Tag: impact

How I Think About What an Appeal Should Be About

Steven Screen  |  Ask

“When you first sit down to write an appeal,” he asked, “how do you figure out what the appeal is going to be about?”

Let’s see, I said.  In a nutshell: I look for a part of the organization’s work, it has to be something I think donors would understand quickly and want to fund, and it needs to be happening soon.

“Wait.  You don’t think about the organization itself, or its vision or mission?”

Not really.  When you’re fundraising in a letter or an email, you don’t have time to educate readers about an organization.  Go look at the results of appeals that explain entire organizations, or spend a lot of time talking about its mission or vision – they don’t work very well.  So I try to identify a part of an organization and just focus on that part, with the purpose of making the appeal and the ask easier for donors to understand.

“So you don’t think about the organization’s programs?”  

Not really.  I guess I look inside the programs to see if there are any activities or outcomes that I think individual donors would easily understand and be interested in.  But I don’t think about entire programs, because programs are usually complex and take time to explain – time I don’t have in a letter or email.

“You said that ‘it needs to be happening soon’ – what do you mean by that?”

When you look at the results of lots of appeals, you notice something interesting about time.  This takes a second to explain.  When an appeal focuses on things that have already happened – like telling a story about a person who has been helped in the past – the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on the timeless or continual nature of the organization’s work (e.g., “will you give a gift to help us continue our work”) the appeal raises less money.  When an appeal focuses on things that need to happen farther in the future, like “next year we want to…” and “we’re trying to end homelessness in our county,” the appeal raises less money.

But when an appeal talks about something specific that is happening soon, say in the next 6 weeks or so, the appeal raises more money.

There are great places to talk about the past, and to go deep on an organization’s vision for the future, like newsletters or annual reports and vision statements.  But it’s clear that if you want an appeal to individual donors to raise the most money, you want to talk about the near future.

***

In my experience, appeals that follow this approach raise the most money.  This is evidenced by Better Fundraising’s experience, over and over and over, when we help organizations shift from their approach to the one I explain above.  They start raising more money immediately, and they start retaining more of their donors each year.

In my next post, I’ll mention the pushback that almost always comes to this approach, and why it doesn’t hold water.

Lots of Small Steps

Steven Screen  |  Ask

The more distinct ideas a letter or email includes, the less likely it is to succeed.

Let me tell you what I mean, first with a concept and then with an example. 

100% Important, or 33% Important?

If I send you an email that has one main idea, you know that that idea is important. 

To use numbers, if I send you a message with one main idea, that idea is 100% important.  And if I send you a message with three distinct ideas, each idea is only 33% important. 

We all intuitively understand this idea.  When we have an important message to send, we communicate only about that one message because any additional ideas are distractions from the main message.

Case in point: nonprofit e-newsletters.  E-newsletters have abysmal open rates because they are updates on everything to everyone.  They talk about this, and there’s a story about that, and they update on the other thing.  You know how low the open rates on your e-newsletter are, and you know they cause almost zero action and have almost zero effect on fundraising results.

What Does Focus Look Like?

First, a letter or e-appeal focuses on part of what the organization does, not all of what the organization does.  This focus makes it easier for donors to understand what is needed and what their gift will do.  It’s usually expressed in an offer, like “$55 provides an hour of equine therapy for a child” or “$37 provides supplies for one classroom.” 

(By the way, even if you feel like your organization doesn’t “just do one thing like that,” you can still focus your fundraising on just one thing.  This is a messaging choice, not something that’s driven by your programs.  Additionally, you can do this and still raise undesignated funds.)

Second, every idea in the letter or email provides reasons for the donor to give a gift to “do the offer.”

Here’s what this looks like in practice.  For this example, say you’re a maritime history museum, you run fun classes for children in August, and you’re doing an appeal in July.   Every piece of content in the letter should be about why it’s such a good idea for the donor to send in a gift to send a kid to one of your August classes. 

