Tag: Asking

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.

A Thorough, Complete Argument for Why You Should Include a Reply Card

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Direct mail reply.

A nonprofit recently asked me if they should include a physical reply card with their mailers.  They asked, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we just had everyone go online to give their gifts?”

I’m going to give you a short answer, and then a long, annoyingly detailed answer.

The Short Answer

The nonprofit is correct that it would be cheaper, but there’s a hidden consequence: they would get fewer gifts overall and would end up raising less money.

Because of this, at Better Fundraising we recommend always including a reply card and a reply envelope in your direct mail packages.  Yes, it’s a tiny bit more expensive to do so, but it’s proven to result in more net revenue for your mission.

Here’s why this happens: in today’s world, statistically speaking, most recipients of a direct mail package want to use the mail to send their gift back to you.  (This seems like a good place to remind ourselves that the average age of a donor in North America is at least 20 years older than the average age of a Fundraiser in North America.)

This means, if you don’t include a reply card and a reply envelope, you are asking a majority of the people who want to give you a gift to do it in a way they don’t prefer.  Not all of them will do it your way, and you’ll lose some gifts.

The Long Answer

Say you send out a great piece of direct mail and, after scanning and reading your letter, there are 100 people who would like to give you a gift.

In other words, you have 100 people holding your letter in their hands with intent to give.

Based on the donor behavior that Better Fundraising sees across several nonprofit sectors, we estimate that of those 100 people, approximately 75 of them would prefer to give their gift to you through the mail, and 25 would prefer to give you a gift online. 

Using this donor behavior as a baseline, let’s think through what will happen.

First, let’s assume that of the 25 folks who prefer to give online, all 25 of them scan your QR code, arrive at your landing page, and 20 of them give you a gift.  That’s an exceedingly generous assumption, because I’ve never seen a giving page or mobile form with has an 80% conversion rate, but let’s go with it for argument’s sake.  (And if you don’t know the conversion rates of your giving/donate page, that’s something to add to your list to measure and manage.)

Now, the other 75 people holding your letter will all go looking for the reply card, and will experience a moment of friction when they can’t find one.  They can’t give their gift to your nonprofit in the way they would like to.

Let’s say 5 of them put your letter in the recycling at that moment.  I’m thinking about my mom here.  She’s a fantastic donor to several organizations.  But there’s no way in the world she’s ever going to give a gift online that involves her typing in a url or scanning a QR code. 

So now you have 70 people left who have an intent to give, but must “switch media channels” (from direct mail to online) in order to give you a gift.  More friction.

Of those 70, maybe 35 will find their phone, open up the camera app, scan the QR code, and go to your giving page.  Great.  Let’s assume your giving page is great and your conversion rate is 50% for visitors arriving with intent to give, so of those 35 donors, 18 will give you a gift.

For the other 35 donors who don’t use QR codes, they will pull out their phone or laptop, hopefully not get distracted by text messages or email or their home page, and enter your website address by hand.  The standard rule of thumb is that for every click that users must make to reach a destination on the web, half of the audience is lost.  So our 35 visitors who arrive at your site, 18 make it to your giving page.  And we know that the giving page’s conversion rate is 50%, so from those 18 visitors we will get 9 gifts.

Whew.  Let’s look at the totals…

The Results

We had 100 people with intent to give after reading your letter.

In the scenario where there was no reply device, you received 47 total gifts:

  • 20 from the people who prefer to give online
  • 18 from the people who use QR codes
  • 9 from the people who had to enter your website manually

Now let’s quickly look at what would have happened if the 100 people with intent to give had a reply card and reply envelope in their hands along with your letter.

I predict that you’d receive about 90 gifts:

  • 20 from the people who went online of their own volition, and
  • 70 from people sending back the reply card with a check or credit card number.  (I’m accounting for some “loss” due to people being unable to find their checkbook, some wouldn’t have stamps, some would forget to mail the letter, etc.) 

That’s 90 gifts versus 47 gifts. 

Now, your numbers might be a little different.  Your assumptions might be a little different.  Your giving page conversion rates might be a little different.  But I think you’ll see that, if you’re counting your pennies and trying to get the most bang for your buck, you’ll include a reply card and a reply envelope.

Two Letters at Year-End?

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Two mails.

Here’s a question we get asked a lot at Better Fundraising: “should our nonprofit send two letters at year-end?” 

Here’s what we’ve noticed over the years: a second letter between Thanksgiving and Christmas will reliably raise at least 1/3 of what your main letter raises.

So here’s an easy way to figure out if your nonprofit should send a second letter:

  • Figure out how much gross revenue your first letter raises in a normal year.
  • If 1/3 of your first letter’s gross revenue would more than pay to print and mail an additional letter, send an additional letter.

