Tag: Donors

The Amount of the Match

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Matching dollars.

Here’s a super tactical, deep-cut of a post for you.  Save or bookmark this for the next time you have a matching grant to use in email or the mail.

Specifically, this post is about how to communicate the amount of matching funds you have. 

Most pieces of fundraising always mention “there is a match” and the “amount of the match” in the same breath throughout the letter.  You don’t want to do that. 

The fact that you have a match, and the amount of the match, are two distinct pieces of information.  And one of them is far more important than the other.

Here are the rules of thumb that we try to live by…

Guiding Principles

  • It’s the match itself that makes people respond, not the amount of the match.  Therefore, the amount of the match is not a piece of information we want to over-communicate or over-emphasize.  
  • The amount of the matching funds only needs to be mentioned once in the email or letter.  Sharing the amount honors the provider of the match, and lets donors know that the funds are limited. 
  • Include the amount of the match on the landing page and/or the reply card.   Do this so that donors who don’t have the letter or email will still see that the funds are limited.  But remember that other copy points like “the donor’s gift doubles” and “what the gift will do/fund” and “the deadline” are more important for creating a response than the amount itself.

Specific Guidelines

  • Even though you should mention the match itself early and often, mention the amount of the match just once in the email or letter.
  • Specifically, mention the amount of the match the second time the match is mentioned in the body of the email or letter.
    • For example, in the context of a letter I will highlight that there is a match on the outer envelope, in the upper right corner/johnson box, and in the first three or four paragraphs of the letter.  Then, the second time the match is mentioned in the letter, I include the amount of the match.  (This usually happens 1/2 or 3/4 the way down the first page of the letter.)
  • If you want to mention the amount again on the second page, fine.  But do it at least three paragraphs before the end of the letter.  Don’t mention the amount in the PS.

Edge Cases

  • If the amount of the match is so large that it’s almost a news item of its own, mention the amount of the match more often.  For instance, say you’re a small organization and you’re given $500,000 in matching funds.  By all means, mention it more than once.
    • But remember – for the donors reading your letter or email, it’s still usually more important that “their gift will be doubled” than “how big your match is.”
  • When using email or social to promote a match, mention the amount more often when the matching funds are almost gone.  As in, “There are only $570 in matching funds left, give now to have your gift doubled!” 
  • Sometimes the amount of the match is very important to the person / Foundation / Organization that has given it.  If you need to mention that amount more often for them, no problem. 

I hope these rules of thumb help you raise even more money the next time you have a matching grant!

Direct response and major gift fundraising should follow the same rhythm

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Follow the rhythm.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials from scratch, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

As I learned about direct response fundraising best practices, I also started to learn about major donor fundraising. And the similarities between successful direct response fundraising and successful major gift fundraising stood out to me.

I understood that all our organization’s fundraising helped our mission. But I never quite understood that both kinds of fundraising were about building relationships, just in different ways.

Our major gift fundraisers spent their days reaching out to donors. They had meetings to share a need and ask for a gift. They had meetings to report back on a donor’s gift or share an update about a project. And they wrote lots of thank you notes and made countless thank you calls. The major gift fundraisers at my organization were doing these things to build a one-to-one relationship with the donor.

With our direct response fundraising we were following a similar rhythm, but on a one-to-many scale.

We shared a need and asked donors to give through appeal letters and e-appeals. We sent out newsletters to report back to donors on what their giving made possible. And we sent out thank you letters and handwritten thank you notes when donors made a gift.

Understanding this similarity helped me view my role differently. I wasn’t just a person behind a desk, assisting with fundraising by writing copy and designing the mail and email. I was a Fundraiser myself, building relationships with people who wanted to do powerful things but weren’t in a personal/major donor relationship with us.

And that shift made all the difference.

Is Your Email List Trained to Give or to Receive?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Donate.

Follow me on this one…

  1. Once people are on your email list, you want them to give you a gift. 
  2. If they don’t give you a gift, you want them off your list.
  3. Because the best way to get people on your email list to become donors is to regularly send e-appeals, you should send e-appeals regularly.

The purpose of your email list is a step towards making a donation.  Your email list is place for people who are interested to find out a bit more about your organization and then to decide whether to become a donor or not.

So be sure you’re asking them regularly – I’d recommend at least one e-appeal per month asking them to help your beneficiaries or cause.

This will cause the occasional unsubscribe.  It will also cause far more people to “take the next step” and make a donation. 

For instance, you could send out an e-appeal and get 5 new donors and 1 unsubscribe.  That’s preferrable to sending another e-news and getting… nothing.

If you don’t regularly ask your email list to give, your email list will be larger but it will not produce much revenue or many new donors. 

You will have trained your email list to receive things from your nonprofit, but not to give to your nonprofit.

Our recommendation: conversations about your email list should center on “Revenue” and “# New Donors”… not size.

