Tag: appeals

Use Graphics, But Not Too Many

Steven Screen  |  Ask

Here’s a question that one of our clients asked recently, and I think it’ll be helpful to you to know what we’ve seen over the years.

“Do graphics (like a visual of a meal in an appeal for meals) actually help?”

The answer is “usually, and up to a point.”

I’ll explain both parts of that answer…

Usually

Graphics are easier to understand more quickly than words, which is why you see them so often.  And when you embrace the idea that people are moving fast when they look at your mail or email, you can see why graphics are so helpful for donors. 

  • An image of a plate with food instantly means the appeal is about providing food
  • A image of a diving board, a s’more and a bunkbed communicates “summer camp” quickly
  • A large “2X” instantly means the donor’s gift doubles

Think of these graphics as a service to your donors, to make your appeals easier to understand quickly.  They make your appeals more accessible to more people.

I’ve seen some people who will push back against using graphics because “they are not professional and we want our image to be professional.”  I ask those people if they’ve ever been grocery shopping – because when you enter a grocery store (even high-end stores like Whole Foods)

there are graphics that immediately point your attention toward sale items – and shoppers don’t think, “oh man, this grocery story isn’t professional.”  Shoppers value graphics because they’re helpful.

As Jeff Brooks says, any time you can help a donor picture what their gift will help provide, you’re closer to getting a gift.

Up to a Point

You can absolutely use too many graphics and put emphasis on too many things.  We’ve all seen marketing materials that are so visually busy that you don’t know where to look.

There’s an old maxim that says, “when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.”  You’ve seen this in appeal letters where roughly half of the letter is bolded and/or underlined.  At that point it’s no longer helpful – it’s just noise.

So don’t use too many.

But… there’s a reason you keep seeing graphics on appeal letters and in emails: they reliably increase how much money comes in.  And they increase how much money comes in because they are helpful to donors.

Get To Know Your Segments!

Steven Screen  |  Repeat

I wrote earlier this week about why you shouldn’t mail your ‘reports’ (newsletters or donor reporting letters) to your lapsed or non-donors because it’s not worth the money to do so. 

There’s a core idea in that post that I want to name, and then go deeper on.  

The core idea is that your database is made up of different groups of people with different characteristics, and each group responds at a different (but predictable) rate to your fundraising. 

The professional name for this is called “audience segmentation,” and if you already report fundraising results by audience segment, you can skip the rest of this post.  But if not, let me give you an easy example:

  • If you mail an appeal to 100 people who have given your organization a gift in the last year or so, perhaps 5 people will respond with a gift.
  • If you mail that same exact appeal to 100 people who have volunteered at your organization in the last year or so, perhaps 1 person will respond with a gift.

Knowing that different groups respond differently (and predictably) has obvious implications for your fundraising plan.  And I hope you’ll walk with me through an example from one of the nonprofits Better Fundraising serves.

The nonprofit is a Christian missionary-sending organization.  If you’re not familiar with the model, there are two layers of fundraising.  Each missionary raises their own financial support from friends and family, people who give because they know and believe in that specific missionary.  The organization itself has donors too, but these are people who support the cause or the institution itself as opposed to any specific missionary.  The money the “organizational” donors give to the organization funds things individual missionaries can’t provide for themselves: training, emergency care, recruiting the next generation of missionaries, etc.

When sending out fundraising, the organization used to lump the results of the two groups together.  Here are the results for their June appeal a couple of years ago:

When reviewing these results, you’d think something like the following: “This appeal did OK but not great.  We drove $17k in net revenue with an ROI of 2.36.”  But that’s from over 9,000 donors, and our response rate was only 1.91%, which isn’t great for an appeal to current donors.

However, because we know that the 9,000 people who received this appeal are made up of two distinct groups (missionary supporters and organizational supporters) we should review results from this appeal broken out for each group.  Now here’s what we see:

Look at the difference in performance for the two groups!

