Tag: iteration

It Can Be Hard to Change Your Ideas about Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Self-reflection.

I wrote a couple days ago about how smaller nonprofits must often create fundraising messages that they don’t prefer for their fundraising to be more successful.

Today, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that changing your ideas about fundraising can be emotionally difficult. 

For a Founder, or for someone who is passionate about their fundraising, it can be a very real struggle to try a fundraising message or strategy that doesn’t personally resonate. 

Let me share my own experience with this, in hopes that it’s helpful. 

Here’s the thing to know about me: I strongly prefer not to make mistakes.  In fact, I hate mistakes.  I fear being wrong.  I fear being judged.

My fear around avoidable mistakes has positive consequences – for instance, it made me a fantastic student.

But it also has negative consequences.  For instance, I’m occasionally a pain in the neck to work with.

So it was challenging for me when I learned that the easiest way for smaller nonprofits to raise more money is to send out more fundraising.

Wait, I thought, wouldn’t the best way be to make each piece of fundraising more perfect?  We’ll eliminate all the mistakes, get everything up to best-practices… wouldn’t that bring all the money in?

Nope.  I saw again and again that the nonprofits that grew their individual donor fundraising the fastest were seeing that “showing up regularly in donors’ lives” is more important than “showing up perfectly in donors’ lives.”

It didn’t seem possible that “sending more fundraising” could work.  It didn’t seem possible that the occasional typo or “wrong thing showing through the envelope window” could work.

But if I’m honest, the real conflict was with my personal preferences and fears.  I was thinking, If we have to move faster we’re going to make mistakes.  I don’t want to focus on the total number of pieces, I want each piece to be an un-critique-able jewel box of fundraising brilliance.  <<pounds podium>>  I’m a copywriter and a storyteller, dammit, not some cheap content machine! 

I’m poking fun at myself here, but my feelings of discomfort were real.

And you’ll smile at why my thinking on this issue eventually changed; I saw the strategy of “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” succeed so many times for so many organizations that eventually I realized I would be making a mistake if I didn’t change my thinking.  And you know I don’t like to make mistakes.  Sheesh.

Anyway.  I still don’t prefer the “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” approach to mass donor fundraising.  But I embrace it because it so obviously helps small nonprofits raise more money and increase donor retention rates.  And because making the world a better place is more important than my own personal preferences and fears.

So… acknowledging that we all have preferences and fears… and acknowledging that doing things in a non-preferred way can be difficult… is there anything about your organization’s fundraising that should be changed in order to raise more money and fund more work, even if you don’t prefer the change?

Change the Recipe, Change the Results

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Recipe.

When a nonprofit is first founded, its fundraising letters / emails / personal asks tend to have high response rates and high average gifts.   

But in my experience, the response rates and average gifts tend to go down as the organization grows. 

Here’s my theory to explain this…

The recipe for fundraising right after an organization is founded is remarkably simple and goes like this:

  • The founder talks about whatever “the situation” is that caused him/her to start the organization
  • They describe what needs to be done to help, and how it will help
  • They ask the donor to give a gift to fund what needs to be done

Works like crazy.

But as a nonprofit ages and expands, it develops its own programs, approach, and expertise.  It develops an organizational ego.

In a nutshell, this results in fundraising that talks more about the organization itself than it used to.  The recipe changes to:

  • They talk about the work they are already doing
  • They describe how they do that work
  • They ask the donor to give a gift to fund their ongoing work

This fundraising recipe does not raise as much money.  It lowers donors’ awareness about whatever “need” the organization exists to serve because “the situation” is rarely mentioned.  And it lowers response rates and average gifts because the fundraising is mainly focused on work that has already been completed – most of the compelling reason to give a gift today has disappeared.

I don’t enjoy this truth, but it’s still true: fundraising to individual donors that talks about “powerful work that’s already done” will cause less money to come in than talking about “powerful work that needs to be done now that the donor can help make happen.”

Organizations that stick to the original recipe will grow faster.

Individual donors tend to give because there’s work that needs to be done.  Not because the organization is already doing the work.

How to Take a Successful Email to the Next Level

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Next level.

Say you’ve sent out an appeal and it was successful.  And you’re sold on the strategy of “sending it out again at the same time next year.”

It’s like you’ve discovered a new “tool” that works really well, and you’re wondering how to get the most out of it.

Let me tell you a story to tell you how we normally do it…

A decade ago we were serving an organization that helps mothers and children who are experiencing homelessness.