Eight Principles for Effective ‘Design’

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
8 Designing Principles.

While we’re talking about nonprofit Designers and design, let me share something that I found helpful.

Check out the following eight principles for effective design from product designer Taras Bakesevych. 

What’s exciting to me is that these principles apply to more than just the “graphical layout and style” of a piece of fundraising – they apply to how you “design” your entire fundraising program. 

Here’s the summary:

  • Empathy: Good design is rooted in an understanding of your audience.
  • Layout: Guide the eye effortlessly across the landscape.
  • Essentialism: Simplicity and purpose above everything else.
  • Guidance: Design should lead us somewhere.
  • Aesthetics: Communicate a feeling.
  • Novelty: “True art lies in balancing novelty with familiarity.”
  • Consistency: Don’t be confusing; build trust.
  • Engagement: Good design is like a good conversation.

Here are a few examples of applying these principles to how a nonprofit designs its fundraising program:

  • A fundraising program has empathy for donors by using language that donors understand, and design that resonates with donors.
  • A fundraising program focuses on the essentials by keeping it simple for donors, and doesn’t try to teach and tell donors everything about the organization and its approach.
  • A fundraising program is engaging by sending out surveys, and asking questions of major donors to discover their passions and interests.

You get the idea.

The whole post is interesting.  Taras gives examples for each principle.  It’s long, but I can guarantee you’ll quickly find something that could be applied to your fundraising program – whether graphically (#9 is “create a clear focal point”) or structurally (#17 is “craft engaging user onboarding”).

In my job, I get to “look under the hood” of a lot of different fundraising programs.  The fundraising programs that are reliably growing tend to be built on all eight of these principles.

About Younger Donors…

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Younger.

The next time a person at your nonprofit says, “We need to get younger donors!” have them read this:

Top 5 Mistakes: Chasing Younger Donors.

The post is from Bill Jacobs at Analytical Ones.  Bill’s been analyzing nonprofit databases and fundraising effectiveness for 25 years, and he knows what he’s talking about.

He lays out the two main arguments for why nonprofits should not chase younger donors, and I’ll add three more:

  • The research I’ve seen indicates that older donors tend to give more than younger donors.  So all things being equal, a 70-year-old donor is more valuable to an organization than a 35-year-old donor in the near-term.
  • Older donors give you a greater chance of receiving a legacy gift.  Last I heard, the average legacy gift in the United States was North of $40,000.  So a 70-year-old donor is more valuable to an organization than a 35-year-old donor in the long term, too.
  • On average, most donors don’t stay on a nonprofit’s donor file for more than 5 years.  So even if you do manage to acquire a bunch of 35-year-old donors, the vast majority of them will have stopped giving 20 years before they’ve entered their prime giving years.

Read Bill’s post and have a couple of these numbers handy the next time someone brings up younger donors.

In fact, Bill’s whole “Top 5 Mistakes” series is great.  Easy-to-read, short and data-driven, what’s not to like?

And I think we all know this, but I’ll say it to be safe: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with younger donors.  Welcome them!  But unless your cause is massively attractive to young people, trying to acquire younger instead of trying to acquire older donors is not a good financial decision.

Trust Your Donors

Steven Screen  |  Ask
High trust.

If you’re at an organization that has a hard time approving new ideas in fundraising, keep reading.

(And maybe you’ve just arrived home from last week’s Nonprofit Storytelling Conference with your head full of new ideas you’d like to try!)

To many people working in nonprofits, new fundraising messaging and tactics can feel deeply risky. And so, some of your team will push back against your new ideas.

To those people, when they push back, here’s what I want you to say…

“I want you to trust our donors. I want you to trust that they could be giving more, and that they are adults.”

“I want you to trust that their support is deeper than a new message, new tactic, or new appeal could shake.”

“Let’s trust that our fundraising right now is not the best it can ever be. And let’s trust that, like larger organizations, we can regularly try new things and improve over time.”

Will each donor say “yes” every time we try something new? Of course not.

Will every “something new” work better than the thing it replaces? Of course not.

But until you trust your donors enough to regularly try new things, to ask for support more often, and try new messages, you’ll never tap into all the giving available to you.

Don’t let internal worries and fears put boundaries around your donors’ generosity. It’s your donors’ job to set their boundaries, not yours.

Trust your donors. Their generosity will astound you.

Messaging Mishaps

Steven Screen  |  Ask
What not to do.

There’s a difference between the messages most organizations want to send, and the messages that make donors want to give.

This is a Big Idea for organizations who want to grow their fundraising programs. Let me explain…

Most organizations have a way they like to talk about their organization and their work. They create this “way of talking about the organization” by having staff and core stakeholders come together and talk about why they think the organization is so effective and why its work is meaningful. And they talk about why they think people should give gifts.

Those ideas come together to form an organization’s messaging. And in some cases, those ideas are codified into a brand.

