Tag: fundraising

Maintain Wonder While Being Skeptical

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Sense of wonder.

There’s a great quote from Carl Sagan that, while not ostensibly about fundraising, is absolutely about fundraising:

“At the heart of science is a balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”

I post that quote today for multiple fun reasons…

I laughed when I read it because there’s a lot of “deep nonsense” in the fundraising world. 

The phrase “deep nonsense” is exceptional writing.  It’s catchy, contradictory, and true all at the same time.

I’ve always admired Carl Sagan.  He and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are mentors of a sort to me.

And speaking of mentors, the next few blog posts are going to be from some of my “fundraising mentors.”

There will be some names you recognize, and hopefully some names that you don’t.  Each post coming your way is great (I’ve vetted every single one).  Hopefully you’ll be introduced to some new people who will become part of your tribe of fundraising mentors.

As a reader of this blog, I’m betting you have some of that “wonder” at this amazing thing called Fundraising that we get to do.  And you have some of the skepticism that “winnows the deep truths from the deep nonsense.”

I hope the next posts will help you identify some new ideas and mentors to help you do even more good than you’re already doing!

Direct mail and… Kale?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Kale.

Direct mail is like kale – nobody likes it the first time they try it.

Kale is a tough, leafy vegetable that tastes like a hedge.

But over time, a person can come to see the benefits of eating kale.  You start to appreciate kale.  And with the right prep and dressings, even enjoy it.

Direct mail is a tough, counter-intuitive, expensive way to raise money.

But over time, an organization can come to see the revenue that direct mail brings in and the relationship it builds.  You start to appreciate direct mail.  And with the right approach and understanding, even enjoy it.

Kale will never be as enjoyable as a cheeseburger.  Direct mail will never be as enjoyable as a great conversation with a major donor, or the emotional high of a beneficiary’s story at an event.

You might not like direct mail or kale.  But both of them are still good for you.

This post was originally published on February 6, 2024.

Avoid Looking Too Sleek or Professional

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Sleek professional.

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.

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

Before we learned fundraising best practices, we spent a fair amount of time trying to make our fundraising look sleek and professional.

I remember sending a donor a thank you note and taking the time to print out a label on the printer to make it look more professional.

Little did I realize… a hand scribbled address would have been the better choice.

We were a medium-sized nonprofit and we had the mistaken assumption that we had to have a certain polished “look” to be taken seriously by our donors. For us, this meant highly designed pieces, glossy paper, and yes… many, many printed labels.

Then we learned how powerful it was to be real – to show our donors that there was a human behind each communication. Being authentic and making a connection became more important than looking sleek and professional.

We began to look for opportunities to show donors that a human had touched the communication they were reading.

Things like a scrawled “thank you” on the carrier envelope of a newsletter or a plastic coated paperclip clipping together pieces of a newsletter pack (brilliant idea from John Lepp of Agents of Good!). These tactics showed that a person was behind the mailing, not a brand or a marketing campaign.

Over time, it felt like we were building a friendship with our donors through direct response fundraising, rather than just trying to get a donation.

As with the other best practices we learned along the way, being real and less polished with our donors made our job easier. It felt more like “us.”

Being real and less polished with our donors caused them to trust us more!  And their donations increased because it was clear that a person was asking them to give, not just a brand or an organization.


Read the whole series:

Charging Your ‘Fundraising Battery’

Steven Screen  |  Thank
Battery charging.

Interestingly, the posts on this blog that tend to generate the most feedback are the posts that are about the Fundraiser, not about fundraising.

They are the posts where a Fundraiser feels seen for the work they are doing and the conditions they are doing it in.

So, here’s a note to all the leaders of Fundraising departments out there: make sure you help the Fundraisers you’re leading regularly recharge their “fundraising batteries.”

And I don’t mean giving them days off or spa days (though they aren’t going to turn those down).

I mean making sure they regularly connect with the power of their fundraising work, and feel appreciated for their fundraising work.  I mean things like this:

  • A monthly exercise where they visualize donors giving gifts, and get that “little jolt of joy” that happens when you put yourself in a donor’s shoes as they make a gift.
  • Bring in an experienced donor who can talk about the joy of giving, and the positive role that fundraising plays in a donor’s life
  • Regularly practice “fundraising fika.”
  • Remind them that while the results of their work may feel like numbers on a spreadsheet, to look around at all the program activity and know they play a major role in making it happen. 

