Tag: communication

Natural, But Not Productive

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
complain

It’s good to recognize that it’s natural to focus on complaints.

Unfortunately, it’s also natural to focus too much on complaints.

Here’s a story I just heard that illustrates this perfectly.

A famous person went to a basketball game in New York. They were shown on the jumbotron and the arena erupted in applause.

And as they were leaving the game, a heckler let them have it for a few seconds.

This person spent the entire limo ride home talking about the heckler and reliving those few seconds. The applause was never mentioned.

The famous person forgot about the avalanche of positive feedback and focused on the one negative.

A lot of nonprofits have the same reaction to a complaint; they forget about all the gifts that came in, and they focus on the one negative. (Funny thought: if the famous person were a smaller nonprofit, couldn’t you see one of their Board Members saying, “Well, you certainly can’t ever go to a basketball game again”?!?)

It’s part of the human condition to put more attention to negative information than positive information. It’s natural, but not productive.

As people who are fundraising on behalf of beneficiaries and causes, our reaction to a complaint must be more emotionally sophisticated than, “Well, we need to make sure that never happens again.”

In the same way you & I know that the person at the game shouldn’t let one heckler be more important than an arena full of people applauding… we also know that we shouldn’t let one complaint be more important than 100 gifts. Or 10. Or even 1.

Read the series:

  1. Getting Used to Complaints
  2. Outline for How to Respond to a Complaint
  3. Not All Complaints are Equal
  4. Natural, But Not Productive (this post)
  5. The Two Times Smaller Orgs Get More Complaints
  6. So. Many. Reasons. To. Complain.
  7. The Harmful Big Assumption
  8. Turning Complaints into Gifts
  9. “Friendly Fire” — Complaints from Internal Audiences
  10. Our Final Thoughts on Complaints

Not All Complaints are Equal

Steven Screen  |  Repeat

Not all complaints are equal. 

For instance, a complaint from a non-donor who is subscribed to your email newsletter should be given less time and attention than a complaint from a beneficiary or staff member.

So, a smart organization responds differently to different complaints.

As an organization responds to a complaint, there are three main “variables”:

  • Change the level of energy put into the response
  • Change the fundraising the complainer receives in the future
  • Change the fundraising all donors receive in the future

Change the Level of Energy

You can vary how much energy you respond to a complaint with.

For instance, the complainer can receive a pre-written email that acknowledges their complaint and thanks them for submitting it… or be met for coffee and an hour-long conversation… or anywhere in between.

Don’t spend more energy than needed when responding to complaints.

Note: this principle also applies to an organization’s internal response to complaints.  A complaint can kick-start worried discussions and hijack future meetings… or it can be quickly submitted into a system and handled professionally.

Change What the Complainer Receives

You can vary the amount or selection of fundraising you send to the person who complains. 

Perhaps they only want to receive a certain type of your fundraising impacts, like your newsletters but not your appeals.  Or they’d like to receive fewer overall pieces.

Code that person’s record in your CRM appropriately and/or make notes to future list pulls, and move along.

Change What Everyone Receives

You can change all of your fundraising that every donor receives.

This is making changes like, “We can’t ever use that phrase again” or “Let’s reduce the number of mail pieces and emails we send.”

This is the most drastic approach.  It’s the approach that smaller nonprofits tend to gravitate towards because of fears that the complainer is speaking for untold numbers of people.  But it’s the approach least used by larger organizations, because they know that one complainer does not speak for anyone but themselves.

Right-Sized Response

The trick is to right-size your response. 

Our advice is to always value complaints and the person making them.  It’s important to respond warmly  because when a person complains, the response or interaction they have with the organization is often the only customized, personal interaction they’ve ever had with the organization.  The person will form a lot of their opinion about the organization based on this interaction.

And at the same time, respond to each complaint with the right amount of energy and the right level of response. Over-reaction gives recipients more power than they deserve.

In a nutshell, one person’s fundraising preferences should not drive your organization’s fundraising strategy.

Read the series:

  1. Getting Used to Complaints
  2. Outline for How to Respond to a Complaint
  3. Not All Complaints are Equal (this post)
  4. Natural, But Not Productive
  5. The Two Times Smaller Orgs Get More Complaints
  6. So. Many. Reasons. To. Complain.
  7. The Harmful Big Assumption
  8. Turning Complaints into Gifts
  9. “Friendly Fire” — Complaints from Internal Audiences
  10. Our Final Thoughts on Complaints

Outline for How to Respond to a Complaint

Steven Screen  |  Report
Receive complaint.