Here are a handful of messages you could include in the letter:

  • You know how important the maritime industry has been (and still is!) to our part of the world, and you know what a tragedy it would be if that history fades away.  The student you help send will learn about their history!
  • You and I both know there’s no substitute for time on the water for a person to learn about the sea.  So the students spend time on a boat each day.
  • A week on the water in the summer is often the only time a child from an underprivileged background has the chance to be on the water.
  • During their class, a young person will learn (IMPORTANT THING 1), and (IMPORTANT THING 2), and (IMPORTANT THING 3).
  • You’ll love knowing that while on our ship, the children are connecting with nature, not the internet.  Sails, not screens!
  • The local maritime industry is struggling right now to find tomorrow’s workers, and you know that an introduction to the industry through a fun summer class is a great way to introduce a person into a rewarding line of work.

Can you feel the focus?  Can you see how all the messages are about how important it is for a child to take a class this August?

This approach works so much better than letters and emails that are about many distinct things.

The big idea here is to think of the letter as “convincing the reader to do this one thing” instead of “convincing the reader to support our organization.”

You might say, “wait, but we want donors to support our whole organization!”

Here’s what I’ve learned from looking at the results of campaigns on donor files for over 30 years: give donors lots of small, easy to take, affordable steps.  When you do that, more people will arrive at “supporting your organization” than if you ask them to make the whole journey in one large step.

The ‘Good Bad Idea’ That Raised $9,000

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Good or bad idea.

I just returned from the always-excellent GiveCon with a fun story to tell you.  It’s a great example of how small nonprofits often underestimate their donors.

A man named Jon and I were chatting, and we got to talking about the small nonprofit he serves (they have about 160 active donors).  Jon mentioned that they’d recently made a large payment to one of their local partners, and were short on cash. 

I said, “Jon, I hesitate to say this, but I have a good bad idea.”

“If you would be willing to write the first draft of an email about this, I’ll edit it for you.  If you send it out tonight, I bet we’ll raise a bunch of money.  My goal is to raise at least as much as it cost for you to come to the conference.”

Jon was game.  It was on!

Before he left the Better Fundraising booth, he and I talked about what the ask should be for.  He was thinking it would be to “refill our coffers after this large payment.”  I encouraged him to not make it about their cash flow, and instead make it about the services the money would eventually provide.

Their organization helps women in Africa who are victims of kidnapping and sexual slavery, and the money would eventually be used to help women recover.

I asked him for some program specifics, and we came up with the following: your gift of $250 will help a woman recover for a month by providing a box of food, assistance paying her rent, and 2 visits from a licensed psychotherapist from her own community.  And we included language to make the funds undesignated in case they raised more than they needed.

Jon sent the email late morning of Day 2 of GiveCon.

After lunch Jon came up to me with a huge grin on his face.  “We’ve raised $2,500 thus far!”

A few minutes after the last session of the day, Jon came back.  “We’ve raised $4,500!”

The next morning, Jon came to a session I was giving.  Near the end I asked him if he would share the current total with the people in the room, and he shared that it was over $9,000. 

This is a meaningful amount of money for their organization.  And it all came in because they had the courage to ask.

I share this story because it’s a perfect illustration of two things you’ve heard me say if you’ve read this blog for any length of time:

  • If you have a need, share it with your donors!  You can do this far more often than you think, donors will love helping, and donors will feel more connected to what’s going on at your organization.
  • Make it easy for donors to know what their gift will make possible.  Jon could have explained the “inside baseball” context of partner payments and cash flow.  And that might have been appropriate in a conversation with a major donor.  But this was a quick email, so instead he talked about what the money would do in the field, using specifics that everyone would understand.

I’m proud of Jon and his organization for sending out the email.  And I’m not the least bit surprised that it raised far more than they thought it would.

At Better Fundraising, we find donor generosity to be both amazing and predictable when donors are given acute, understandable reasons that their support today will make a difference.

