When Nelson Mandela was in prison (for 27 years!) he studied the language of the Afrikaner people who put him in prison.
Mandela shared that “the way to understand people is speak and understand their language.”
Mandela credited his understanding the Afrikaans language with his ability to establish good relationships first with the prison wardens, and later with the Afrikaners who ran South Africa.
Mandela understood the language of the Afrikaners, spoke the language of the Afrikaners, yet advocated for his people.
The same principle is true for highly effective Fundraisers: they understand the language of their donors, speak the language of their donors, yet advocate for the organization’s beneficiaries or cause.
Any time you’re responsible for bridging a gap – whether it’s between different races or between nonprofits and donors – the bridge is more likely to get built if you understand and use the language of the person you’re trying to build it with.
When you write, if you don’t have a picture in mind of what the person reading your writing is like, you tend to write for yourself.
I can speak from experience on this – the first posts from this blog are… not interesting. I was writing to myself. It took me months to develop a good picture of who I was writing to and for. And that’s when this blog started to be helpful to people and our number of subscribers started to grow.
“Writing for yourself” happens all the time in nonprofit fundraising. And it results in fundraising that’s not interesting or effective.
Contrast that to a nonprofit that has a good picture of what their donors know, care about, and the language their donors use. When the nonprofit writes to and for those donors (instead of themselves) they create fundraising that connects more and raises more money.
***
If you’re like me, you want to know why “writing to and for your donors” works so much better. So even though I said this would be a short post, here’s a longer explanation if you’re interested. 🙂
When a nonprofit writesto itself: they base their fundraising on what the organization knows, what the organization cares about, and uses the words the organization uses.
This results in fundraising that:
Tries to teach the recipient things, instead of tapping into what the recipient already knows. This is “13% of people in our county have experienced homelessness” compared to “You know that no one should have to be homeless.”
Tries to make the recipient care about new things, instead of tapping into what the recipient already cares about. This is “Our program is one of the most effective literacy programs” compared to “You know the immediate difference knowing how to read makes on a person’s life.”
Tries to teach the recipient new words and phrases, instead of using words and phrases the recipient already knows. This is “They are what we call a UETA – Under Exposed to The Arts” compared to “They haven’t been exposed to the Arts enough, and you can change that.”
Think about that for a second; look at all the extra work a donor has to do before they can give! The reader of the email or letter:
Has to learn new things
Has to care about things they didn’t care about before
Has to learn new vocabulary (and sometimes whole new concepts)
This puts what we call an “education barrier” between the organization and its donors.
Organizations using this approach tend to stay small because their fundraising materials ensure that only the “true believers” will give; because only the “true believers” will spend the time and effort to be educated.
The more effective approach is to build a picture of what individual donors who care about your beneficiaries or cause tend to know, care about, and read.
Then write your fundraising to and for the people who fit that picture.
You’ll make your organization more accessible to more people, raise more money, and achieve more of your mission.
A lot of smaller nonprofits believe that sharing their uniqueness will cause them to have fundraising success.
But in my experience, when an organization talks about their uniqueness in their fundraising to individual donors, it causes them to raise less. (In fact, when we start working with organizations that have been making a big deal of their uniqueness, we stop mentioning it and they start raising more money.)
Here’s the deal: there’s nothing wrong with uniqueness, and it’s an important idea in a couple of contexts; but in your letters and emails to individual donors it’s something like the 8th most important idea.
Here’s an off-the-cuff list of things that are more important to get right in your fundraising to individual donors than mentioning your organization’s uniqueness:
Earning and keeping the donor’s attention
Sharing the situation the beneficiaries or cause are in today
Sharing the size of a gift a donor needs to give to make a meaningful difference
Sharing what the donor’s gift will do to help
Sharing how the donor’s past gift made a difference
Making the letter/email effective for both Readers and Scanners
Making it clear that the donor’s gift is needed
If you’ve done all seven of those things well, and adding a mention of your uniqueness doesn’t diminish any of those seven, then by all means talk about it.