Here’s a handy outline for how to handle a complaint in person or on the phone.

You’re welcome to modify the outline as needed for your organization – there isn’t any magic in any one particular step. But there is magic in the overall approach, which I’ll describe below.

This approach assumes that the person complaining is reacting to the content or strategy of your fundraising, as opposed to an error the organization made, like mailing a donor who has asked not to be mailed, or calling a donor by the wrong name, etc.

Here’s the outline:

  • Thank the person for getting in touch.
  • Ask them to tell you what’s bothering them.
  • When they are finished, ask, “Is there anything else?”
  • Thank them for reading and responding to your fundraising.
  • Tell them that you appreciate them because most people a) don’t pay as close attention as they do, and b) don’t get in touch when they have a problem.
  • Tell them that you’re sorry they don’t like the [INSERT REASON FOR COMPLAINT], but that your organization a) does this because it causes the most engagement with donors, which b) causes the most gifts to come in, so that c) your organization can help your beneficiaries or cause as much as possible.
  • Tell them that your organization realizes that not every donor is going to like every piece of fundraising, that you wish that weren’t the case, but “the occasional staff or donor not liking the occasional piece of fundraising” is a small price to pay in order to help more beneficiaries.
    • NOTE: you can even say, “I don’t really care for [INSERT REASON FOR COMPLAINT] either, but I know it works great and because of it we’re having more of an impact than ever.”
  • Ask the person if they would like to be communicated with differently (e.g., “removed from appeal letters,” or “receive fewer communications”).
    • Repeat their preferences back to them, and ensure your organization has a system in place to execute their preferences.
  • Thank them again for getting in touch, and for giving you the chance to tell them why your organization does fundraising the way it does. Then tell them that you so appreciate the person getting in touch so you can communicate with them in the way they want to be communicated with.

The Big Idea

The “magic” of this approach is the belief (and attitude) that your organization has done nothing wrong.

Most organizations respond to complaints and complainers out of fear. The whole conversation with a complainer is filled with fear-based worries like, “Are we going to lose this donor?” and “So many other donors must feel this way.”

And after a conversation with a Complainer, there’s often an immediate push to change an organization’s fundraising approach – regardless of whether the approach is successfully raising money.

Don’t use that fear-based response. Instead, believe that your organization has done nothing wrong and confidently follow this outline.

Because complaints are going to happen to any organization that’s raising more and acquiring more individual donors. The trick is to learn to accept complaints as a “cost of doing business” instead of managing the organization to remain small enough so that you rarely get them.

Read the series:

  1. Getting Used to Complaints
  2. Outline for How to Respond to a Complaint (this post)
  3. Not All Complaints are Equal
  4. Natural, But Not Productive
  5. The Two Times Smaller Orgs Get More Complaints
  6. So. Many. Reasons. To. Complain.
  7. The Harmful Big Assumption
  8. Turning Complaints into Gifts
  9. “Friendly Fire” — Complaints from Internal Audiences
  10. Our Final Thoughts on Complaints

There’s a Scientific Case for Two Spaces After Sentences

Steven Screen  |  Ask
spaces

This year for the holidays I’m sharing the thinking and stories behind my fundraising posts that got the most reactions on social media.

Here’s #7, #6 and #5.

For today, here’s #4…

Using two spaces between sentences is a small, donor-centered bet; it’s quantifiably easier for people to read & more familiar to older donors. Regardless of personal preference, if using two spaces helps more people read your fundraising, isn’t that a bet worth making?

I don’t share this thought because I’m pedantic about punctuation. (I’m agnostic on this issue.)

The latest study I’m aware of showed a mild 3% increase in reading speed when there were two spaces after sentences opposed to one space. It wasn’t a big study. And it used a mono-spaced font (which slightly muddies the water, in my view).

My point is to call attention to the way we Fundraisers make decisions about the fundraising we produce.

The most effective direct response fundraising tends to be made for our donors, not for internal audiences. It needs to attract their attention, not ours. It works best if it’s in their language, and doesn’t use our professional phrasing and jargon. It needs to focus on the “mission match” between the donor and the organization, not on the organization itself.

So. If most donors are old (the average age of a donor in the U.S. is about 65)… and most donors grew up on text that had two spaces between sentences… and there’s data that says that having two spaces between sentences will help a donor read a little faster… and reading more of your fundraising results in more people giving… doesn’t it seem like a good little bet to put two spaces between sentences in our fundraising letters?

Will it make a massive difference? Almost certainly not.