Breaking out the results like this, we see two completely different stories that were hidden when the results were lumped together:

  • For organizational donors, the appeal was a huge success.  It resulted in almost $20k in net revenue with an ROI of 6.8 and a response rate of 6.06%.  That’s a win that we’d take every time.
  • For missionary supporters, the appeal was not a win when judged by conventional cultivation metrics: it lost over $2,000, had an ROI less than 1, and a response rate of just .62%.  Ouch.
    • However, it did result in 44 new organizational donors at a cost of $215 per new donor (the “cost per response”) which is an acceptable cost per new donor for this organization.

The organization learned a handful of lessons from this exercise that has helped them grow since this mailing was sent two years ago.  For instance: 

  • They used to think their appeals were only working OK.  Now they know that their appeals are working great for organizational donors.  This makes the organization feel much more confident in their fundraising.
  • They now know the tradeoffs of sending mailings to Missionary donors.  Today, for most mailings, they include few or no Missionary donors, which saves the organization tens of thousands of dollars a year. 
  • And when they do send a mailing to Missionary donors, they judge the mailing’s success by the number of new organizational donors acquired.
  • There’s also a political reason for all of this: now, whenever a stakeholder or Board member says something like, “Hey, why are we mailing missionary donors” or “Hey, why are we not mailing missionary donors” the person in charge of fundraising points to the spreadsheets, says “this is what happens when we do, this is what happens when we don’t, and here’s why.”  The stakeholder or Board member usually walks away impressed.

So, what different groups is your database made up of?  And can you start analyzing your fundraising results by group (“by segment” is the technical term) so that you can make your fundraising operation more efficient and effective?

For instance, many nonprofits that we start working with have been sending their appeals to basically everyone: anyone who has given a gift in the last 5 years, plus their volunteers, plus the non-donors that are on their list.  But when we evaluate the performance for each group, the organization usually discovers they’ve been losing money by mailing to some of their groups.

So they “tighten up” the groups they’ve been mailing to, start saving meaningful amounts of money, and then use that money to either raise more money or do more mission work.

My advice to you, if you don’t already, is to start getting to know your segments!

The ‘Good Bad Idea’ That Raised $9,000

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Good or bad idea.

I just returned from the always-excellent GiveCon with a fun story to tell you.  It’s a great example of how small nonprofits often underestimate their donors.

A man named Jon and I were chatting, and we got to talking about the small nonprofit he serves (they have about 160 active donors).  Jon mentioned that they’d recently made a large payment to one of their local partners, and were short on cash. 

I said, “Jon, I hesitate to say this, but I have a good bad idea.”

“If you would be willing to write the first draft of an email about this, I’ll edit it for you.  If you send it out tonight, I bet we’ll raise a bunch of money.  My goal is to raise at least as much as it cost for you to come to the conference.”

Jon was game.  It was on!

Before he left the Better Fundraising booth, he and I talked about what the ask should be for.  He was thinking it would be to “refill our coffers after this large payment.”  I encouraged him to not make it about their cash flow, and instead make it about the services the money would eventually provide.

Their organization helps women in Africa who are victims of kidnapping and sexual slavery, and the money would eventually be used to help women recover.

I asked him for some program specifics, and we came up with the following: your gift of $250 will help a woman recover for a month by providing a box of food, assistance paying her rent, and 2 visits from a licensed psychotherapist from her own community.  And we included language to make the funds undesignated in case they raised more than they needed.

Jon sent the email late morning of Day 2 of GiveCon.

After lunch Jon came up to me with a huge grin on his face.  “We’ve raised $2,500 thus far!”

A few minutes after the last session of the day, Jon came back.  “We’ve raised $4,500!”

The next morning, Jon came to a session I was giving.  Near the end I asked him if he would share the current total with the people in the room, and he shared that it was over $9,000. 

This is a meaningful amount of money for their organization.  And it all came in because they had the courage to ask.