Fundraising in a nonprofit (particularly smaller orgs) has its own unique difficulties.  What other department regularly gets negative critical feedback from all the other parts of the organization?  What other department’s wisdom and expertise is regularly pushed aside because of one person’s opinion?

So if you’re in charge of Fundraisers – make sure they regularly get to feel the beauty and grace of fundraising.  You’ll recharge their fundraising batteries, you’ll have happy co-workers who stick around longer, and you’ll create a place where Fundraisers want to work.

The Core Four

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Core four.

“We want to raise more than 1 million dollars each year from our individual donors.  What should we do?”

That, my friend, is a great question that more small nonprofits should be asking. 

We were curious, so we looked at our clients that had broken the “raise $1mm in a year from individual donors” barrier.

This post shares the four strategies that had the largest effect.  And how using all four strategies at the same time had a supercharging effect…

Optimized Events

They professionalized their events by having a tighter schedule, fewer people on stage, a tighter script, and left the “we have to convince people to give” thinking at home.

Perhaps most importantly, they changed their content strategy.  The first thing they did was to figure out what the ask would be for, and then designed the content of the event to make the ask as powerful as possible.

They raised more money at the event, and their donors had a better time.

Strategic Major Donor Systems

They installed a proven system to manage their major donors.

Major donors were identified and ranked, relationships were cultivated, and the right amount of time was spent on the right donors.

The systematic approach retained more major donors year over year, and lifted more major donors to higher levels of giving.

More Donor Communications

They increased the amount of fundraising sent to individual donors beyond what they previously believed was possible. 

They saw that they were not going to grow into a larger organization until they embraced one of the key behaviors of larger organizations: communicating more often.

And they started raising more money every year.

Segment Appropriate Messaging

They embraced the wisdom that different audiences should be communicated to differently.  So they spoke differently to a Foundation, and differently in an email to individual donors, and differently to a long time major donor.

This caused consternation among staff, but the organizations started raising more money.

The Flywheel

Those four strategies work together like the proverbial “flywheel” to accelerate growth…

  • Because the event is optimized, more people come back the next year, plus more people invite their friends.  So there are more people at the event, and they tend to give more because the event is well constructed…
  • The major donors are identified, and then systematically cultivated, so the organization has a growing major donor file…
  • Because segment-appropriate messaging is used, each piece of fundraising raises more money because it’s relevant to that audience…
  • Because there are more donor communications, the organization raises more and retains more donors…
  • This leads to more donors going to the event… and the circle continues.

To show you what it looks like when it all comes together, here’s the event performance for an organization that we began serving in 2016:

Gross revenue chart.

Impressive, eh?

Virtuous Circle

Those are the “Core Four” strategies that, working together, create a self-reinforcing virtuous circle that helps organizations experience crazy growth.

Which of the Core Four could your organization improve at? If you’d like help, send an email to info@betterfundraising.com.  Or go here to see how we help organizations like yours!

The Danger of Focusing on One Metric

Steven Screen  |  Report
Secret meeting.

A friend who’s a Fundraiser recently shared a story with me.  It was about a nonprofit who received a pitch from a consultant that he would increase their average gift size.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  What nonprofit wouldn’t want all of their donors giving more?

So the nonprofit hired the consultant.  And their average gift size went up! 

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Too bad what also happened is that their response rates went down.  And their retention rates went down.  So despite the increase in average gift, the organization is raising less total money than they used to be.  And they have fewer donors.

That doesn’t sound great.

This is a great illustration of the danger of focusing too much on one fundraising metric.  All the main metrics are important, but none of them exist in a vacuum.

It’s relatively easy to increase any one metric.  Need higher response rates to your direct mail?  Include a freemium!  (Your response rate will go up… but your package now costs more.)  Want to increase the ROI on your next campaign?  Don’t send direct mail, only send email!  (Your ROI will go up because you’ve lowered costs by so much, but you’ll raise less money overall.)

The trick is understanding the whole system and the tradeoffs made with every tactic.

Any time someone wants to optimize one metric, always be wary.  Ask what the consequences will be to the other metrics.

And always remember: the only metric you can use to pay for programs is Net Revenue.

Direct mail and… Kale?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Kale.

Direct mail is like kale – nobody likes it the first time they try it.

Kale is a tough, leafy vegetable that tastes like a hedge.