The lesson we’ve learned looking at fundraising results over the years is that uniqueness matters most to insiders and experts. For instance, your unique approach is often a very important point to include in a grant application.
But when you’re talking to your individual donors – the vast majority of whom aren’t insiders or experts – the results make it clear that there are other, more important messages to communicate first.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a famous astrophysicist. Millions of people love him for his ability to explain complex scientific ideas in ways that non-experts can understand.
But you know what? At any given time there are hundreds of scientists who are deeply annoyed at Tyson. Why? Because his explanations oversimplify the complex realities of astrophysics, or the space-time continuum, you name it.
But the videos and TV appearances that Neil makes aren’t for those experts. The videos and appearances are for you and me. The job of those appearances is to get more people interested and involved in the sciences.
In order to do that job, Neil has taken the occasional potshot from an annoyed expert.
The exact same thing is true of individual donor fundraising: in order to get more people interested and involved in a nonprofit, the leader of the organization has to simplify complex realities. This makes the organization more accessible and raises more money, and results in potshots from friends at sister organizations, Board members, and program staff who are experts.
The Red Cross oversimplifies the complex realities of disaster relief. World Vision oversimplifies the complex realities of childhood poverty. St. Jude’s oversimplifies the complex realities of pediatric cancer research and treatment.
The experts in those fields are deeply annoyed at the oversimplification going on in the fundraising done by those organizations.
But the fundraising is not for those experts. And the fundraising done by those organizations has resulted in millions of people being more involved, and billions of dollars raised to make the world a better place.
So this is a call to all the creators and approvers of fundraising out there. If Neil will take a few potshots in order to get more people interested and involved in the sciences, will you take a few potshots to get more people interested and involved in your cause and helping your beneficiaries?
This is the second post in our series on donor-centered print newsletters. The kind of newsletters that delight donors and raise more money for your nonprofit.
The first post was about the purpose of your newsletter. This post is the second and final Big Idea you need to succeed.
And after this – I promise – the posts will get tactical.
But if you don’t know this one idea, all the tactics in the world won’t help very much.
A Powerful, Unexpected Question
It’s 1994. I’m less than a year out of college working at a fundraising agency that specializes in helping large nonprofits raise money. And I’m writing my first newsletter.
I handed my draft to my boss – an accomplished, brilliant fundraiser.
He read the first story, scanned the rest of the stories, and handed the stack of paper back to me.
Then he asked me a powerful but unexpected question:
“Why Are You Writing About the Organization?”
I didn’t know it at the moment, but that was one of the most powerful lessons I ever learned about effective fundraising.
At the time all I could do was say, “What do you mean? It’s … the organization’s newsletter.”
“Sure.” My boss said, “but most donors aren’t reading a newsletter to find out anything about the organization. They are reading it to find out if their gift made a difference.
“The most effective newsletters are written to show donors what their gift accomplished. And the best way to do that is through stories about beneficiaries.
“So stop writing about the organization and its programs. Start writing about the donor and telling her stories about lives that have been changed because of her kindness. Then she’ll think it was a great idea to give to the organization, and be more likely to give again.”
So … I went back to my office to do a complete rewrite.
But I was a far more effective fundraiser from that moment forward.
Your Newsletter
As you create your newsletter, you will be tempted to “write about your organization.”
People in your organization will even push you to write about your organization.
They’ll say things like, “But we have to tell people about everything we do and tell them that we’re good at it!”
No. You don’t. In fact, when you do, fewer donors will read your newsletter. Because hearing about your organization is not why they are reading. They are reading because they are hoping to hear about themselves. Whether and how their gift made a difference. Whether they are a valuable part of your organization.
Keep this idea in mind as you read this series. Then all the tactics – the writing style, the headlines, the picture captions – will make sense.
You’ll start keeping your donors for longer. And your newsletter will become a major revenue source!