Jon’s donors were ready.  Yours are, too.

The Bad Part of the Story

Steven Screen  |  Report
Before and after house.

The bad part of the story helps us know how good the good part of the story is.

If your donors don’t know the “bad parts” – what things were like for a person before your organization helped, the emotions of the person when they were in need – your donors will never know how powerful your work is.

Because they don’t know how powerful your work is, your fundraising won’t raise as much money.

The “after” isn’t particularly interesting or powerful if you don’t know the “before.”

Are You Preaching to the Choir, or Sending Out Invitations?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Preach to the choir.

What is an appeal letter for?  What’s the reason appeal letters exist?

(I ask this because if you know more about what a tool actually is, you’re more likely to be successful using it.)

An appeal letter is not for the donor to “learn more about the nonprofit.”  All the donors receiving the appeal already gave to the organization.  They already know enough to have donated.  They don’t need to know more.  Don’t preach to choir.

Here’s my take, based on the appeals that are working the best for Better Fundraising’s clients: the job of an appeal letter is to let donors know about compelling work the nonprofit plans to in the next couple of months, and to invite the donor to get involved in that work by giving a gift today. 

“Knowing more about your organization” is not stopping any of the donors receiving your mail from giving another gift.

What’s stopping them is the lack of a timely invitation to get involved in compelling work that’s happening soon.

The ‘Change You Make,’ not ‘How You Make the Change’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Make this world better.

Here’s a rule I live by when asking for donations through the mail or email.  It’s subtle but important.

Focus on the understandable change your organization makes in the world, not on how your organization makes the change.

Let me give you a quick “before & after” of an example ask, and then dig into the details…

Focused on how the organization makes the change:

Your gift will fund our research-based brain development program addressing the mental health and cognitive needs of children from 8 weeks to 5 years. 

Focused on the change the organization makes:

Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.

In the “before” example, notice how much “how we do our work” is present:

  • Their work is researched-based
  • Their program is a brain-development program
  • Their program addresses mental health and cognitive needs

Those details are incredibly valuable to the organization, and are what make them effective.

But they are not why most individual donors, in email or the mail, donate.

What makes individual donors donate, based on the fundraising results we see, is the understandable change that the donor’s gift will make.  Let’s look again at the example that focuses on the understandable change – you’ll see how it’s focused on things the donor will immediately understand and how the world will be better than it was before.

“Your gift provides a pre-school where a child feels safe so that they learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten.”

  • The gift “provides a pre-school” – everyone reading immediately knows what pre-school is and who goes there, as opposed to very few people knowing that a “research-based brain development program” is.
  • “where a child feels safe”’ – feeling safe is an obvious benefit, and indicates that the child didn’t feel safe before, which points to an obvious positive change the donor can help make.
  • “learn the skills they need to succeed in Kindergarten” – this communicates that the child doesn’t have the skills now, but that the donor’s gift will help provide the skills.  The obvious “understandable change” is that the child probably wasn’t going to succeed in Kindergarten, but now they will.

Here’s the hard-won knowledge I’m hoping you’ll work into your fundraising this year: if you focus your fundraising to individual donors on the understandable change your donors can help make with a gift today, you’ll raise more money. 

If you want to know more about why this happens, read my post from last Thursday.

And if you want two other ways of describing the same general concept, here you go:

Good luck, and I hope your year is off to a great start!

Want More People Interested in Your Organization?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Interested.

This is oversimplified, but still true…

At the beginning of a nonprofit’s fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“How can we describe our work to be as inspirational as possible?” 

Farther along on their fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,

“What do humans tend to be motivated by, and how can we talk about our work in a way that taps in to what motivates people?”

The second question results in creating fundraising that’s more interesting and relevant to drastically more people, which increases the amount of money the organization can raise. 

Why?  Because there aren’t that many people interested in your work itself, no matter how inspirationally you describe it.

