Tag: communication

“It’s Too Easy to Read!” The One Complaint I’ve Never Heard from a Donor

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat

In my 20 years of nonprofit work, there’s one complaint I have NEVER heard from a donor.

I’ve never heard a donor complain that something is too easy to read and understand.

But interestingly enough… that IS something a lot of organizations worry about.

The worry goes something like this:

  • “We don’t want donors to think we’re talking down to them!”
  • “That doesn’t sound like our executive director!”
  • “Our donors are different… they are educated!”

There’s a Steven Screen saying that I have on a sticky note next to my computer screen: “Nobody has to read your fundraising.”

Painful… but true!

If you don’t make your fundraising easy to read, most donors will stop trying.

That’s why you need to do the work to make your fundraising communications easy to read.

When you make your fundraising communications easy to read and understand, more donors will read. And that will lead to you raising more money.

Here are three simple things you can do to make your communications easier to read.

  • Use short sentences.
  • Use words that are easy to understand (and limit organizational jargon!).
  • Don’t be afraid of sentence fragments or starting a sentence with And or But.

Here’s the thing…

This has nothing to do with how smart your donors are. Your donors ARE smart – I get it! But your donors are busy, and they have a bunch of things competing for their attention at any given moment.

So… you must do the hard work to make things simple and easy to understand.

It’s worth it – I promise!

Before I go, I want to share a free resource you can use to help you make your fundraising communications easy to understand. I use it all the time!

https://hemingwayapp.com/

Copy and paste your text and Hemingway will assign a reading level and highlight complex sentences. Aim for a 6th – 7th grade reading level.

When you do the hard work to make your fundraising communications easy to read and understand, your donors are more likely to give. It’s that simple! Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Find me on Twitter @sarahlundberg.

Use your Social Posts to Build Better Donor Relationships

Jonathan Steck  |  Report
social

Fundraising is as much about building relationships with your donors as it is about raising money for your cause.

This is especially true for your mass donors, who because of their sheer numbers often don’t receive the face-to-face attention that your mid-level and major donors would. And it’s because of this, that frequent communication to your mass donors becomes more important.

Think about it this way…

Every appeal letter, newsletter, email, phone call, and social post from your organization is building an important relationship with your donor.

And one of the easiest, and most cost-effective ways to build that relationship is through social media. It may not yield the same number of gifts as your appeal letters, but social media can be an engaging way to interact, often in real-time, with your donors… if it’s done right.

There are lots of social media tips and tactics for fundraisers out there, but sometimes it’s worthwhile to remember the simple things.

1. Keep the post focused on one idea

Try not to muddy the waters by including multiple messages in your social post. Many organizations make this mistake and lose the donor’s interest in the process. Tell a story, promote an event, ask for help, but try not to do everything all at once. Remember, you only have a few precious seconds to grab and keep your donor’s attention, so keep focused on idea.

2. Make sure the image or video you use is relevant

It might sound obvious, but if you’re planning on including an image or a video in your social post, make sure it’s relevant to your headline and content. If you’re talking about Thanksgiving, for example, consider using images that best illustrate this holiday.

3. Make sure your landing page links work

Every clicked on a URL only to be directed to a random page? Or none at all? Before scheduling your social post, be sure to check the URL you’re using and that the content in your post matches the content on the landing page.

4. Keep your message donor-focused

Your social posts can absolutely be an extension of your fundraising, so just as we recommend doing with your appeal letters and newsletters, write your social posts with your donor in mind. Talk about the impact of their gift, how they helped solve a problem, or the difference they can make.

These four reminders are basic, and may be second nature, but if you’re tentatively dipping your toes in the social media water, and need some lane ropes, then we hope these suggestions help you build better relationships with your donors.

Upgrade your mid-level communications today using these 3 tips!

McKenzie Mitchell  |  Repeat
Personalized.

While we might wish that each of our communications could be perfectly personalized for each donor, this often isn’t the reality.