Someone recently asked me what advice I’d give to Designers working at and for nonprofits.
I gave some “big picture” advice – which I’m told was helpful – so I’m sharing it here with you…
Know that different design contexts have different design requirements
One of the things that happens at nonprofits is that they come up with a design approach and they apply that approach regardless of context.
For instance, say one of the colors in your logo/brand is a beautiful light green. In an Annual Report, you can use that green as the color for a headline or a small block of text to make the page more visually interesting. But in direct mail you should never use a light color for text because it’s so hard to read for older donors, and in direct response fundraising readability is directly correlated with fundraising results.
As a Designer, you’ll be more helpful to your organization (and your beneficiaries or cause) if your design is effective for each particular context than if your design is perfectly consistent across all the contexts you have to design for.
You keep your organization’s design accessible for your donors
The person who wants you to fit a 550-word letter on one page does not know that the resulting “wall of text” won’t be read by anyone but their Mom. The young person who wants the reply card form to be super-tiny does not know that a 75-year-old donor with a touch of arthritis will never be able to write their credit card number in a space that small.
It is the Designer’s job to think about these things on behalf of your donors to make it easier for them to understand and support your organization.
And if you keep your organization’s work more accessible, your organization will raise more money.
Be a partner to the writer
The best design in the world cannot compensate for lousy copy. So if the letter you’re asked to design doesn’t have a good offer, or takes too long to get to the point, or sounds like a Ph.D. dissertation, say something.
Speaking as a copywriter, I’ve had hundreds of ideas that sounded great in my head but just didn’t work on the page. The most helpful Designers told me so, and helped me see why.
Note to anyone working with a Designer: if you don’t treat the Designer as a partner, and give their feedback real consideration, you won’t get to work with that Designer for long.
Design for donors, not yourself
The most effective Designers always keep in mind that the primary audience for their design work has different preferences and needs than the Designer does.
This is hard to do.
For instance, most Designers at nonprofits are at least 20 years younger than the core audience for their work: the average age of a donor in the U.S. is their late 60’s, and I’d guess that most Designers at nonprofits are younger than 40.
For a Designer, this means that your donors are more likely to emotionally resonate with a different design approach than you are. Real life example: most donors at most organizations are more likely to respond to a letter that looks like a telegram than they are to a letter that looks like the cool titles on a hot new Netflix show.
Design for your audience.
Be your own advocate & Ask questions
OK, this is two pieces of advice, but they are related.
The tough thing about working in the nonprofit world, especially at smaller nonprofits, is that there’s little training for Designers. So in most cases, you are responsible for your own growth.
The best thing you can do to help your mission and your career is to learn about the nuts and bolts of fundraising. You will have to ask for time and budget to buy books, to take classes, to go to a conference.
And you can ask questions that your organization likely hasn’t asked before, like “what kind of design will resonate best with our donors?” and “How should our look and copy vary from context to context?”
Ask an experienced nonprofit Designer or Creative Director to be a mentor, whether it’s just for one coffee or it’s monthly for years. This profession is full of generous people. Sitting here writing this, I can think of nine people who helped me over the years, and I don’t ever remember being turned down.
If you advocate for yourself, and you’re curious, you’ll cause your organization to raise more money. Designers who do this are worth their weight in gold.
What’s your job?
I’ll end with a picture from the cover of my favorite book on design, Type & Layout…
The designers who are communicating are gifts to their organization and beneficiaries, and will always have their plates full of interesting work.
Sometimes an idea or perspective from outside the world of Fundraising can help you see the work of Fundraising more clearly.
That’s what happened when I heard about “Ask Culture vs Guess Culture.”
Here’s a quote from when this idea first appeared online:
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer.
When an organization is operating in Guess Culture, here are three of the behaviors you see:
Over-stewarding of donors
Never asking, or Asks that aren’t direct or clear
Perfect example: I did a “creative review” for an organization where I looked at twelve pieces of their fundraising. In all those pieces they never actually asked the donor to give a gift.