But there are millions of people who are engaged by emotions, who want to see justice done, who want to right wrongs, and who want their gift to make a meaningful difference.  Focus your fundraising on how those elements are part of your work, and your organization becomes a lot more interesting to a lot more people.

Fundraising in Two Steps

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Make a difference.

At its simplest, I think you can boil “raising money from individual donors through the mail and email” down to two steps:

  1. Making an emotional connection with the humans reading your fundraising (which I wrote about on Tuesday), and 
  2. Then giving people an easy, low-cost step they can take to make a meaningful difference.

This approach is easy to understand but hard to do.  And it goes against the standard orthodoxy of “make a case and describe our work in an inspirational way.”

But in my now 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, this “two step” approach is at the heart of the fundraising that works the best.  (And if you want evidence, just call me.  Better Fundraising’s clients routinely see huge jumps in revenue as soon as we help them switch them from the standard approach to this approach.)

And it makes sense, right?!?  If you “make a case and try to inspire people with your work” you have to teach them about your work and tell them why it’s inspiring.  This means your reader has to learn something before your request for support makes sense.  This is homework, not fundraising!

Or you could tell your reader an interesting story about something they care about. (And you know they care about your cause or your beneficiaries – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be on your list.)

Once your donor is emotionally engaged, you give them a low-cost way to make a meaningful difference.  You lower the barrier to giving a gift.  You describe something great that they can do or be a part of.  You describe the meaningful difference it will make.

 Get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a difference. I share how to do this in this post, this free eBook, and it’s what McKenzie is describing in this post.

Really, that’s it: get people emotionally engaged, then tell them how their small gift today will make a meaningful difference.

How to ‘Keep It Simple’ When What You Do Isn’t Simple

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Keep it simple.

My previous post was about why it’s so effective to focus a piece of fundraising on a specific and low-cost part of your nonprofit’s work.

But many organizations don’t believe they have anything specific or low-cost that they can highlight for their donors.  They’ll say, “What we do isn’t quantifiable.  How can you put a price on inner peace / justice / the environment?”

So today I’d like to give you a few examples of how to identify and price a specific part of your organization’s work – even if your work seems unquantifiable. 

(I should mention that I have tried before to write down all the “rules” for how to do this well, and it results in a multi-page document with decision trees that only a deep fundraising nerd would read.  And in my experience, what people really want are real-life examples that they can learn from and apply to their own organizations.  So here are some examples that show you the process in action.)

I’ve divided the examples into work that is “quantifiable” and “unquantifiable” – though (spoiler alert) you’ll soon see that all nonprofits have work that is quantifiable.

Quantifiable

Say your organization has a goal to protect 150 acres of wetlands this year.  And that preserving these wetlands is only part of what your organization does.  Let’ see how specific we can get…

  • Make a rough determination of the percentage of your total budget that is spent on wetlands preservation.  For example, say your total budget is $1.1m, and you spend about 1/3 of your organization’s time and budget on wetlands preservation.
  • 1/3 x $1,100,00 = $366,630.  That’s how much it costs you to preserve these 150 acres.
  • Divide your cost by the number of acres you protect.  $366,630 / 150 = $2,444.  So, it costs an average of $2,444 to preserve one acre.
    • Note: this would make a great major donor offer; “If you give a gift of $2,444 you’ll preserve 1 entire acre of wetlands!”
  • There are 4,047 square meters in an acre, so divide the cost per acre by the number of square meters in an acre.  $2,444 / 4,047 = 60¢ to protect one square meter. 
  • This organization now knows that it costs, on average, 60 cents to protect 1 square meter of wetlands.

Now the organization can say things like:

“It costs less than dollar for you to protect a square meter of wetlands.  Think of all the flora and fauna you’ll help protect!  The square meter you protect might have a bird’s nest, or be part of a stream that’s full of life.  A gift of just $49 today will protect an area of wetlands the size of a pickleball court!”

