And you’ll LOVE the amount of additional money you raise with very little work.
