Tag: Asking

Assume Abundance

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Abundant tree.

As you begin your year, assume abundance.

When something bad happens, and you’re wondering if you can send an emergency email to your email list, assume abundance.

Later in the year, when you’re wondering if you can ask that major donor for a second gift, assume abundance.

When you’re architecting your fundraising event, and you’re discussing how to increase the average gift, assume abundance.

But there’s always fear around assuming abundance.  We fear we’ll bother people, or offend people, or wear out our welcome.

I’ve been doing this for 30+ years now.  The negatives we fear do not materialize, but assuming abundance does occasionally create a little friction.  Case in point: just yesterday we heard from a client who “assumed abundance” last fall and began fundraising like it.  They raised far more money at year-end than ever before.  After sharing the results, they said: “we had a donor complain about our year-end appeal, and when our CEO met with that donor, the donor handed him a $1,000 check.”

To summarize: this nonprofit assumed abundance, raised more than ever before, experienced a little bit of friction, received a larger gift than they normally would have, and deepened a relationship with a major donor.

Assume abundance.  Assume a tiny bit of friction.

It’s worth it.

Specialized

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Specialized.

Another helpful idea to start your year with:

As a nonprofit moves forward on its fundraising journey, each piece of communication tends to become more specialized.

Specialization happens because, as you grow and start to measure the performance of everything, you find that the more specialized pieces of fundraising tend to perform better.

But this is hard for smaller nonprofits at the beginning of their fundraising journey.  When you don’t communicate to donors very often, each piece of communication tends to “say all the things.”  An appeal letter will thank donors for their previous gift, and ask for a gift, and share a story to report back, and update people on the recent programmatic change. 

All of those different messages tend to make it hard for individual donors moving fast to know what you want them to do.  (This is why Better Fundraising help nonprofits specialize their comms into three main buckets: Asks, Thanks, and Reports.)

And here’s the thing for today: don’t wait to specialize until you’re one of those big, sophisticated organizations – specialize now so that you become one of those big, sophisticated organizations.

For Individual Donors, There Is No ‘Later’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Act now!

When your individual donors receive your fundraising in the mail or email, they make decisions very quickly. 

Right?  An individual donor doesn’t receive a fundraising email in April, set it aside somewhere, then come back at a scheduled time to review all the fundraising emails she’s received. 

She either gives a gift in response to the email… or she doesn’t.  There is no “later.”

Contrast this to a Foundation.  Foundations receive lots of grant applications by a certain deadline, have people who are paid to read and vet the applications, and at some point later the decision makers thoughtfully ask themselves, “Should we give a gift or not?”

Here’s what this means:

  • Foundations ask themselves, “Should I give a gift or not?”
  • Individual donors ask themselves “Should I give a gift right now or not?”

And this, my friends, is why having urgency in your email and mail fundraising is so effective. 

When individual donors read fundraising with no urgency, there is no strong reason for them to give a gift “right now.”  Will you get some gifts?  Of course!  Donors are great and they love what you do.

But contrast this to a piece of fundraising that has some urgency – maybe there’s a deadline, or matching funds that expire, or a surge of people that need help.  That urgency communicates to the donor that their gift is needed now, and will make a difference soon.  This gives a donor reasons to give a gift “right now.”

If your nonprofit doesn’t have any urgency in your fundraising, it means that as you are reading this, there’s a whole group of people who love what you do but tend to not send gifts because they never need to “right now.”

Here at Better Fundraising, we tap into that group of donors (and their “pent-up giving”) again and again.  We start working with a nonprofit, we add urgency to their fundraising, and it unleashes giving from many of their donors who have been sitting on the sidelines. 

The same easy increase is available to you – but you must include urgency.

If you don’t provide donors a reason to give right now, you’ll receive fewer gifts right now.

The ‘Change You Make,’ not ‘How You Make the Change’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Make this world better.

Here’s a rule I live by when asking for donations through the mail or email.  It’s subtle but important.

Focus on the understandable change your organization makes in the world, not on how your organization makes the change.

Let me give you a quick “before & after” of an example ask, and then dig into the details…

Focused on how the organization makes the change:

Your gift will fund our research-based brain development program addressing the mental health and cognitive needs of children from 8 weeks to 5 years. 

Focused on the change the organization makes:

Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.

In the “before” example, notice how much “how we do our work” is present:

  • Their work is researched-based
  • Their program is a brain-development program
  • Their program addresses mental health and cognitive needs

Those details are incredibly valuable to the organization, and are what make them effective.

But they are not why most individual donors, in email or the mail, donate.