It can take way too much time. We often don’t have all the accurate data needed. And frankly, the donors don’t give at a level that warrants that kind of attention to detail… yet.

So, for this group of “mid-level” donors who aren’t quite in a gift officer’s portfolio, but give at a higher level than many of your annual or mass donors, here are three ways you can easily personalize your communications without taking too much time:

  1. A Cover Letter with personalized program or campaign information
    • Try sorting your mailing list by the last fund or campaign that your mid-level donors gave to. Group them by that fund or campaign and merge a sentence or two about that program into a personalized cover letter to accompany your communication.
  2. Post-it notes
    • Did you know you can print on post-it notes at your office? Add a personalized thank you to any generic letter for your donors. Depending on the size of your mailing list, you can type out each one in Excel and merge, or type directly into Word, letting your donor know how special they are. Here’s a link with step-by-step instructions!
  3. Send a hand-written thank you
    • Gather a couple staff members and have a half-hour “thank you card party” every week. Imagine: Thank You Thursdays! Prioritize your list of donations by amount, from high to low. For the donors you don’t have time to make a thank you call, send a short hand-written note. Be sure to include the personal contact information of the signee in case the donor would like to call you back!

Even if you try just one of these three tips in your next mailing, you are improving your donor’s experience by making them feel truly appreciated. The chances one of your mid-level donors upgrading to a major donor just increased!

“Why are you writing about the organization?”

Steven  |  Report
Thinking writing.

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!

This post was originally published on February 25, 2020. Get a free downloadable “e-book” of this whole series here.

Authenticity Isn’t Always Useful

Steven  |  Ask
authentic

In the nonprofit world we tend to embrace authenticity.

It’s assumed that if we’re authentic, and the fundraising we create is authentic, that we’ll attract more people to our cause. More money will be raised, and we’ll do more good.

But there are clear limits to this line of thinking. 

Say you’re at an organization that has eighteen different programs. But your fundraising is most successful when it focuses on one particular program. Furthermore, that program has a holistic, whole-person approach to caring for people of all ages.  But the fundraising clearly works best when it asks donors to “feed one child.”

In that scenario, any fundraising you create that focuses on “feeding a child” will feel wildly inauthentic to program staff and anyone who understands the depth and breadth of your work.

However, the fundraising you create that focuses on “feeding a child” serves your mission by helping donors understand a powerful part of your organization’s complex approach.

Think of a college professor. Can you imagine how an accomplished astrophysicist – tenured and with a long track record of publishing cutting-edge research – feels when teaching “Astronomy 101” to a bunch of college freshmen (some of whom are hung over)?

Do we think she feels “authentic” giving those lectures when she could be discussing the latest findings with her peers? 

Probably not. She does it because it’s part of the job, and because it’s likely there are some future astrophysicists in her class.  How will they get excited about the subject if she doesn’t show up in an engaging way? Furthermore, she can’t show up in class and talk to the freshmen like she talks to her peers.  She makes the generous choice to speak to them in language they’ll understand.

Fundraising is the same. There are some donor communications we need to make – even if we don’t prefer them – because it’s part of the job. 

And how will the future volunteers / donors / advocates get excited about our work if we don’t show up – speaking to them at their level – in an engaging way?

There’s nothing wrong with communicating authentically. The trap is when “communicating authentically” comes to mean “we talk about our work in one particular way that feels authentic to us.” 

Nonprofits should make the generous choice to talk to different audiences in different ways: we should communicate about our work differently to institutional funders who are experts in our fields differently than we communicate to mass donors.

Our primary focus should not be on being authentic to ourselves, it should be on being relevant to the particular audience being communicated to.

It’s a Trap!

Steven  |  Repeat
Trap.

Please please please, do not get stuck in the classic nonprofit trap of thinking, “We want to raise more money but we have to sound like us.”

First, let’s take just a moment to acknowledge the strategic absurdity of expecting to raise meaningfully more money this year but “say the same things we always say in the way we always say them.”