Let me give you a couple of examples and then give you one more helpful idea.

Say your primary letter raises $30,000 gross, and costs $5,000 to print and send.  Then I would send a second letter.  That’s because a second letter will reliably raise at least $10,000 gross (which is 1/3 of $30,000), and with a cost of only $5,000 you’ve raised an additional $5,000 in net revenue.

Important note: in addition to the extra revenue, you’ve also gotten gifts from all the people who donate to the second letter.  Statistically speaking, this increases the likelihood those donors will give to you again next year.

But if your primary letter raises $15,000 gross and it costs $5,000 to print and send, I would not send a second letter.  Reasoning; 1/3 of $15,000 is $5,000, so you’re raising an additional $5,000 gross with expenses of $5,000.  You’re only breaking even.  Instead of sending a second letter, I’d spend the time and budget on something with a higher ROI.

The Fear

When I’m walking a nonprofit through this exercise, and they see that sending a second letter will make sense for them, we then run into what is often the real barrier: even if the second letter is projected to make money, the nonprofit fears there will be some un-named and unknown negative consequence to asking again.

Getting past the fear of sending a second letter is a very real part of helping a nonprofit increase how much money they raise at year-end.

Here’s what I tell people: the negative consequences they fear do not come to pass:

  • There’s a fear that the “threshold for donor fatigue” will be reached by sending a second letter, and even though more money is raised this year fundraising for next year will go down.  Doesn’t happen.
  • There’s fear that a significant number of major donors will react negatively to a second letter, and reduce their giving next year (or leave entirely).  Doesn’t happen.
  • There’s fear that the second letter will “steal revenue” from the first letter.  This does happen, but in such small amounts that it basically doesn’t matter.  To give you a sense of scale: a second letter might “steal” $2,000 in revenue from a first letter, but raise an additional $10,000 in new revenue.  So yes, the first letter raised $2,000 less.  But you have $8,000 more in total net revenue to use to make the world a better place.

Every larger nonprofit I know sends at least two direct mail letters between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Many send three.  It’s a tactic that works.

And now you know how to come to a first draft conclusion for whether it makes sense for your organization.

My suggestion: do the math, figure out whether it pencils out, and if it’s even close I would “assume abundance” and send it!

The Myth of ‘Engage 7 Times Before Making the Ask’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Seven times.

There’s some advice going around out there that I’d like to debunk: you do not have to talk to a person seven times before asking them for a gift. 

I say this because I have helped nonprofits acquire hundreds of thousands of new donors over my career, gifts from people the nonprofit had never contacted before the moment they made the gift. 

Just last year we helped a nonprofit launch a brand new monthly giving program.  They have acquired 3,300 new donors in the last year, and approximately 95% of those new donors had never heard of the organization prior to giving their first gift. 

I have experience acquiring new donors for small to mid-size nonprofits who most donors have never heard of before, through email, direct mail, television, radio, telemarketing and face-to-face.

Just last Saturday I went to a small fundraiser for a person running for local office.  (I had nothing to do with the event; I was in the audience.)  There were about 40 people there.  None of the potential donors had ever met the candidate before.  Yet the campaign left with a meaningful number of donations and new donors.

This is not sorcery; it’s mostly being confident enough to ask.  And some of it is knowing how to ask well.

I suspect that the myth of “you have to engage with a donor 7 times before asking them for a gift” hangs around because asking feels risky.  And the idea that “we need to warm them up first” feels like good relationship-building.  But the data doesn’t support it, and in the meantime, gifts are being left on the table. 

Instead, please know that it happens every day.  It’s happening right now.  It’s probably happening to your donors right now.

Be confident.  Assume abundance.  Make the ask.

You’ll be glad you did.    

***

P.S.  Are there a couple vanishingly small contexts where the “7 times” advice holds?  Sure.  If you run into a potential major donor at the grocery store, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift.  If you’re talking to the grants officer from a foundation for the very first time, it’s not the right time to ask them for a gift.  But don’t take those contexts and apply them to your event, or your email list, or the mail, etc.

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.

Donor Fatigue: The Most Misdiagnosed Problem in Nonprofit Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Fatigue.

Sometimes when an organization isn’t raising as much as they used to, or they’re sending out a bunch of fundraising and it’s not working as well as they hoped, the specter of “donor fatigue” creeps out like a layer of cold air at everyone’s feet.

Everyone suddenly feels a little less comfortable.

“We may be experiencing donor fatigue,” the nonprofit tells itself.  And there’s this kind of unsaid belief that “well, we raised as much as we could from them, but we did our best.”