What makes individual donors donate, based on the fundraising results we see, is the understandable change that the donor’s gift will make.  Let’s look again at the example that focuses on the understandable change – you’ll see how it’s focused on things the donor will immediately understand and how the world will be better than it was before.

“Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.”

  • The gift “provides a pre-school” – everyone reading immediately knows what pre-school is and who goes there, as opposed to very few people knowing that a “research-based brain development program” is.
  • “where a child feels safe”’ – feeling safe is an obvious benefit, and indicates that the child didn’t feel safe before, which points to an obvious positive change the donor can help make.
  • “learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten” – this communicates that the child doesn’t have the skills now, but that the donor’s gift will help provide the skills.  The obvious “understandable change” is that the child probably wasn’t going to succeed in Kindergarten, but now they will.

Here’s the hard-won knowledge I’m hoping you’ll work into your fundraising this year: if you focus your fundraising to individual donors on the understandable change your donors can help make with a gift today, you’ll raise more money. 

If you want to know more about why this happens, read my post from last Thursday.

And if you want two other ways of describing the same general concept, here you go:

Good luck, and I hope your year is off to a great start!

Audience and Channel

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Audience.

If you’re going to be a very effective Fundraiser, you have to constantly be aware of context.

The two main contexts to be aware of in your email and mail fundraising are Audience and Channel.

Audience

“Audience” is who you’re talking to.  For instance…

  • Individual donors care about different things than institutional donors
  • Institutional donors care about different things than Program Staff and Organization Insiders
  • Longtime major donors care about different things than First Time Email Donors

If you’re not constantly thinking, “Who am I talking to right now and what do they value,” you’re constantly missing opportunities to connect.  Because if your voice or message is perfect for one of your audiences, it’s not close to perfect for your other audiences.

Channel

“Channel” is the method you’re using to communicate to your audience.  For instance…

  • In the mail and email, you have a different amount of time than you have over lunch with a donor, so you communicate differently
  • At an event, what you tell a donor is different than what you’d say over lunch
  • In a grant application, what you tell an institutional funder is different than what you tell an individual donor.

If you’re not constantly thinking, “What channel am I communicating with the audience right now and what works best in this method,” you’re probably making one method work well and causing the other methods to be ineffective.  (By the way, the most common phase of this for smaller nonprofits is to be effective in person 1-on-1, but not effective in the mail and email – which is why we at Better Fundraising have jobs 🙂 )

The clearest example I’ve come across to illustrate this is the following:

 AudienceChannelKnowledge LevelTime Spent Reading
Grant ApplicationInstitutional fundersMulti-page Grant applicationLikely knowledgeable about your sector and workSeveral minutes
Email appealIndividual donors300-word emailUnlikely to be knowledgeable about your sector and workSeveral seconds

At the foundation, a subject-matter expert is paid to read your application.  On the individual donor’s phone, a non-expert is more likely to flick through your email than to read it. 

Just given that context, of course the two pieces of fundraising should be written differently.

So as you think about your fundraising for this year, may this year be one of increased awareness at your nonprofit for which audience you’re talking to and which channel it’s taking place in.

How Things Work

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Owner manual.

I’ve always liked to understand how things work.

Engines, supply & demand, how plywood is made, you name it.

Early in my fundraising career, when looking at detailed fundraising results, I noticed the following three things that go a long way to explaining how mass donor fundraising works:

  1. Appeals raise more than stewardship pieces.  OK, great.  An appeal is the best thing an organization can do increase revenue.  And if an organization wants to raise more money, its annual plan should prioritize sending appeals.  Appeals are also great at getting donors to give again, which is the definition of “retaining” a donor.
  2. Stewardship pieces increase donor retention.  Great.  We need to make sure that every annual plan has some stewardship pieces – but need to remember that they raise less than appeals.

The immediate next question is, “What’s the right mix of appeals to stewardship pieces?”  Back to the fundraising results I went.  I looked at the nonprofits who were out-raising similar organizations while also retaining a high percentage of their donors.  And that’s when I noticed:

  1. The organizations that had the healthiest mix of Revenue and Donor Retention sent roughly 2 appeals for every 1 stewardship piece.  The 2:1 ratio maximized their revenue & impact today, while also retaining donors so that next year went great.

I’ve used that rough ratio successfully for hundreds, probably over a thousand nonprofits since then.  It keeps on working.

(It is, of course, a little different in a major donor context where you are in relationship with the donor.  The 2:1 ratio does not apply.)

