Tag: appeals

Keep Up the Urgency

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Urgent Alarm

“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.

It’s urgent that you do.

All Cars are the Same and Unique

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Cars Look the Same

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:

  1. Know that doing direct response fundraising (appeals, newsletters, e-appeals, etc.) is different from other types of fundraising.
  2. Learn the “attributes” and best-practices
  3. As you create your direct response fundraising, focus first on the attributes that will increase your chances of success.
  4. 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.

Offer Amount vs. Ask Amount

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Donate

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:

  1. The “offer amount” is different than the “ask amounts.”
  2. 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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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!

Repeat What Works

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Repeat

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.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Afraid to Ask

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. 

And if you want easy ways to improve all your appeals or e-appeals, download our free eBook, “Asks That Make Your Donors Take Action.”

Please Try It

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.

A Note to Leaders

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Leader compose letter

This is a note to Leaders of organizations who want to raise more money this year through the mail and email, or who need to raise more money through mail and email because you are still unable to have events and meet with donors. 

You’ll raise more money faster if you can cultivate an attitude that each piece of mail or email your organization sends out is an experiment and an opportunity to get better.

Organizations that get better at direct response quickly do not treat every piece of fundraising as precious.  They look at each piece as:

  • An opportunity to raise money
  • An experiment that might work
  • A data-producing effort that will be learned from
  • A chance to stay “top of mind” with their donor (in contrast to all those organizations that “go dark” for weeks and months at a time)

And here’s what I see in organizations that do not get better quickly:

  • A belief that each piece is something precious.
  • A deep fear of offending anybody, and a belief that any offense would cause outsized negative consequences. 
  • Large approval teams. Everyone who sees it is allowed to make changes.

A Structure for Quick Improvement

It’s probably too much to ask a blog post to change the beliefs an organization has about mail and email fundraising, the “story they tell themselves” about mail and email fundraising.

But here is a structural recommendation for how the fundraising gets created that can help…

  • After a draft of an appeal or e-appeal is created, a very small number of people review it.
  • Reviewers can submit suggested changes, but not make changes.
  • No more than three people are allowed to make changes, and preferably fewer.
  • If a Reviewer’s suggested edits or changes are not accepted, they are told why.
  • After appeals or e-appeals are sent to donors, anyone in the organization can comment on it.  The person in charge of the fundraising decides whether to take the comments into consideration for future fundraising, or not.

Cascading Benefits

This structure has several cascading benefits…

The person or team who creates the fundraising saves time and can focus on their expertise  →  The team then creates more pieces of fundraising  →  This allows more fundraising to be sent to donors  →  This speeds up the pace of learning what works and what doesn’t →  This increases donations →  This increases donor retention. 

Another benefit: this structure will help you attract and retain better fundraising talent.

But you have to trust the structure and the process.  You have to trust the fundraising team.  You have to trust the skills they’ll develop.  

Show me an organization structured like this, with a team that uses data and best practices to make decisions instead of having to make the edits from Bob in Accounting, and I’ll show you an organization primed to learn quickly and raise more money in 2021.

The Three Practical Empathies

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Empathy

The work of a Fundraiser involves empathy for others.

Empathy for your beneficiaries or cause so you can tell their story.

Empathy for your organization and its programs so you can share about them.

Most nonprofits are full of empathy… but they often miss empathy in three key places…

Empathy for Donors

Practical empathy in fundraising allows you to give a gift to donors by ‘crossing the gap’ to their level of understanding.

To understand what it’s like to be in a donor’s chair.  To know what she knows.  To know what she doesn’t know.  And speak to her in language she understands, at a level of knowledge that makes sense to her. 

That’s empathy for donors.  (Which is helpful, because fundraising is for donors, not for internal stakeholders.)

But the problem with fundraising that’s empathetic to donors is that internal stakeholders don’t prefer it.

Empathy for Internal Stakeholders from Fundraisers

Another necessary practical empathy is from Fundraisers towards internal stakeholders who don’t understand as much about fundraising as Fundraisers do.

Because when you create fundraising that’s empathetic to donors, it’s often not liked by internal audiences.

For instance, program staff, board members and executive leadership often don’t understand that:

  1. While internal conversations are (and should be) full of industry jargon, fundraising communications should avoid jargon because most of your donors don’t know what it means.  But internal stakeholders prefer jargon because its accuracy is helpful to them.
  2. Direct response fundraising is different than interpersonal communication.  While a 1-to-1 conversation might wander around to establish relationship and common ground, a direct response e-appeal needs to get to the point immediately.  But internal stakeholders aren’t usually familiar with direct response best-practices and – reasonably – would never use them themselves.
  3. While a grant application might detail the finer points of your organization’s programs and approach, the average reader of an appeal letter isn’t interested in those details.  But internal stakeholders know those details make your organization effective!  To not include them in an appeal feels wrong.

But internal stakeholders weren’t trained in direct response or any other types of fundraising.  Empathy is needed to understand the concerns of internal stakeholders, to speak directly to their concerns, to help them understand what you’re doing with a generous spirit and solid explanation.  Share your knowledge.

Empathy From Internal Stakeholders Towards Donors

The final necessary practical empathy is from internal stakeholders towards donors.

In my experience, the best approach is for Fundraisers to help Board and Staff through the same transformation you went through when you learned to cross the gap. 