There are two important things to note here, and I believe they are the cause of most of the ineffective fundraising that’s out in the world.

First, note that the organization likes this messaging. Remember, the messaging is made up of the reasons staff and stakeholders think the organization is effective & meaningful. The “reasons for support” are the reasons those staff and stakeholders believe are the most important. The organization is sharing the reasons the staff and stakeholders think the donor should give a gift.

Second, most individual donors are markedly different from staff and stakeholders. The vast majority of individual donors – especially if an organization wants to scale past a few hundred donors – know less and care about different things than staff and stakeholders do.

Here’s a thought exercise for you…

If an organization sends out fundraising with messages that would motivate staff and stakeholders to give… but the people who receive the messages know less and care about different things than the staff and stakeholders… how well do you think the fundraising is going to work?

Not very.

The Leap

What happens for organizations that make “the leap” to the next level of fundraising success is that they start making their fundraising more other-centered.

The organization sets aside what staff and stakeholders like about their organization. They set aside why staff and stakeholders think people should support them.

The organization then does the hard work to figure out what donors tend to support. The organization does the hard work to figure out the messaging that causes regular people to respond.

So, are your appeals sending the messages your organization likes sharing? Or, are you sending or the messages that you’ve figured out are more likely to get a response? Because the messages an organization wants to send aren’t likely to be the messages that are most effective at causing individual donors to give.

***

If you’d like help creating and sending fundraising messages so that your organization makes “the leap” to your next level, get in touch. We stop taking new customers around the end of October because there’s so much to do for year-end, so if you’re interested, I’d encourage you to fill out this form for a free conversation.

Time-Sensitive Reminder: Donors Aren’t Thinking About Your Cause

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
reminder

I wrote last Thursday about how donors put themselves on the hook.

Donors have chosen to take some responsibility for what is happening in the world, and to do something about it through their giving.

But that doesn’t mean donors always remember that they care, or even think about your organization.

Personally, I don’t remember very often that there’s a lack of affordable housing in the Seattle area. It’s just not something I think about. But I’m thankful that a couple organizations regularly remind me, because it’s an issue I care about.

I think most donors are in a similar situation: donors aren’t inclined to think about your cause or beneficiaries often, but it’s in their values to do something about it.

At Better Fundraising, we think that one of the functions of fundraising is “to remind people who care that there is work that needs to be done.”

I say all this because Fundraisers and organizations are often uncomfortable sending out fundraising that reminds donors of the work that needs to be done. It can feel awkward.

So I want all Fundraisers to remember that your donors chose to be responsible. They know that work needs to be done. They care. But they probably don’t remember right now.

Your fundraising provides the invaluable function of reminding them and giving them a chance to do something about it.

Easy Money: Ask Your Monthly Donors to Give a Little More Each Month

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Ask for more.

Have you ever asked your monthly donors to upgrade, to give you a few more dollars each month?

You should. Here’s why…

Your monthly donors are usually 3 things:

  • Your true fans. They are the folks who are really bought-in to your organization or your cause. They cared enough to make the commitment to be a monthly donor.
  • Able to give more. Most (but of course not all) monthly donors have the capacity to give more. You already know that they respond great when you send them appeals, and often send in 13th and 14th gifts during each year.
  • Pleased to give more. They are true fans. They love getting to help your cause, and they love getting to help a bit more than they normally do.

Put all that together and you can see that it’s a no-brainer to ask monthly donors to “give a little more each month.”

Here’s a quick summary of how we do it:

  • Once a year, run a mini-campaign to monthly donors that asks them to increase their monthly gift by a few dollars.
  • A direct mail letter tends to be the anchor of the campaign. Include email if you can. The best-performing campaigns always include telemarketing, but you don’t need it to succeed.
  • The campaign’s messaging thanks the donor for the good they are faithfully doing every month, tells the donor how either/both costs and the need are increasing, and asks the donor if they, “could give an extra $4, $7 or even $11 more each month to help” (or something like that).

Oh, and we usually run the campaign in one of two general timeslots: January 15 through February 15, or September after Labor Day.

You’ll be thrilled at how many of your monthly donors say “yes” and start giving more each month. And I’ve never seen the increase in their monthly giving affect their response to other fundraising efforts throughout the year.

The things you might fear will happen, won’t happen. You won’t have mass cancellations. You won’t get complaints.

I helped an organization with a thriving monthly donor program do this for the first time several years ago. They began raising an additional $60,000 every single month. Now they run the “monthly donor upgrade” campaign once a year, and they send it to every returning monthly donor who didn’t upgrade the previous year.

Now, that’s a big organization. But right now, many of your monthly donors could be giving your organization a little more money each month and would be happy to do it.

My recommendation? Prepare a “monthly donor upgrade” campaign and run it this September or at the beginning of next year. You’ll be thrilled you did.