What I want to focus on is this: I know of no nonprofit with a thriving fundraising operation that “sounds like” they sounded when they started. Instead, they experimented with and tailored their message over time, in order to raise more and do the most good.

“Sound like us” or “sound like me” are good values, but should not be the primary values.

An organization’s primary value for their fundraising communications should be something like, “we will continuously evolve our fundraising messaging so we can fund more and more of our mission work.”

(I’m assuming we’re telling the truth, etcetera etcetera.)

What’s more, an organization should “sound” different when communicating with different audiences. You should sound different when talking to an experienced professional at a Foundation partner than you sound in an email asking non-donors to make their first gift.

The primary goal for an organization’s fundraising communications should not be to “sound like us.” The primary goal should be to evolve and improve “what you sound like” over time in order to raise the most money and keep as many donors as possible each year.

Three Reasons You Should Occasionally Let Your Fundraiser Try Something New

Steven  |  Repeat
Something new.

If you have some control or influence over fundraising at your organization – please take a minute to read this.

Maybe you’re the Executive Director, or a Board member, or the Head of Programs. But you have some “say” over your fundraising strategy, content and language.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Let your Fundraiser try something new every once in a while. Even something you don’t like.

There are three main reasons you want to do this…

  1. No one piece of fundraising is going to make or break your year. So it’s fine if you try something new every once in a while, even if you’re a small organization. Most nonprofits overestimate the importance of any one particular piece of fundraising.
  2. If a smart Fundraiser doesn’t get to try new things every once in a while, they will likely leave. One of the reasons nonprofit fundraising has a massive turnover problem is that Fundraisers are told they will be responsible for the fundraising – and usually told they need to raise more money than last year – but also must take all of the advice from non-Fundraisers. Would you thrive in that environment?
  3. For your organization to raise a different amount of money, you must communicate differently than you have in the past. Put another way, your current communication plan and messaging are perfectly designed to raise the amount of money that you raised last year. If you want to raise meaningfully more, you need to make meaningful changes.

If you don’t accept a little risk by giving your Fundraisers the freedom and leeway they need to make changes, you haven’t given them the freedom and leeway they need to achieve the fundraising goals.

Why “Look Nice and Use Our Brand Colors” Persists

Steven  |  Ask
Brand colors.

Our previous post noted that organizations who design all their fundraising pieces to “look nice and use their brand colors” accidentally cause their organization to raise less money.

Yet this approach persists. It’s arguably the most common approach!

I think there are two reasons it persists, and each of them is a good lesson for all of us Fundraisers to remember:

Lack Of Differentiation

At the vast majority of nonprofits, people aren’t taught that the design considerations for designing appeal letters are different than the consideration when designing a brochure or an annual report.

In direct response fundraising, there are some design approaches that are proven to work better than others.

It’s not your fault because you weren’t trained how to do this stuff.

And the first step towards an organization’s design helping them raise more money instead of less is the ability to differentiate between different types of fundraising.

Misplaced Branding Principles

There are many product- and corporate-branding principles that have been widely misapplied to the nonprofit world.

Here’s a summary of the resulting approach: “If our fundraising stays on brand all the time, that is good for our brand and will cause more people to give money over time.”

That’s true IF (and only if) your brand is effective in all the contexts in which you fundraise.

For instance, say one of a nonprofit’s brand colors is cyan (light blue) or something similar. And in order to stay on brand, the nonprofit uses cyan for some of the text in its newsletter.

Cyan, because it is so low contrast, is almost impossible to read by most people. Look at what using cyan (compared to black) does for reading comprehension:

(Data from Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes by Colin Whelldon.)

While this color can be very effective in creating a feeling as part of a brand’s palette, it’s ineffective when used as a text color.

So the brand is effective in one context, but not in others.

In that case, ‘staying on brand all the time’ absolutely does not help the organization raise more money now, or in the future.

The lesson here is that brand consistency (looking and feeling the same in all contexts) matters less than brand relevancy (being relevant and effective in whatever context you’re working in at the moment).