Under-communicating out of a fear of “donor fatigue”
You’re also seeing Guess Culture at work any time you hear a Major Gifts Officer say something like, “If you do a great job of stewarding a donor, you won’t even have to ask.”
Guess Culture and Fundraising
I think the unique demands of nonprofit fundraising cause people and organizations to operate in Guess Culture more than they normally would.
Asking for money is a vulnerable experience, and it’s hard to be vulnerable. Many times, for many reasons, it’s emotionally easier to shower donors with stewardship and give them the occasional “opportunity” to give… instead of boldly preparing a specific offer and asking the donor to make a gift.
And of course the Guess Culture approach works sometimes. Because donors are generous, any approach will work sometimes.
But looking at the performance of the nonprofits we’ve worked with over the years, an Ask Culture approach to major gifts fundraising (and to direct response fundraising) works better. It results in raising more money and keeping more donors year-over-year.
Ask Culture major gifts fundraising looks like:
When setting up a conversation or meeting, telling the donor in advance whether you’re going to ask for money or not
Being willing to ask major donors for more than one gift a year
Asking for a specific amount
Asking directly with phrases like, “…so I’m asking if you’ll give a gift of $10,000”
After the ask is made, being silent and letting the donor speak next
Of course there will be a few “no”s. Of course there will occasionally be an uncomfortable silence.
But you’ll get a lot more “yes”es and you’ll raise more money for your cause.
A few years ago I wrote a letter for a large, national organization you know the name of.
The letter was a huge success – it doubled the number of gifts they projected, and the average gift was higher than expected, too.
The President of the organization was pleased with the letter’s performance… and thought it would have raised even more if it was more in his voice. So he wrote the letter the following year.
His letter brought in half the number of gifts.
The president is a very smart person and a great public speaker. But his communication style – his “voice” – was not effective in direct mail.
There’s no judgment here; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his voice. But no one voice is always the best voice for all contexts.
Quick common example: an organization decides that as part of their voice they will always describe their beneficiaries with one particular phrase, and that phrase is highly academic. That phrase is perfectly appropriate in a grant application to a foundation with subject-matter expertise. However, in a fundraising email to individual donors who don’t immediately know what the phrase means, the phrase will usually cause the organization to raise less money.
A nonprofit’s “voice” needs to be flexible enough to be modified for whatever context it’s communicating in. To be most effective, a speech to a state legislature should sound a little different than a direct mail letter to individual donors, which in turn should sound a little different than a grant application.
If your Executive’s voice, or your brand voice, isn’t flexible enough to be adapted to meet the requirements for success in whatever context you’re communicating in, slavishly following any voice is costing you more than it’s helping you.
If you use the appropriate voice for each context, instead of using the same voice in every context, you will raise more money.
This is our third post to help with your election-year fundraising. (Be sure to read about what to do in The Noisy Spring and The Summer Slump.)
Today’s topic is The Election Storm (September through Election Day).
The Election Storm
As the political campaigns reach their peak, and media attention is laser-focused on the election, fundraising for non-political organizations tends to drop.
During this period, you should expect a lull in giving. That September appeal that’s always a winner won’t work quite as well. Those major donors who always buy a table at your event… a couple of them won’t do it this year.
Here’s how to make the most of this period, and set yourself up for a strong year-end:
Run the campaigns you normally run. Just be aware that they probably won’t raise as much as normal. And try to avoid any important fundraising communications in the 10 days before the election.
Continue to communicate with your donors. Share stories of success, and tell your donors the powerful difference their gift has made. Your donors will be inundated with a lot of negative news – be the bright spot in their day!
Maintain an active presence on social media. As we saw during the pandemic, many people are eager to talk, read, and hear about things other than the “News.” Your social media followers will be grateful for the positive things they see in their feed.
Don’t panic if giving looks different from typical years. Work your plan and get everything in place for what’s coming next… The Year-End Rally!