I’m sure you can see how helping a donor think about their gift in that way makes it easier for the donor to envision their impact.

And I’m sure you can see how – at the moment a donor is reading your fundraising and deciding whether to give a gift or not – seeing that their gift of just 60 cents could preserve one beautiful piece of land that they can instantly envision is more likely to give a gift than a donor being asked to support an organization’s wetland preservation programs.

And the process above works for most anything that’s easily quantifiable; the number of people going to a museum in a day, the number of “nights of safety” provided to a victim of domestic violence, the number of words translated by a Bible translator, you get it.

If you don’t know exactly how many acres of wetlands you’re going to protect (or whatever), you can use the number than you plan to do this year to calculate your cost, or you can use your average per-acre cost from last year.

But now… what should you do if what your organization does is not easily quantifiable?

“Unquantifiable”

Many organizations will say something like, “Well, what we do isn’t measurable.  You can’t quantify it.”

My response to those organizations is to share my belief that every nonprofit is ultimately made up of specific, understandable actions.  Those actions may produce an outcome that is unquantifiable (think “healing” or “inner peace”), but if a nonprofit utilizes any time or money to achieve its goals, there are actions that can be quantified.

So the technique here is to take anything that feels unquantifiable and break it down into smaller, identifiable actions that individual donors will quickly understand. 

Here are some examples from my past, along with a couple of “specific, understandable actions”:

Unquantifiable:

  • “We provide justice to those who need it”

Quantifiable

  • Cost to coordinate the “matching” of an attorney who is donating their time and the person who is receiving legal counsel for free
    • This would be the “cost per hour” of the salary of the staff member who does the coordinating, multiplied by the number of hours it costs to match one attorney with a client.
      • “Your gift of $37 to CASA provides a person who needs it with an expert attorney they can trust.”
  • Cost of a legal fee paid for on behalf of a beneficiary
    • This would be the cost of the legal fee.  (You are free to include the cost per hour of the salary of the staff member who pays the fee.)
      • “Sometimes the only thing standing between a person being free of an abusive landlord is a $115 fee, and that’s what your gift will help pay today.”

Unquantifiable:

  • “We create networks of peacemakers”

Quantifiable:

  • Cost per new person added to the network
    • This could be the total budget of the organization for a year divided by the number of new people added to the network each year.
      • “The cost to add one new peacemaker to our powerful movement is just $90.”
  • Cost for training materials for one person
    • This would be the total development and printing costs of the training materials, divided by the number of people who receive them.
      • “Just $4 prints and hands our all-important training materials to a new peacemaker so they can have an even greater impact.”

Unquantifiable:

  • “Help people heal at a sacred place”

Quantifiable:

  • Cost per visitor
    • This could be the total budget of the organization divided by the total number of visitors each year.
      • “Your gift of $49 will welcome one person into the sacred land that both you and I love.”
  • Cost to maintain one acre of the location
    • This would be the total maintenance budget, divided by the number of acres.
      • “I figured out that it costs an average of $155 to maintain one acre of this special place.  Will you give a gift to provide enough maintenance funds to care for at least one acre today?”
  • Cost to maintain one walking path for one month
    • This would be the total amount of time spent maintaining paths, times the cost/hour of the people doing the maintenance, then divided by the number of paths, then divided by 12.
      • “Because we boost your gift with volunteer labor, the cost to maintain one of our beloved walking paths is just $75 for a month.”

I think you see the methodology here.  It’s breaking down what you do into easily identifiable steps, then figuring out the cost for that step.

Then, the fundraising shows the donor the value of that step. 

To borrow from my previous post, when a nonprofit uses this technique they have “reduced cognitive load for the donor, answered a question donors have (‘how much do I need to give to make a meaningful difference?’), and helped show that anyone can make a difference by giving to the organization.”

All of this works together to make your organization more accessible to more people by making it easier for a person to understand what their gift will accomplish.