Asking Archives | The Better Fundraising Company

How to Figure Out if Your Fundraising is ‘Working’

Steven Screen | May 7, 2026May 6, 2026Repeat

I was giving a webinar recently and was asked the following question: “should we still be sending a printed annual report to our donors?”

It’s a perfectly good tactical question and I answered it… but later I found myself thinking that what I should have done was teach the person how to figure out the answer for themselves.

Because it’s a real sign of growth when a nonprofit learns how to answer the question, “is [INSERT TACTIC or STRATEGY] is working or not?”

I should mention that what I’m about to share is easy to understand, but difficult to put into practice.

Here’s the deal…

You can always figure out whether a fundraising strategy or tactic is working if:

Every fundraising activity has a declared core purpose, and
You have an empirical way to measure its effectiveness.

Here’s why it’s difficult to do this at a smaller nonprofit. Smaller nonprofits tend to have multiple purposes for each project, and personal forms of measurements.

Let’s take appeal letters as an example…

A smaller nonprofit will usually give multiple core purposes for sending an appeal letter: “We send appeal letters to update our donors on our work, and to inspire our donors, and to raise money.”

And most of the ways the appeal performance is judged are personal: the ED judges whether it was in his voice, the Board Member judged whether his mother would read a letter that long, and (maybe) someone has expectations for the gross revenue.

It’s almost impossible to measure whether something is “working” or not when you’re juggling three unranked criteria and multiple personal forms of measuring success.

Contrast that to the following…

When each fundraising activity has one core purpose: “We send appeal letters to raise money.”

And the appeal is judged according to empirical fundraising metrics: “was the response rate above 3.5%, the average gift above $75, and did we meet our Net Revenue target of $43,500?”

With that kind of clarity of purpose and metrics, it’s easy to figure out whether the appeal “worked” or not.

So, back to question in the webinar about whether to send printed annual reports. The challenge (and it can be a formidable challenge, sometimes) is to define the core purpose for sending the printed annual reports to donors, as well as empirical measurement targets.

For instance, we could use metrics like:

Donors who receive the printed annual report are 5% more likely to be retained than donors who don’t; or
The annual report will raise more than it costs to produce and send.

Great, now we’ve got something we can measure.

What doesn’t work are criteria like:

“Our major gifts officers really like to have it when they go meet with donors in person,” or,
“[NAME] on the Board says we must have one if we are going to be perceived as professional.”

Criteria like that hold nonprofits hostage, because when deciding between different people’s wants and preferences, someone always loses. It’s often easier to “just keep doing the thing” because the alternative is hurt feelings, the highest-ranking person getting their way, or people leaving their jobs.

(I could write several blog posts on this alone because it’s partially responsible for the crazy turnover in our sector, and it’s what causes many nonprofits to be unable to grow – they don’t really know how effective their fundraising is or isn’t, and they can’t cancel anything because every project and strategy is someone’s pet.)

So… if your organization has limited resources… and you want to be able to make good decisions in order to grow… what you want are defined core purposes and empirical metrics.

Then you can have more fruitful discussions about how to improve your fundraising, which will lead to raising more, which will increase your organization’s impact.

Want Your Fundraising to Get Luckier?

Steven Screen | May 5, 2026May 4, 2026Repeat

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.

Never Interrupt Your Donors When They’re Being Generous

Steven Screen | April 30, 2026April 28, 2026Ask

My mentor used to tell a story about “the $100 donors.”

He was serving a large national charity that had approximately 250,000 active donors at the time. The charity noticed that every time they sent out an appeal, a large group of donors would each give $100.

A person at the charity was worried they were going to “burn out” those $100 donors, so he decided to remove all $100 donors from the next few appeals.

My mentor always talked about how “three bad things happened, two in the short term and one the long term”:

The $100 donors stopped giving. They just stopped. Thousands of them gave to one appeal, and none of them gave to the next appeal.
The organization raised a lot less money. Their appeals simply raised less than they used to, and the organization accomplished less.
When the $100 donors were added back into appeals months later, some of them started giving again, and a significant percentage of them never gave again.

One person’s fear that “their donors were going to get burnt out” was given more weight than the behavior of thousands of donors. Because of that, the organization raised less money and lost many of those donors.

Hearing this story, you can see how that was a big mistake. But at the time, the person’s worry sounded strategic. I’m sure the reasoning was something like, “Let’s not burn these donors out. Let’s let them rest, and then they will give more later.”

That reasoning sounds smart because we all have fears around asking too often. And the idea that “we can ask less often and will somehow raise more” is very attractive. So it’s easy to say yes to suggestions like this.

But because of stories like this one, and 30+ years of fundraising experience, at Better Fundraising we’ve learned to assume abundance instead of letting our fears put boundaries around donor generosity.

