Tag: appeals

News Speed vs Nonprofit Speed

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Send main fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But everyone can write and send an e-appeal.

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

Kudos for the Wrong Thing

Steven Screen  |  Ask
You are awesome.

Every nonprofit has its own preferences.

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

All good things. 

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

For instance…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Fineprint.

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

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Read the whole series:

How a Strong Fundraising Offer Changes Everything

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Can you help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how to get donors to understand?

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

We started digging into the line items of budgets.

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

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

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

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

And suddenly our appeals started to raise more money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird but True (and Important)

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Strange but true.

Here’s something weird but true:

Your Staff and Board receive more of your fundraising communications than your donors do.

That might not seem possible, but here’s how it works:

The Staff and Board of a nonprofit tend to open and read everything the organization sends out… but donors don’t. 

Let me give you an example, and then I’ll share why this is so important.

For example, if you send out a fundraising email, almost everyone on your Staff and Board notice and look at it.  But if your email open rate is 30%, then 70% of the people on your email list did not see the email.

So your Staff and Board received an email, but effectively 70% of your donors did not.

And if you send out an appeal letter, everyone on your staff and Board will notice and take look at it.  But maybe 50%* of donors opened the letter.

So your Staff and Board received an appeal letter, but about half of your donors didn’t.

Play this out over the course of a year and your Staff and Board have received a lot more of your fundraising than your donors have.  Put another way, the Staff and Board understand how many pieces the organization is sending to donors, but they don’t understand how few pieces the donors are receiving.

Consequently, most nonprofits have an over-inflated sense of how much they are communicating with their donors. 

The Consequence

When Staff and Board don’t know this truth, they often inadvertently keep an organization smaller than it could be.

The Staff and Board base their advice on “how much communication is enough” on their own inflated perception, NOT on their donors’ lived experience.

Consequently, nonprofit Staff and Boards consistantly advocate for less communication than the organization could be sending out, which results in less money raised from individual donors.

At Better Fundraising, our general rule of thumb is that most individual donors see a little less than half of the fundraising an organization sends out.  Keep that in mind as you build annual plans and campaigns, and you’ll communicate more effectively and raise more money.

And if you’re at a smaller nonprofit where your Staff or Board are handicapping your fundraising because of a mistaken understanding of “how much we’re communicating with our donors,” please share this post with them.

Getting Staff and Board to recognize the situation, and then moving past the stage where “my Board/boss won’t let us send out any more fundraising because s/he thinks we send too much,” is a step made by every organization with a thriving individual donor fundraising program.

***

* This is an educated guess.  The published data on direct mail open rates is self-reported data, which is notoriously inaccurate.

Need an emergency fundraising email because of the LA fires?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Fires.

We’re replacing today’s blog post with a special announcement:

If you’re at a small nonprofit, and the fires in LA have caused you to need extra/emergency funds, we’d like to help: we will write an emergency fundraising email for you.

<< If you don’t work in/around LA, but know someone who does, please feel free to forward this post to them. >>

Watching the fires unfold this week has been heartbreaking.  We work with people who have lost their homes. 

Knowing how the nonprofit community jumps into action at times like this, there are hundreds (thousands?) of smaller nonprofits in LA who could use some emergency cash.  And they don’t have the time or expertise or budget to get out an emergency email. 

So we’d like to help.

If you’re at a small nonprofit and would like us to write a free emergency fundraising email for you, here’s what to do:

  1. Send an email to info@betterfundraising.com
  2. Give us a brief snapshot of what’s happening for your beneficiaries or organization
  3. Tell us if your organization is too small to afford to do this on your own, or if you’ve just never really known how

We’ll reply with a few detail questions about your exact situation so we know what to say in the email.  Once you send us the answers, we’ll write an emergency email for you within a day or two.  We’ll also send a handful of tips that will help you with emergency fundraising in general.

We made this offer after hurricanes Helene and Milton last fall, and it was a joy to meaningfully help the organizations who took us up on our offer. 