Here’s one of the things all this makes you realize: you can over-steward your mass donors, and there are real negative consequences to doing so.  If a nonprofit over-stewards its mass donors, it raises less money in the short term and retains fewer donors in the long-term. 

Think of stewardship as “planting seeds” and appeals as “picking the fruit.”  If you plant a lot of seeds, but don’t pick the fruit very often, you have less of a harvest than you earned.  Fruit doesn’t pick itself.

Interestingly, the biggest hurdle to smaller nonprofits sending out more appeals is emotional resistance.  People cannot believe the 2:1 ratio is correct.  They don’t enjoy sending appeals.  They can’t believe that donors enjoy giving in response to appeals.

That’s why much of Better Fundraising’s work is sitting with nonprofit leadership, talking to stakeholders, sharing examples & stories, and helping them be comfortable trying one or two steps of a different approach.

If you’d like to have that conversation, let’s chat.  It’s what we do.  You do the dreaming about the impact you could have if you raised a great deal more in 2026, and we’ll help you have the conversation and start raising more money and retaining more donors!

Three Tips for the Final Three Weeks

Steven Screen  |  Year-End
Three snowmen.

It’s December 11th.  By now you should already be seeing increased traffic to your website and increased gifts.    

Here are three quick tips to help you make the most of the final three weeks of fundraising this year.

Tip #1

Make sure the description of what the donor’s gift will make possible is the same on your giving/landing page as it is in your year-end appeal letter and your year-end emails.

If our experience is any indication, making sure donors see the same language in your fundraising and on your giving page will increase the amount of money you raise.    

Tip #2

Make sure the hero image / first slider on your website is a call to action to give a year-end gift.  The link should take a user directly to your giving page.

Most nonprofits see a surge in web traffic during the final weeks of the year, and most of that traffic is arriving with an interest or intent to give you a gift.  By making your call to action super obvious, you increase the number of people who make it to your giving page, and you’ll get more gifts.

Tip #3

If your web provider/platform allows it, set up a pop-up (also called a “popover” or a “light box”) with a call to action to give a year-end gift. 

Again, a lot of people coming to your site this month are coming with the intent to give a gift.  Pop-ups are proven to increase the number of visitors who actually give those gifts.

Good luck!

Want More People Interested in Your Organization?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Interested.

This is oversimplified, but still true…

At the beginning of a nonprofit’s fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“How can we describe our work to be as inspirational as possible?” 

Farther along on their fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“What do humans tend to be motivated by, and how can we talk about our work in a way that taps in to what motivates people?”

The second question results in creating fundraising that’s more interesting and relevant to drastically more people, which increases the amount of money the organization can raise. 

Why?  Because there aren’t that many people interested in your work itself, no matter how inspirationally you describe it.

But there are millions of people who are engaged by emotions, who want to see justice done, who want to right wrongs, and who want their gift to make a meaningful difference.  Focus your fundraising on how those elements are part of your work, and your organization becomes a lot more interesting to a lot more people.

Word Pictures

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Story.

It happens all the time at nonprofits – you want to include a story in your next appeal or e-appeal to help donors understand the situation better… but you don’t have a story.

In case that ever happens to you, here’s a technique we use all the time.  I call it “telling a true story about a person you know exists but you have not met.”

Here’s an example for an organization that sends missionaries and is raising money to provide training for the missionaries. 

As I write you today, there’s a missionary who could use a little help.  Their faith is strong, their marriage is strong, but they could use a little break and a little encouragement.  That’s why I’m excited to tell you that your gift of $XX will provide a day of respite and training.

Because in the life of a missionary, there should be times of rest.  These are people who think about their calling 24/7!  And with as rapidly as today’s world is moving, it’s hard to build deep cross-cultural relationships and stay on top of the latest missionary knowledge.

Your gift will allow one person to do just that.

Imagine the relief when a missionary hears, “A generous donor has sent in a gift to help pay for your training.  And the cost for this break and trip will be paid for – it doesn’t come out of your personal budget!”

If you put yourself in a tired missionary’s shoes for a moment, I’m sure you can image tears, and relief, and joy, and wonderment.

See how there’s no traditional “story”?  But can you also see how we’ve painted a true word picture that helps the donor see the situation and what their gift will do?

Here’s the thing: you are an expert in the people or cause you’re working on.  You know the details, the circumstances, and the emotions.

So you can share details that you know are true, even though you don’t know the people themselves.

This technique is not a replacement for “a great story from the field.”  (There are details and emotions in real stories that even the best writers can’t create.)

But sometimes you don’t have a story.  And when you know your work, and you know your fundraising would be more powerful with true details, this technique is helpful.