They didn’t have any fundraising planned for summer, and we didn’t want them to “go dark” for a couple of months.  So we asked them if they did anything for the children of their beneficiary families when it was time for them to go back to school.

Turns out the organization provided each child with a new outfit, new shoes, and a backpack filled with school supplies.  (This organization knew that kids who had been homeless had experienced more than enough trauma, and didn’t want the kids to feel like “the poor kid on the first day of school.”  We love them for this!)

The organization was low on budget, so direct mail wasn’t an option.  We put together an e-appeal that asked donors to provide an outfit and backpack for a child. 

It worked great.

And we worked under the assumption that if more people saw this offer, more people would give.  So here’s what we did in the subsequent years to turn a successful piece of fundraising into a full-blown campaign.

  • Year #2, we sent the email again and we did a direct mail letter with the same offer.  We raised even more.
  • Year #3, we sent the email and letter, and added a 3-email series on the last 3 days before the first day of school.  We raised even more.
  • Year #4 we did all of the above, plus updated their website to feature the campaign for the entire month of August.  We raised even more.
  • Year #5 we did all of the above, plus we asked a major donor to provide a match.  We raised even more.
  • Year #6 we did all of the above and used the campaign as a way to increase major donor giving over the summer.  We raised even more.

Today, this campaign is a pillar of the organization’s fundraising plan.  In addition to raising several buckets of money, it raises awareness about what happens to kids who experience homelessness.  It’s brought new donors into the organization.  It brought some donors deeper into the organization’s programs.

And it all started with one email that worked. 

So if you send out something that works, do two things:

  1. Notice what the campaign asked for.  In this case, it asked donors to provide a new outfit and backpack with school supplies for a child.
  2. Then ask yourself how you can get that same ask in front of even more people, even more times, at the same time of year.

After you go through this process a few times. you’ll have multiple proven campaigns with predictable, increasing revenue.  These campaigns become very real “assets” that reliably raise money year after year.

Send the Same Thing at the Same Time to Save Time

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Repeat.

When you send out a fundraising letter or email that works great, I want you to do something: plan to send out the same message, in the same format, at the same time next year.

Think about how much time you could save!

And wouldn’t you love knowing that what you send next year is going to work great?

If you’re not already using this strategy, here are some examples of letters / emails / campaigns that nonprofits we serve are successfully repeating each year…

  • March “Send a kid to the museum for a day”
  • Late January “Monthly donor recruitment” campaign
  • July “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride”
  • Early August “Back to school”
  • Late October “Thanksgiving meals”
  • Early May “Send a kid to summer camp for a day”
  • Summer “Provide clean water for a family”
  • Early November “Christmas Newsletter”
  • Late October “Fall gift catalog”
  • Early March “Easter appeal”
  • September “Persecuted Church” campaign
  • Early June “Summer Book Drive”
  • Early May “Help a graduating student with disabilities get a job interview”

All of the above letters / emails / campaigns are reliable performers where the nonprofit can count on raising a bunch of money.

They all started when we sent a letter or email, noticed that it did particularly well, and we decided to “do it again next year.”

Specifically, we sent the same message (with the same “offer”), in the same format, at about the same time.  The writing and design was updated only as much as absolutely necessary. 

When you use this strategy, four powerful things happen:

  1. You do less work because it takes less time to “update last year’s letter / email / campaign” than it does to “create a new letter / email / campaign from scratch.”
  2. You have more energy for other projects because of the “lighter lift” required by mail and email fundraising.
  3. Over time, your annual plan fills up with proven winners, so your annual revenue becomes more predictable
  4. You start raising more money every year because you get better and better at knowing what makes each letter / email / campaign work well.

    1. For instance, say you’ve done a “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride” letter for three years in a row.  You notice that one of those three letters raised more than the other two.  You open the PDF of the one that worked best and use it as the “template” for the next “Stop a girl from becoming a child bride” letter.  You’ve learned from your experiments and you’ve leveled up!

So… look at the results of your fundraising pieces from last year.  Did you do anything that you can “do again” this year with minimal updating?

Or if you’ve been “repeating” letters, emails and campaigns for years, what did you learn from last year’s fundraising that you can use to make this year’s fundraising more effective?

Bittersweet Moments of Clarity

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Clear thinking.

When you get better at something, there’s that bittersweet moment where you’re thinking two things almost simultaneously:

  • Oh man, I’ve been doing it wrong all along… and
  • Hey, I know how to do that better now!

In those moments, it’s as if you see the world a little more clearly than you did before. You understand how things work a little better than you did a moment before.