We are inspired by all that nonprofits in the LA area are doing right now.  This is the way we can help, and just like you, we’ll help as much as we can.

If you or your organization need an email, please get in touch!

Approach to Appeals

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Appeal.

This month we’re sharing the ideas and strategies that had an outsized positive impact on the nonprofits we serve. 

Today’s idea is that there’s an approach to appeals (appeal letters and e-appeals) that, in our experience, tend to work the best.

Here’s the simplest summary of what the performance data leads us to believe:

  • The most successful appeals tend to be about the help that your beneficiaries or cause needs now, and how the donor’s gift will provide that help.
  • The less successful appeals tend to be about help that the organization has already provided, and request support for the organization.

When organizations change their appeals to be about the help that’s needed, and how the donor’s gift will help provide it, two things happen.  First, each appeal raises more money.  Second, the organization retains more donors year-over year.

Put another way, they start raising more money in the short term and in the long term.

Of course, appeals like this are only one element in an effective donor communications plan.  And they take a lot of thought to create.  For instance, appeals like this only describe part of an organization’s work.  You have to choose which part of your work to talk about, and you have to talk about it in an accessible way.

But if you create appeals that follow this approach, you’ll start raising more money immediately.

***

If you’re interested in what it would look like to have Better Fundraising write and design your fundraising, fill out the “get in touch” form on this page.  We’ll reach out to schedule a chat. 

And if you fill out the form before the end of the month, we’ll give you our 2024 pricing for all of 2025, a savings of $3,500.

Take More Steps

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Steps progress.

This post is the first in a series of special posts for January.  Last year we kept track of the ideas that had outsized impact on the small and medium-sized nonprofits we serve.  Each of the posts this month is about one of those big ideas.

I hope they are helpful as you think about your fundraising this year.

***

Every piece of fundraising you make & send is a step on your journey to raising more money.

Here’s the simple truth: the more steps you take each year, the closer you are to raising more money, because you get better when you practice.

You know those organizations that send out 10 appeal letters, 6 printed newsletters, and 50 fundraising emails?  They can do that because they’ve practiced so much that their fundraising works great.

They don’t have different donors than you.  They don’t have a better cause than you.  They’ve just practiced more.

At some point in the past, someone at those organizations said, “Let’s figure out a way to make and send more fundraising.”

If your organization needs someone to say that, you can be that someone.

Don’t be afraid of making & sending more fundraising.  The more steps you take, the better you get at taking steps.

Matte, Not Glossy

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Paper choices.

In the midst of the holiday hubbub, here’s a tactical tip for you…

I was once part of a test to see if using matte paper, as opposed to glossy paper, would change fundraising results.

Here’s how the test worked:

  • We took the organization’s active donors (about 80,000) and randomly split them into two equal groups.
  • After writing and designing their newsletter, we printed half of the newsletters on matte paper and half of the newsletters on glossy paper.
    • Just to be super clear, the design and content of the newsletter was exactly the same.  The only difference was the finish of paper.
  • One of the groups of donors received the matte version, and the other group received the glossy version. 

The matte version of the newsletter raised more money.  Both the Average Gift and the Response Rate were slightly higher.

I’ve replicated these results in other tests, and so have lots of other Fundraisers.

The general understanding for why this happens is that glossy paper reflects more light than matte paper, and the reflections make anything printed on glossy paper a little harder to read.  This is especially true for older donors whose eyes don’t adjust between bright and dark as well as they used to.

And as you already know, when your fundraising is harder to read, fewer people read your fundraising.  And when fewer people read your fundraising, fewer people give.

The difference in money raised was not astronomical, but it was significant enough that the organization started using matte paper for almost everything (even over the objections of somebody in leadership who thought glossy paper was “more professional.”)

Using matte instead of glossy doesn’t apply to everything.  Does the outside of your holiday card to donors need to be matte?  No.  Can your annual report be on glossy stock?  Sure.

But when you desire a response from the piece, and therefore readability matters more, go matte.