Donors Archives | The Better Fundraising Company

Emotional Connection > Organizational Connection

Steven Screen | November 4, 2025November 4, 2025Repeat

Your donors don’t experience your fundraising as “donors.”

They experience your fundraising as humans.

So if you want to expand the number of people who will pay attention to your fundraising, make your fundraising more interesting to humans.

Humans who like stories with villains and triumphs and tragedies and emotions.

Because there’s a very small group of people who resonate with your organization… but there’s a very large group of people who would resonate with the stories you can tell, with stakes that matter, and the emotions woven through all of it.

Today, what cuts through the clutter is emotion-filled content that sounds like real humans talking about what they care about. Not “approved content” that’s passed through the pastel-colored nonprofit hope machine.

Get real. Get emotional. Don’t make a case, make a moment.

Whose Story Is It?

Steven Screen | October 23, 2025October 21, 2025Ask

There’s a blogger I like named “Gabe The Bass Player” who writes primarily for musicians. I find him thought provoking.

Talking mostly to musicians, he recently said, “You keep getting to do this because enough people continually add you as part of their story.”

I think the same thing is true about nonprofits and fundraising – your organization keeps getting to do its thing because enough people add you as part of their story.

Keep thinking about that last part: “…people add you as part of their story.”

There are a million different ways to think about fundraising. But any way that ignores the fact that an individual donor is primarily adding you to her story is not going to work very well.

Is it true that she’s also part of your story? Of course.

Is it true that she’s also part of the story of your cause or community? Of course.

But at that mostly sub-conscious “give or don’t give” moment, her story is the most important story to her.

So for your mail and email fundraising to really succeed, it must be created in such a way that the donor sees herself and wants to add your organization to her story.

Your Email List is a Cross Country Team

Steven Screen | October 21, 2025October 16, 2025Ask

If you’re a small nonprofit and you don’t raise much money from your email list, keep reading.

Here’s an analogy that has proven helpful for many of the organizations we serve: think of your email list as a high school cross country team whose season has not yet started.

People have signed up for your team. Some people have been signed up for the team for 6 months. But the team hasn’t gone on any runs yet – they haven’t had to do anything yet.

In this analogy, when the season starts and the cross country team begins going on long runs, what’s going to happen?

Three things, almost immediately:

People are going to drop off the team. They are going to say, “Oh, I didn’t know we’d have to do that, turns out this isn’t for me, I’m going to drop off the team.”
A few people are going to complain. “I don’t like this. I liked it more when we talked about running.”
A few people are going to say, “Yes, this is what I’m here for, this is hard but good.”

The same three things are going to happen when you start to regularly ask your email list to make gifts: people are going to drop off your team (unsubscribe), people are going to complain (reply to your emails with whatever is bothering them), and people are going to know they are in the right place (donate).

But most nonprofit email lists are like cross country teams that go on one or two runs a year. That kind of “training” doesn’t make for a very effective team.

Here’s the thing: on your cross country team, you want people who understand that they will need to go on long runs. You want people who will go on long runs even when it’s cold and rainy. You want people who are on the team despite the difficulty, who love the community and the joy of getting better.

And on your email list, you want people who understand that they will be asked to give gifts. You want people who are on your list despite the difficulty, who love the community and the joy of making the world a little bit better.

Your cross country team will be stronger when it is a little smaller, and made up of people who know what it takes.

Your email list will be stronger when it is a little smaller and made up of people who know what it takes.

So if your email list hasn’t been asked very often, be prepared for a few unsubscribes and complaints when you start. But also be prepared for more donations than you’ve received before, more first-time donors, and an email list you can count on when the going gets tough.

True Believers, Casuals, and Onramps

Steven Screen | October 9, 2025October 9, 2025Repeat

Most small nonprofits have beliefs about what they would like their donors to be like.

These beliefs tend to sound something like:

“We want someone to fall in love with our vision for the future” or “We want donors to know that they are investing in creating something” or “We want to connect with our donors in a more partner/visionary way.”

These are great, but limiting, desires.

They are great because donors who do those things tend to give a lot for a long time. Donor who are “true believers” like that are fantastic!

But it’s limiting because organizations that feel this way often create fundraising messaging and programs that are only attractive to true believers.

You know this has happened any time you hear someone say, “To really know what we do, you need to come on a tour.” Or “Come to our event and you’ll really understand.”

That may be true, but wow – that puts a barrier between a person who is interested in your organization and them giving you a gift.

In my experience, organizations that do this rarely grow larger than 50o to 1,000 donors because there are only so many true believers. (There are exceptions to this; if you’re working on a cause that’s incredibly popular or well known, or if people are highly aware of and compassionate about your beneficiaries.)

The trick is to build a fundraising system for your organization that identifies true believers and has put in the work to make your organization accessible to what we might call “casual” donors.

Large organizations have learned over time that most of their true believers are people who have come up through their donor pipeline; they started as $50 donors, upgraded to mid-level, then became major donors, often (but not always) going deeper in relationship with the organization.

So, while we may want all our donors to be true believers and in love with our vision, we make it more likely that we’ll actually achieve our vision if we create fundraising messaging and annual plans that give “casuals” a good onramp into our organization.

The Amount of the Match

Steven Screen | September 2, 2025August 27, 2025Ask

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 | March 13, 2025March 10, 2025Repeat

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 | October 1, 2024September 24, 2024Ask

Follow me on this one…

Once people are on your email list, you want them to give you a gift.
If they don’t give you a gift, you want them off your list.
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 | June 11, 2024June 10, 2024Repeat

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 | May 21, 2024May 15, 2024Repeat

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.