I share this story because it’s a perfect illustration of two things you’ve heard me say if you’ve read this blog for any length of time:

  • If you have a need, share it with your donors!  You can do this far more often than you think, donors will love helping, and donors will feel more connected to what’s going on at your organization.
  • Make it easy for donors to know what their gift will make possible.  Jon could have explained the “inside baseball” context of partner payments and cash flow.  And that might have been appropriate in a conversation with a major donor.  But this was a quick email, so instead he talked about what the money would do in the field, using specifics that everyone would understand.

I’m proud of Jon and his organization for sending out the email.  And I’m not the least bit surprised that it raised far more than they thought it would.

At Better Fundraising, we find donor generosity to be both amazing and predictable when donors are given acute, understandable reasons that their support today will make a difference.

Jon’s donors were ready.  Yours are, too.

It’s OK to Ask for a Smaller Approval Team

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Approval team.

If you’re a fundraiser whose appeals have to wind their way through four (or six, or eight) reviewers before they go out the door, you’re allowed to push back.  In fact, you should.  Here’s the case to make.

You were hired to do two things (well you were probably hired to do lots of things but there are two main things you were hired to do in regard to this): understand donors & what motivates them, and understand how direct response fundraising actually works.  That’s your job, and is one of the main ways you add value to your organization.

But a long approval chain takes those exact skills out of your hands.  Every reviewer who can change your copy is, in effect, overriding your expertise.  By the time a piece survives six approvers, it doesn’t sound like a fundraiser wrote it.  It sounds like a committee wrote it.  Because a committee did.

Let me acknowledge something up front: the heavy approval process doesn’t exist because anyone is being unreasonable.  Boards want to protect the brand.  Leaders want to make sure nothing embarrassing goes out under their signature.  Program staff want their work represented accurately.  Marketing wants the language consistent.  All of those instincts come from a good place.

Let me give you an analogy: the best performing appeals are like a screwdriver; they do one thing and they do it perfectly.  A large approval process tends to turn the screwdriver into a Swiss Army Knife that does a lot more things – but none of them well.

I’ve watched this scenario at hundreds of organizations.  And I’ve noticed that the orgs that grow their individual donor revenue the fastest have a few things in common, and one of them is this – they keep their approval teams small, and one person, not a group, makes the final decision.

When committees decide, fundraising gets compromised in predictable ways.  The bold ask gets softened.  The emotional language gets neutralized.  The specific gets generalized.  The urgent gets diluted.  Nobody in the room is trying to make the piece less effective, but the cumulative effect of “let’s also add…” and “could we soften…” and “I’d feel better if we mentioned…” is fundraising that doesn’t work.

It’s also slower.  Every reviewer adds days.  Every round of revisions adds more.  Every piece that takes a month to clear is a piece you didn’t send while you waited.  The hidden cost isn’t just the quality of the pieces – it’s the volume.  The orgs that send more, raise more.  Approval bottlenecks suppress volume.

Here’s a small structural change worth proposing to your leadership:

  • A small group reviews each piece – three or four people, max.
  • Reviewers can suggest changes, but not make them.
  • One person – ideally someone who knows direct response – makes the final call on what gets changed.
  • After a piece goes out, anyone in the org can comment on it.  Those comments go to the person in charge of fundraising, who decides whether to take them into account for next time.

That’s it.  Same care.  Same brand protection.  But the fundraiser gets to do their job, the pieces stay sharp, and the volume goes up.

If this is something you want to bring up, here are three things to say, in this order:

“You hired me to understand donors and to understand how fundraising through the mail and email works.  The current approval process makes it hard for me to do what you hired me for.  I’d like to propose a small change that keeps everyone involved but lets me move faster and keep the pieces effective.”

“It’s a well-known truth that fundraising written by a committee performs worse than fundraising an experienced person. That’s not a criticism of anyone on the team – it’s just how committee decision-making works.  The pieces get smoothed out, and smoothed-out fundraising raises less money.”

“What I’m proposing isn’t ‘no review.’  It’s right-sized review.  Reviewers can suggest.  One person decides.  After the piece goes out, everyone can give feedback for the next one.”