The next time you’re asked to design a piece of fundraising – or you ask someone to design a piece of fundraising for you – ask these two questions:

  1. What type of fundraising are we creating here?
  2. What are the hallmarks of effective design in this context?

The ability to differentiate, and then to know what effective design looks like in different contexts, will help an organization achieve more of its mission than an over-devotion to using its brand colors.

Should You Sponsor or Start a Podcast?

Steven  |  Report
podcast

I’ve been asked some form of the following question three times in the last week:

“We want to get new donors, and we’re thinking about sponsoring a podcast.  What do you think?”

Spoiler alert: the short answer is “probably not.”   

There’s nothing wrong with sponsoring or even starting a podcast. However, it’s likely that the cost for each donor you acquire via a podcast will likely be higher than the cost to acquire a donor through more traditional methods.

In short, there are three main reasons why…

#1 – Most Donors Are Old, Most Podcast Listeners Are Young

The most recent Blackbaud study shared that the average age of a donor in the United States is 67 years old.  (It’s good to recognize that this means half of the donors are older than 67.)

And according to Riverside.fm, only 22% of podcast listeners are over 55.

Right there we have an immediate mismatch. Generally speaking, nonprofits generally want older donors because older donors tend to give more, and tend to be donors for longer lengths of time. But the audience for podcasts is younger donors – who tend to give less, and for shorter lengths of time.

Is there anything wrong with this? No. But targeting younger people tends to be a less efficient use of resources.

#2 – But Steven, We Need Younger Donors, This Is Great!

The “but we need younger donors!” argument was part of all three conversations I had.

But it doesn’t hold much water.

For most organizations, the average length of time a donor will give to the organization is about 5 years.

So, say you sponsor a podcast and you’re acquiring donors who average about 35 years old.

Most of those donors will have left your organization by the time they are about 40 years old.  That’s roughly 25 years before they enter their prime giving years. 

Is there anything wrong with this?  No.  Will you have raised some money and acquired some “younger donors?”  Sure. 

But if you have limited resources, wouldn’t you rather acquire 60-year-old donors who would give more and for longer periods? 

#3 – Donating Is A Little Harder

In the context of listening to a podcast, there’s a little bit more “friction” between a person and their donation than there is compared to traditional fundraising channels.

For instance:

  • When a person reading your letter wants to give a gift, the reply card and reply envelope are right there
  • When a person reading your email wants to give a gift, they click on a link
  • When a person listening to a podcast wants to donate, they have to press “stop” on the podcast, then they have to search for the link to your donation page.  This assumes that the link is in the show notes and that the notes are included in the app the person is using to listen to the podcast. 

Is there anything wrong with this? No, it can still work. But always pay attention to friction – it matters far more than most people think.

There Are Exceptions

It’s easy to think of two exceptions to this advice:

  • Organizations whose donor base is overwhelmingly younger, like many social justice organizations.  If the average age of your donors is 35, then a channel that reaches that audience makes sense.
  • Organizations that have already maximized the ROI from traditional donor acquisition channels, but still require more new donors to meet organizational goals, so are willing to expand outside of the “tried and true.”

I’m sure there are more exceptions.

If you’re considering getting in the podcast game, those two exceptions are probably good “starting filters” to see if it makes sense for your organization.

Be “Platform Agnostic”

The three hard-won lessons I’m trying to share really have nothing to do with podcasts:

  1. There are lots of ways to acquire new donors
  2. Each one has a different audience and a different return on investment
  3. When our resources are limited, it’s our job to figure out how to get the best return

Be “platform agnostic.” It doesn’t matter which platform or media channel you or your friends prefer, or what would be “cool” to do. What matters is looking at all the available choices and making the best choice for your organization.

Sometimes that means making unsexy choices. Sometimes that means alienating younger members of the fundraising team. Sometimes it means pissing off the spouse of the board member who has strong feelings.

It means looking at all the options. Estimating the ROI of your possible choices. And then achieving as much of your mission and vision as you can.