This would be like a chef who loves his own cooking, and then if most of the restaurant’s tables are empty, blames the customers.  That’s what “donor fatigue” often is: an assumption that the fundraising itself is great, so the donors must be the problem.

But we have to remember that there are two parties involved in every fundraising interaction: the people receiving the fundraising and the fundraising itself. 

Unless an organization also gives its fundraising a critical look, allegations of “donor fatigue” are effectively blaming the donors while letting the fundraising off the hook. 

Don’t get me wrong, “Are our donors fatigued?” is a perfectly good question.  But it should always be accompanied by another question: “What if the problem was something about our fundraising materials?”

In my experience, a good amount of poor performance gets misdiagnosed as “donor fatigue.”  I say this from experience because Better Fundraising is regularly hired by organizations that want to grow but are fearful of donor fatigue, or have declining results and are blaming donor fatigue.  And what generally happens is that we help the organization immediately start raising more money from the same group of donors. 

You can’t change your donors.  But you can change your fundraising.

We try to have an attitude/approach that goes something like this: we can’t control our donors, but we can control our fundraising.  So if a piece of fundraising doesn’t work, assume it is the fundraising and go to work on that.

This takes real strength for a nonprofit to do.  Not every organization is willing to say, “Hey, hold on, maybe the problem is what we’re saying.”

But when you do, you start working on what you can control.  And when you’re working on what you can control, it gives you more agency, responsibility and power.

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.

It’s OK to Tell Your Donors When You’re Behind on Your Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Broken pig.

If your organization is behind on its fundraising goals, you’re allowed to tell your donors.

If you’re behind your budget right now, you’re probably feeling a little sick about it.  I’d like to help with that because in my experience, telling your donors is one of the best things you can do!

Of course, this feels dangerous.

So when an organization is behind its fundraising targets, here’s what tends to happen: someone offers up the idea to share the budget gap with donors, and someone else says, “We can’t do that, people will think we are bad at managing money, and our leadership will never approve it because they think it makes them look bad.”  (And if you have a Marketing or Branding department, they’ll say you can’t do it because it’ll hurt the long-term image of the organization.)

The instinct to hide a shortfall comes from a good place – staff and leaders want to protect the organization’s reputation, and you want donor confidence to remain high.

And there’s a layer that makes the whole thing even harder: even though shortfall campaigns happen all the time, nobody ever talks about them.  The organization doesn’t want to share that they had to do one.  Shortfall campaigns never get talked about at conferences.

And so we find ourselves operating in the dark on this issue, afraid of some consequences that we’ve never actually seen happen.

But (and this is a big “but”), please let me share with you the results of the 60 to 70 times I’ve run campaigns where nonprofits let their donors know that they were behind their fundraising goals.

Here’s what actually happens:

  • The campaign almost always raises significantly more than the nonprofit’s regular campaigns.  It’s usually the best campaign of the year.  One of Better Fundraising’s clients usually raises about $150k at year-end, and their shortfall campaign raised $650k.  Here’s that story.
    • Specifically, response rates and average gifts are higher than average.
  • The feared negative consequences don’t happen.  I’ve measured – there’s no drop in retention rates, and there’s no drop in long-term giving.
  • The number of calls the organization gets from “concerned donors” is usually less than five.

In a nutshell, here’s why a campaign that lets donors know a nonprofit is behind their fundraising goals or budget is usually so successful: donors know that the organization is a nonprofit.  They know that funding is uneven.  They don’t want any of the nonprofit’s services to be cut.  A shortfall is a clear, urgent need – and humans respond to clear, urgent needs.

And if this is something you are open to, it’s the conversation with your boss or your Board where the idea to share the shortfall gets killed.  Here are three things to say to your boss, in this order, to help them be more open to the idea:

“I know this feels risky.  I had the same instinct.  But shortfall campaigns have been run successfully for a long time, it’s just that nobody talks about it.  Here’s what one experienced fundraiser saw as he ran more than 50 of these campaigns… (show them this blog).”

“Our donors know that we’re a nonprofit.  They know that funding varies from year to year.  When we tell them we’re behind our budget, we’re building trust – we’re treating them like partners instead of just calling them partners.”

“We know our donors care about our work.  Let’s tell them what’s going on and give them a chance to help, not hide it and take the decision out of their hands.”

When you’re behind budget, trust your donors.  They care about what your organization is working on, and they care about your organization.  They want you to keep going.  Give them the chance to help.  You don’t have to hide what is happening.

Your donors can handle the truth.  They will thank you for telling them.  And they will surprise you with their generosity.

How to Figure Out if Your Fundraising is ‘Working’

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
On target.

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:

  1. Every fundraising activity has a declared core purpose, and
  2. 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.