And one note for any leader reading this: the trade-off is real.  You can have careful fundraising, or you can have effective fundraising.  The organizations I see grow the fastest have learned to choose the second – by trusting the person they hired to do the job they were hired for.

Importantly, when the person doing the job feels trusted, they will tend to stay in the job longer.

You hired a fundraiser.  Let them be one.

It’s OK to Write Fundraising That’s Emotional

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Sad puppy.

If you’ve ever written a fundraising piece you knew was going to work, only to have someone in the room say “this is too emotional” – I feel you.

And I want to give you a couple tools to help you get your great fundraising approved.

Because what has happened to you is pretty common: a Fundraiser drafts an appeal that’s vivid, urgent, and emotionally honest.  They send it around for review.  And someone – usually program staff, or the branding lead, or a senior leader – pushes back: “This is too emotional.  Donors will feel manipulated.  We need to tone it down.”

Even though every word is true!

What makes this objection so hard to argue against is that it sounds reasonable.  Even ethical.  Nobody wants to feel like they’re being manipulative, or be accused of being manipulative.  And the person raising the objection usually holds real authority and means well – they understand the work deeply and they care about how the organization shows up in the world.

So the piece gets toned down.  And it raises less money.  And the Fundraiser feels frustrated.

But here’s why you want emotion in your fundraising.  More than 70 years of head-to-head testing & research on giving consistently shows that people give for emotional reasons, the vast majority of the time:

  • One well-known study compared donations in response to images of a sad child, a happy child, and a neutral child.  Same need.  Same ask.  Same beneficiary.  The sad-child version raised donations from 77% of viewers.  The happy-child and neutral-child versions?  52% each.  When there’s less emotion, there’s less giving.
  • After the Notre Dame fire in 2019, donors from around the world sent hundreds of millions of unsolicited (!) dollars to repair an old building.  Curing cancer is arguably more important – but what happened to the building was emotional, and people responded.

Emotion isn’t a flaw in giving.  Emotion is how giving works.

When you write emotionally, you’re not manipulating your donors.  You’re reminding them why they care.  The reasons they got involved in the first place were emotional – and the most respectful thing you can do is meet them in the same place they entered from.

So the next time someone in your organization calls a piece “too emotional,” here are two things worth saying – in this order – to keep the emotional version alive:

“You know everything we do and why we do it.  You’re an expert.  But our individual donors aren’t experts.  They became donors because their emotions were touched – by a story, a moment, a need.  When we tap into those same emotions in our fundraising, we’re not manipulating anyone.  We’re reminding them why they care.  What feels ‘too emotional’ to you doesn’t feel that way to a donor.  To a donor, it feels real.”

“If we change this to be the way you’d describe the work to another expert, donors will experience it as a dry lecture.  And in test after test, that approach to individual donors raises less money.  The most respectful thing we can do is meet our donors where they actually are.”

One real boundary worth naming: manipulative fundraising distorts, lies, or exaggerates.  That is NOT what we are talking about here.  We’re talking about sharing the emotions of our beneficiaries, and the emotions of our team around the work, and the emotions a donor might be feeling.  Because emotions aren’t manipulative any more than the truth is manipulative.  As long as we are telling the truth, we’re not crossing a line.

And we’re giving a gift to our donors, because we’re letting them know the full picture of what’s going on and what’s at stake.  Not a dry lecture with numbers and program details, but real lives with real consequences.

The people who became your donors did so because something touched their hearts.  Fundraising that touches their hearts again is the surest way to get them to give again.

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

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Complain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, right-size your organization’s reaction.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Want Your Fundraising to Get Luckier?

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Lucky clover.

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

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

Doing × Telling = Amount of Luck  

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

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

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

The asking is where the lucky breaks come from:

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

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

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

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

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

Simple Test

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Simple test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What If Apple Advertised Like a Nonprofit?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Smart phone ad.

Here’s a fun thought exercise for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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