But over time, a person can come to see the benefits of eating kale.  You start to appreciate kale.  And with the right prep and dressings, even enjoy it.

Direct mail is a tough, counter-intuitive, expensive way to raise money.

But over time, an organization can come to see the revenue that direct mail brings in and the relationship it builds.  You start to appreciate direct mail.  And with the right approach and understanding, even enjoy it.

Kale will never be as enjoyable as a cheeseburger.  Direct mail will never be as enjoyable as a great conversation with a major donor, or the emotional high of a beneficiary’s story at an event.

You might not like direct mail or kale.  But both of them are still good for you.

Four Reasons to Have a Direct Response Fundraising Program

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Reasons why.

Do you ever wonder why your organization is doing all the dirty work of direct response fundraising – the briar patch that is direct mail letters and emails and landing pages and coding and tracking response rates?

You might especially be wondering this if you’ve done the math and seen that 80% to 90% of your revenue from individual donors comes in from a tiny percentage of your major donors.

If that’s you, here are four reasons smart nonprofits of all sizes still do this type of fundraising today…

Major Donor Identification System

Sending mail and email – and watching the results carefully – is one of the main ways organizations reliably identify new potential major donors.

That’s because many major donors will begin their relationship with you by making a small gift. 

Organizations then use their direct response fundraising program to identify those potential major donors.  They set up systems to:

  • Notice when gifts above a certain size come in
  • Use wealth-screening software (and occasionally good old-fashioned Google research) to determine which of their smaller donors has the capacity to give larger gifts

There are “hidden major donors” on your file right now, today.  Are you using the mail and email to find them?

Anti-Fragile

One of the goals of mature nonprofits is to have multiple revenue streams.  In other words, they don’t want their lifeblood coming from just events, or just grants, or just major donors, or just earned-revenue.

Because if you have just one main revenue stream, the organization is fragile.

A few months into the pandemic I talked to a national organization that was $15,000,000 (!!) behind their budget for the year.  Their fundraising was overwhelmingly based on regular, small events with wealthy donors. 

Because they had not developed a direct response fundraising program (they told me they thought fundraising through the mail was “icky”), they did not have a way to stay in relationship with their donors when they couldn’t meet in-person.  Unfortunately, they and their beneficiaries suffered because of it. 

The more income streams you have, the less fragile you are, and the more prepared you are to fundraise in uncertain times. 

Stay In Touch

Most people reading this blog will have major donors that you’re not in relationship with.  They make a gift or two every year, but they’ve resisted your attemps to build a personal relationship with them.

And you have people who receive your mail and email… but you’ve never met them.

Your direct response fundraising program is how you build relationship with those donors. 

This becomes more important as you grow.  If you have 500 donors, you likely know 30%-50% of them.  But if you have 5,000 donors, you likely only know 10%-15% of them.  That means your direct response fundraising IS the relationship for a large percentage of your donors.

Unless you’re an organization that has a natural source of publicity and a cause that people regularly think about, it’s extremely difficult to grow your donor file without a direct response fundraising program.

And Hey, You Can Raise Real Money!

Many of Better Fundraising’s clients raise the majority of their revenue through the mail and email.  Maybe they haven’t spun up a grants department yet, or their major donor program is just getting off the ground.

But they are raising between $4 and $10 for every $1 they spend in the mail.  

In addition to the three reasons above, they are raising serious revenue to power their nonprofit or ministry. 

The Goal

The goal with your direct response fundraising program is to establish a system where your organization stays in relationship with donors as you grow… and identifies & cultivates more major donors… and becomes less fragile… and raises money while doing it.

That right there is why savvy organizations are investing in their direct response fundraising programs.  And it’s why Better Fundraising loves helping organizations build the systems and repeatable processes that help them be successful in the mail and email.

Almost Done, My Friends

Steven Screen  |  Year-End
Almost there.

This is just a note of encouragement that you’re almost done with year-end fundraising. 

All the sweat, and stress, and extra hours… they are almost over.

And they were worth it.

You created fundraising that inspired and encouraged your donors to give gifts.  They did so joyfully.  Your beneficiaries will be helped, your donors will feel more connected.

You didn’t manipulate anybody, you didn’t twist anybody’s arm.

Every gift that came in was an act of generosity.  Some of them were acts of sacrifice.

And they all happened because you created and sent out your fundraising.

Well done, and good luck the next couple of weeks!