And 20 years from now, when today’s younger donors enter their prime giving years, I bet it will be a good little bet to have one space between sentences.

The Big Idea is that Fundraisers make a hundred little decisions each time they create a piece of fundraising.

And if you get in the habit of making each of those little decisions with donors in mind, you create fundraising that’s more relevant to donors and you absolutely raise more money.

Effective Fundraisers Endure the Pain of…

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
effective

For the holidays this year, I’m sharing my fundraising posts that got the most reactions on social media, and the story behind each idea.

Here’s #5…

Effective Fundraisers endure the pain of creating messages that internal audiences don’t like, the pain of sharing real needs, and the difficulty of being other-centered in order to raise more money for the organization.

Let’s face it – occasionally being a Fundraiser is a thankless task.

There are often people in your organization who don’t like fundraising, or don’t believe you should have to fundraise at all.

There are often people who don’t like the fundraising messaging that tends to be most effective.

There are often people who believe that fundraising is somehow manipulating donors into doing things the donor does not want to do. (The people who believe that know donors are adults, right?!? They know donors are quite good at deleting emails and putting down letters, right?)

In addition to all of that, it can be emotionally hard to be a fundraiser. You have to regularly expose yourself to pain and need and suffering – then share those things with donors so that donors have a full picture of what’s happening.

That’s no fun. Nobody tells you that when you start your fundraising career.

Then Fundraisers must do the difficult, other-centered work of creating messaging that makes sense to donors (as opposed to messaging that makes sense to internal experts). Crossing the gap to donors is hard work.

That’s a lot of hard things.

So here’s my encouragement to Fundraisers in the thick of it:

  • Pushing through these things helps create incredible acts of generosity
  • Pushing through helps your organization raise more money and do more good
  • Pushing through raises awareness for your cause and/or beneficiaries
  • Pushing through is a requirement for your organization to make “the leap” to the next level of fundraising success

As a Fundraiser doing the hard work, you get to help make all of that possible.

Like so many things in life, Fundraising is “both.” It’s hard work and huge reward. It’s sharing the need with donors and sharing the triumphs with donors. It’s conflict and it’s achievement.

Effective fundraising is hard work. But let’s not miss the reward for that hard work; we need to remember – and regularly celebrate – all the good things that Fundraisers make possible.

If ‘Sounding Like You’ Were the Key to Success, Wouldn’t You Already Be Raising More?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
voice

For the holidays this year I’m sharing my fundraising posts that got the most reactions on social media, and the story behind each idea.

Here’s #6…

When people critique fundraising by saying, “this doesn’t sound like me/us,” I always think, “Well, if ‘sounding like you’ were the key, wouldn’t you be raising more money than you currently are?”

I’m intentionally poking at a sacred cow here.

There’s a lot to unpack from just one sentence, but here goes:

  • There’s a tendency in nonprofits to believe that they can’t make changes to their voice.
  • There’s also a tendency to believe that an it’s an organization’s voice that is mostly responsible for their fundraising success.
  • And there’s a tendency to apply their voice legalistically so that the organization says the same thing, in the same way, regardless of who they are talking to or how they are talking to them.

That’s in direct contrast to the organizations that, in my experience, create the most effective fundraising:

  1. They are constantly evolving and improving their voice in order to raise more money.
  2. They know that their fundraising success is driven more by what they say to donors, as opposed to the “voice” they use to say it.
  3. Their voice – and the people applying it – are flexible enough to change based on who is being communicated to, and on how the communication is occurring. (e.g., A fundraising email sent to non-experts will intentionally sound different than an E.D.’s remarks at an event, because in an email you have people’s attention for a few seconds, and at an event you have their attention for an hour.)

The most successful organizational voices are flexible enough so that they can communicate differently to different audiences, and be used differently in different communication channels, yet still sound like the same organization.

If you find that your organization’s “voice” won’t allow you to communicate effectively in some types of fundraising to some audiences, you probably need to apply your voice less legalistically.

The good news is that as soon as you do, you’ll start communicating more effectively and raising more money.

Top Ideas of 2022: Number 7

Steven Screen  |  Ask
tweet

For the holidays this year, I’m going to share my fundraising ideas that got the most reactions on social media, and the story behind each idea.   

Starting with #7…

Effective direct response fundraising is so hard to create because it’s other-centered: it’s more about the donor and her values, and about the beneficiaries/cause, than it is about the organization sending it.

It is SO HARD for humans to realize that other people are different than us, and that they know and care about different things than we do.