There’s a great quote from Napoleon, who said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Here’s how that applies to this story and fundraising: “Never interrupt your donors when they’re being generous.”

The Bad Part of the Story

Steven Screen | April 28, 2026April 27, 2026Report

The bad part of the story helps us know how good the good part of the story is.

If your donors don’t know the “bad parts” – what things were like for a person before your organization helped, the emotions of the person when they were in need – your donors will never know how powerful your work is.

Because they don’t know how powerful your work is, your fundraising won’t raise as much money.

The “after” isn’t particularly interesting or powerful if you don’t know the “before.”

What If Apple Advertised Like a Nonprofit?

Steven Screen | April 16, 2026April 9, 2026Ask

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!

The Wave

Steven Screen | April 9, 2026April 6, 2026Repeat

Each individual donor is like a wave rolling across the ocean.

The wave formed before they met your organization. Their wave will continue rolling after they’ve left you.

Fundraising allows you to use some of a wave’s energy for your purposes.

But the creator of effective fundraising never forgets: your organization is tapping into their wave.

Email and Snail Mail: in the way or on the way?

Steven Screen | April 2, 2026March 25, 2026Ask

As a follow up to my recent post about why organizations are still using email and snail mail to raise money, there’s one other idea I want to address.

This is for the people and organizations who are annoyed that they have to do fundraising in email and the mail.

This is like getting annoyed at having to go through Oregon when driving from Washington to California.

Oregon isn’t in the way, it’s on the way — if you want the fastest route.

Can you drive around Oregon and get to California? Sure, but it’ll take longer and be more expensive.

Can you get lucky and have someone give you a ticket on McKenzie Scott Airlines so you can fly to California? Sure, but the chances are pretty slim.

Fundraising in email and the mail isn’t “in the way” of a nonprofit raising more and having more donors; they are “on the way” to raising more and having more donors.

Un-planned Gifts

Steven Screen | March 17, 2026March 13, 2026Ask

A well-rounded fundraising program generates an unexpected benefit: un-planned gifts.

We all know what a planned gift looks like; it’s the gift left in the will or estate of a donor. And I’d argue it’s barely-involved major donor who says, “we give you a gift of this amount every year at this time.”

But un–planned gifts? Those are all the gifts in March because your e-appeal was so strong. Those are the all the gifts at your event from major donors who had already give earlier this year.

And here’s the thing – the donors love giving those gifts! They are thrilled to be able to help.

There are two hallmarks of fundraising programs that regularly produce unplanned gifts:

Showing up in donors’ lives regularly with relevant content. You’re not going to get a lot of unplanned gifts if you’re only sending two or three appeals a year.
Focusing your Asks on needs that are happening soon. This gives your donors a chance to play a meaningful role in a part of your work that’s happening soon – as opposed to the more standard (and less compelling) “be a part of our ongoing work.”

And the consequence of all those unplanned gifts is something that every smaller nonprofit wants – meaningful fundraising revenue coming in all year long, not just during a couple of months.

If your organization would like to get more unplanned gifts, the first thing to do is believe that they are possible. Assume abundance. Believe that the effect of sending out another piece of fundraising is going to be a bunch of un-planned gifts, not the mythical “donor fatigue.”

Once you begin to assume abundance, everything else is possible. All the big organizations have made this shift. What’s holding you back?

The ‘Frosted Flakes’ of Fundraising

Steven Screen | March 10, 2026March 10, 2026Ask

“Sugar cereals” were everywhere in the 80’s and 90’s.

But there was always one caveat – they were marketed as “part of a balanced breakfast” and pictured with orange juice, toast and usually some fruit. Like so:

Peer-to-peer fundraising should be marketed the same way – as “part of a balanced fundraising program.”

People love peer-to-peer for the same reason they love sugar cereals: it’s grrrrrreat in the short term. In peer-to-peer, you get that spike of revenue, a bunch of new donors, and a ton of social media mentions.

But there’s a crash coming.

You know your donor retention rate for all those new donors will be maybe 5%. You know that all those social media mentions will amount to… a few new followers and not much else. You know that unless you do that fundraiser again next year, all that revenue and all those relationships go away.

There IS absolutely a place for peer-to-peer fundraising in an otherwise healthy fundraising environment, just like there’s a place for the occasional bowl of Frosted Flakes.*

All those new donors, and revenue, and social media mentions are good and helpful, after all.

But our goal in fundraising should be to begin and cultivate long-term relationships. Donors who give to you for years.

In the same way you can’t build a healthy body when your meals are predominantly sugar cereal, you can’t build a healthy fundraising program when your revenue and new donors predominantly come from peer-to-peer.

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* Personally, I prefer Cap’n Crunch with “Crunchberries.” And those little pink spheres stretch the definition of “berries” so far as to be unrecognizable… but dang they taste great.