Share with Board and Staff that the same empathy they use to understand your beneficiaries can (and should) be used to understand your donors.  For example, your organization is effective because it understands the problem you’re working on, meets it where it is today, and creates small, practical steps to make things better.

Great fundraising uses the same approach: understanding the donors, meeting them where they are today, and creating small, practical next steps donors can take to make things better. 

Embracing the three empathies is often what unlocks an organization’s fundraising potential. 

Which helps an organization help its beneficiaries even more.

A Plea for Help

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Help

At its simplest, an appeal letter or e-appeal is a plea for help.

And to be most successful, an appeal needs two things:

  1. A problem.  This is the reason for the plea.
  2. A solution to that problem that the donor can provide with their gift.

Do your appeals get this right?

For instance, many organizations send appeals that primarily ask donors to “‘support our organization.”

But asking donors to “support our organization” doesn’t raise as much money as asking donor to “solve a problem with your gift.”

Why?  

Because when an organization asks for “support,” they end up trying to prove that they are worthy of that support.  So those appeals spend a meaningful part of their letter or email telling the donor that the organization is effective, and sharing a story of a person who has already been helped.

But that approach reduces engagement and money raised. 

Think of it this way: in the Emergency Room, when someone’s life is on the line and help is needed “STAT,” do the nurses first share about people they’ve helped in the past?  No.  They yell for exactly what they need.

When a ship at sea is sinking and they sent out an SOS message, do they also include stories of all the successful voyages they’ve made before?  No.  They send their location and they plead for help.

A plea for “support” simply isn’t as strong – and doesn’t get as good results – as a plea for help.

The Big Shift

Steven Screen  |  Ask
shift

When most organizations write an appeal letter, they believe that the letter needs to convince the donor to support the organization. 

That approach results in appeals that don’t raise as much as they could. 

There’s a simple shift in thinking that results in appeals, e-appeals and newsletters that raise more money…

The Big Shift

The “shift” is this: moving from “trying to get the reader to support our organization” to “trying to get the reader to do one powerful thing for one beneficiary.”

That’s the Big Shift.

And when you write a letter that asks your reader to do one powerful thing for one beneficiary, you end up with a letter that raises more money.

It raises more money for a host of reasons, but here’s the main one: you’ve asked your donor to do something easier.  And when you ask your donors to do something easier (as opposed to something harder) you get more gifts.

Because asking a donor to support your organization is a Big Ask.  It means supporting your vision, your strategy, your cause, your accounting, your staffing structure, your… everything.

That’s a Big Ask because it asks your donor to do a lot.  That’s fine when you’re talking to a Foundation, or submitting a long application for a grant.

But not when you’re doing direct response fundraising and you have your donor’s attention for a few seconds.

You want to make it easier for them to say “yes,” not harder.  You need to make the shift.

To make this happen, customize the “one meaningful thing” for your organization.  Maybe it’s moving a piece of legislation forward by one small step.  Maybe it’s giving one person the tools they need to advocate for your cause.  Maybe it’s making the experience of a cancer patient just a little bit easier. 

You get the idea.

When you ask for something smaller, you’ll get more yesses.  And you’ll get more second yesses and third yesses.  Then you’ll raise more money. 

What Happens Next

Here’s what happens when you internalize this shift…

Your appeal letters become easier to write.  Because rather than trying to convince them to support your whole organization, you’re just trying to convince them to do one thing for one beneficiary. 

And you raise more money.  It’s a proven approach.

Pushback

As you make the Big Shift, you’ll notice something.

When you write appeals, you’ll find yourself (out of habit) inserting boilerplate copy about your organization – those phrases you’ve always used in the past.

And you immediately notice that those boilerplate phrases make your letter less interesting and less powerful. 

You’ll start to see how the way you used to communicate was boring to everyone but insiders and core donors. 

Additionally, when you circulate a draft of a letter that has made the shift, some well-meaning person will say “But we also have to mention our program that does X…”  And someone else will say, “We need to add a couple paragraphs about how effective we are…”

And you will see how neither of those things make your letter more likely to convince a donor to do one meaningful thing for one beneficiary. 

The Big Fear

The big fear that organizations tend to have around this approach is this: if I ask for something smaller, will my larger donors start giving smaller gifts?

In my experience (27 years and counting) this doesn’t happen.  In fact, what’s more likely to happen is that you’ll start getting second gifts from your major donors – gifts that are in addition to what they normally give!

The Leap

The “big shift” is one of the shifts in thinking that helps organizations make “the leap” to the next level of fundraising success. 

It helps them create fundraising that is attractive to more people than just insiders and core donors.  It helps them create fundraising that acquires more new donors.  It helps them grow.

The Big Shift at Year-End

If you want to make the Big Shift in your year-end letter, check out our new training. 

It’s just $40 and when you’re done with the training, you’ll be done with your year-end letter.

It shows you exactly how to write a powerful letter – that asks your readers to do something easy instead of something hard – that will raise you more money at year-end this year.   

The training is video-based and step-by-easy-step.  One option has you finished with your letter in 30 minutes.  The other option has you done with an even better letter in about 90 minutes.

The Time to Shift is Now

I hope you and your organization have made the Big Shift.  I believe in the extraordinary generosity of donors – we’ve seen it this year more than ever.  But I also believe this is going to be a competitive fundraising environment for at least the next several months.

Making it easier for your donors to say “yes” is a tool – a way of thinking – you should use to fund your mission.  So make the “big shift” and start raising more money!