Take a look at the worksheet below.  It attempts to show the differences between the people who make & approve fundraising, and the mass donors who receive the fundraising.

Click here to view a larger version of this chart.

Just look at that last line, the part of the “story” that a person is interested in. There’s a huge difference between what Insiders tend to be interested in, and what mass donors tend to be interested in.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard for Insiders to create effective direct response fundraising – they care about different things than their donors care about.

Let’s quickly look at the steps an Insider needs to go through to make effective fundraising for mass donors:

  1. Insiders first need to embrace that most donors are different than them.
  2. Then Insiders need to embrace that it’s OK for themselves to speak differently.
    • Note that this is where protestations about “but that’s not our voice!” always come up. But the strict adherence to a particular voice almost always means the organization will be ineffective communicating with people who think differently than Insiders – which is almost all individual donors.
  3. Then Insiders need to be confident enough that this new type of fundraising will work, that they will actually send it out.

So it’s a lot of emotional work for Insiders to be other-centered enough to send out fundraising that’s prepared for group of people who are different than themselves.

But for the Insiders and organizations that do it, the fundraising rewards are huge.

Ask Before a Need (not after)

Steven Screen  |  Ask
The early bird gets the worm

The the third idea I use to help organizations create fundraising plans that raise more money is this:

Ask before a Need.

(You can find the first two ideas here and here.)

Put another way, you’ll raise more money if you appeal for funds right before your donors understand you have a need for funds.

To illustrate the principle, think of the classic “Back To School” appeal in the Education sector. Schools and Education Foundations routinely send “Back To School” appeals in September, after the students have already gone back to school.

We’ve helped maybe fifty schools and Education Foundations raise more money (with basically the same letters and emails!) simply by moving their Back To School appeals from September to late July or August.

Just by making the ask before a need, rather than after, they raise significantly more money. Usually between 1.5x and 2x more.

Here’s why “asking before a need” works so well. When an organization asks donors to help after you’re already helping your beneficiaries, you’re just asking donors to fund work you’re already doing. That’s not particularly exciting to donors.

When an organization asks donors to help before the Need arrives, you’re asking donors to play a powerful role in meeting the need right as it happens. That’s exciting to donors.

Specific Timing

So, if your beneficiaries or your organization experience a Need, schedule your Asks (appeals, e-appeals) before the Need.

In general, send your appeal letter about 6 weeks before the Need begins. If you’re running an email campaign, start it about 2 weeks before the Need begins. If you’re only doing a couple of emails, start them 2 or 3 days before the Need begins.

If you want to have the largest impact, do all three:

  • Direct mail about 6 weeks before the Need begins
  • An email campaign starting about 2 weeks before the Need begins
  • Multiple emails in the 2 or 3 days before the Need begins

Next Year

As you plan your year, here’s what I want you to do:

  1. Identify the “Needs” faced by your beneficiaries
  2. Schedule your Asks before those needs
  3. Ask your donor to send in a gift to help meet the need

This simple shift will help you raise more money with the exact same number of communications you sent the year before.

Never Go Dark

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Dark mode.

This is the second idea I use to help organizations create fundraising plans that raise more money:

Never go dark on your donors.

Fundraising is similar to personal friendships. We all have friends who show up, and we all have friends who go dark.

As a nonprofit, don’t be a friend who goes dark. When you go dark, you have a lower chance of remaining their friend.

Don’t let donors go months – or even weeks – without hearing from you.

The more you are a regular part of your donors’ news feed – their mail, their email, their social – the more you are a part of their lives.

Truth: the amount of donor communications you send is one of the things that communicates whether your cause is important or not. Two appeals a year, a few emails and a bunch of social? That communicates that your work must not be that important. Eight appeals, four newsletters, and thirty emails? That communicates that your work is urgent and important.

(This is unfair to organizations with small staffs, but it’s unfortunately still true.)

Like a good friend, when you show up in your donors’ lives, talk about your donors and not about yourself (your organization). Show up and tell donors what’s happening with the beneficiaries or cause that they care about. Show up and “report back” to donors the amazing things their gift has made possible through your organization.

So as you make your annual plan for next year, look for times of the year when you’ll be going dark on your donors. Then find an easy-to-create donor-centered communication to send your donors at that time.

For many small organizations, it will feel awkward to send out so many donor communications. You need to consciously make the generous choice to show up in your donors’ lives early and often.

Your donor are adults. You can’t scare them away with a few more pieces of fundraising.

And imagine how much your beneficiaries will appreciate knowing that you never go dark on their behalf.