I had one of those “moments of clarity” recently, thanks to the impressive and irrepressible Jen Love.

We were on a panel at the Storytelling conference talking about direct response fundraising. I shared one of my writing tools: starting the first draft of every appeal and e-appeal with the sentence, “I’m writing to you today because….”

(I’ve written about why that’s an effective tool here and here.)

Jen then said something like, “Yeah, I love that. I’ve taken it a little further and what I use is, ‘You’re hearing from me today because…’.”

Cue my moment of increased clarity.

Her version is better than mine! It starts with the magical word, “you.” It places the donor in a more active role with more control. It leads to more writing about the donor and what they care about, and less about the organization.

I share this with you today because… You’re reading this today because you know that the more moments of clarity you can have, the more effective a fundraiser you’ll be.

But there are Fundraisers and organizations who don’t really want those moments of clarity. They like their way of doing things. Or they can’t believe that your moment of clarity could apply to them, their communications, or their donors. For those organizations, getting better at fundraising is a challenge.

But if you seek out those moments – if you’re eager to find out that what you’ve been doing is a little wrong, and that there’s a better way to do it – getting better at fundraising and raising more money is delightful.

In my experience, the most effective fundraisers are having “moments of clarity” all the time. Because of those moments, they see the world a little more clearly. And they create fundraising that’s more effective.

Nobody

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
first

I have a message for all the young Fundraisers and smaller organizations out there.

Nobody gets their fundraising right the first time.

I say that because it’s easy to get discouraged.

As you start – as an organization starts – there is SO MUCH that you’re having to figure out. Not to mention, nobody got into this business because they desperately wanted to send letters and emails to people. 🙂

So, please know three powerful things…

  1. You’ve begun! That’s a LOT farther than most people get. Maybe they look the other way. Maybe they refuse. Who knows. But you started. From my perspective 30 years in, that’s a bigger deal than you think it is.
  2. Becoming effective is an iterative process. You start. You pay attention. You add another skill. You get better. You notice something else. You get a little better every month. That too is a bigger deal than you think it is.
  3. The whole way, you’re helping your cause and you’re helping your donors. You’re helping the cause by raising awareness, and raising money, so that more good gets done. You’re helping donors because they care – but they don’t have programs like you do, so they can’t do much by themselves.

That’s a lot of good. You could be spending your time marketing bags of chips. Instead you’re helping make change.

It’s not easy. (If it were easy, we’d all be raising tens of millions of dollars and have six-pack abs.)

So keep going. Keep iterating. Keep practicing.

And thanks for being a Fundraiser!

Fundraising “Disasters” Are Rarely Fatal

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Crisis ahead.

Last Thursday’s post about mistakes got me to thinking…

Mistakes and disasters in fundraising are rarely fatal.

I’ve been part of a lot of mistakes and bad breaks over the years. (Which I think is true of anybody who has been in fundraising for any length of time.)

Just look at this partial list:

  • The Anthrax Scare of 2001 – When poisonous anthrax was mailed to random people that October, everyone in America was afraid to open their mail, and donations through the mail just… completely… stopped.
  • The Great Reply Card Swap – An appeal letter was sent out with a reply card for a completely different nonprofit. And that other nonprofit? Their donors received the reply card for the first nonprofit. Good times!
  • Awkward Typos – When tens of thousands of donors were supposed to be asked to help “fill the pantry” at the rescue mission, and instead were asked to “fill the panty.” And as mentioned last week, when donors were supposed to be asked to “sign the enclosed placemat and return it with your gift“ were instead asked to “sign the enclosed placenta and return it with your gift.”
  • The Host Who Eternally Lapsed – When the famous person you’ve hired for $50,000 to host the donor acquisition TV show… unfortunately passes away a couple months after filming. So you have to pull the shows off the air, reschedule the media buys, and reshoot all their portions of the program.
  • The Poorly Timed Acquisition Campaign – When you launch a national donor acquisition campaign with TV spots, direct mail buys and print magazine ads… right as the 2007 great recession/subprime mortgage started.

All of these left a mark… but none were the massive blow that the organization initially feared.

I think the lessons are to control what you can control. Know that mistakes are going to happen. Send out more fundraising (having fewer fundraising pieces is risky because you’re more reliant on the performance of any one piece).

Donors are generous – they want to give. And it’s inspiring to see how nonprofits are resilient on behalf of their beneficiaries or cause.

Three Reasons You Should Occasionally Let Your Fundraiser Try Something New

Steven Screen  |  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.