Tag: Letters

The Two Reasons Effective Fundraising Writing is Repetitive

Steven  |  Repeat

Short post today.

A little brevity seemed in order after posting mini-manifestos on how to save time and raise more by “repeating” and a list of what to repeat and even on follow-up mailings.

So. There are two reasons effective fundraising writing is so repetitive:

#1 – The more people read and hear something, the more likely they are to think it’s true and important.

So when you repeat words/phrases/ideas like “your help is needed today” and “your gift made a big difference” in your fundraising, your donor is more likely to believe them. And then she’s more likely to take action.

Here’s the science:

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies … participants with low or high motivation to process information were presented persuasive arguments seen once or twice. In all 3 studies, repetition increased the persuasiveness of weak and strong arguments when little processing of message content occurred.

— From the Abstract to “The impact of repetition-induced familiarity on agreement with weak and strong arguments.” By Moons WG, Mackie DM, and Garcia-Marques T.

#2 — Most people don’t read the whole thing.

Most donors quickly scan your letter or email; they don’t read all of it.

So the savvy fundraising writers and creators make their fundraising more repetitive to increase the chance that your scanning donor sees it.

Take a look at this heatmap of a direct mail letter. The green shows the locations that the readers spent time on:

Heat map.
Now does it make sense that pro writers repeat the main message at the beginnings and ends of their letters and emails?

And does it make sense that the classic nonprofit letter – a letter that buries the Ask about 2/3 of the way through the letter – doesn’t work as well? Many of your donors never even see it!

Taking My Own Medicine

I’ve been writing about the power of “repeating” and being repetitive all month.

It’s beginning to feel repetitive…

But I’m taking my own medicine. I know that when something feels repetitive to me, that means it’s just starting to get through to my readers.

That’s the same advice I give to nonprofits every week: “I know it feels repetitive to you, and that means it’s getting through to your donors. Because it’s your donors’ reaction to your fundraising that matters most, not yours!”

Please do read our posts this month on “repeating.” Especially if you’re with a small- to medium-sized nonprofit. It’s not sexy, but the idea of repeating your best content, repeating your best tactics, and repeating your best messages is a powerful key to raising more money!

Proven way to “Repeat” — send a follow-up mailing to raise 1/3 more

Steven  |  Repeat
Repeat mailing letters.

There’s a simple way for small nonprofits to increase revenue by 1/3 for most of their campaigns.

There aren’t that many “tricks” that nonprofits can use to raise more money immediately. But this is one of them.

Repeat Your Message in a Follow-up Mailing

Here’s what to do almost any time you have a mailing going out with a time-sensitive deadline: send a follow-up mailing, with the exact same main message as the initial mailing, a couple of weeks after your initial mailing.

A “follow-up mailing” is a proven tactic that large nonprofits have used for 60 years. And a few years ago I noticed something when our smaller clients added follow-up mailings…

The Benefits of a Follow-up Mailing

  • The follow-up mailing will raise about 1/3 what the initial mailing raises.
  • Sending a follow-up mailing will not materially reduce the amount of money the initial mailing raises.

So by sending a follow-up mailing you’ve increased your revenue by 1/3.

And that 1/3 is new money. Additional revenue. It’s from donors who otherwise wouldn’t have given to the campaign.

An Example

Say you have a Back-to-School campaign every August. And you normally mail your letter around August 7th.

Here’s what I’d do. Send your Back-to-School letter earlier, around July 25th. Then send a follow-up mailing on August 9th.

The follow-up letter should have exactly the same main message as your first letter. Repeat the same phrases and the exact same call to action. Just make it a little shorter, and mention the deadline for response a couple times more than you did in your first letter.

The second letter will raise about one third of what your first letter raises. And your initial letter will raise about the same amount that it always does.

Why This Works

There are two reasons this works:

  1. Not every donor received your message the first time you sent it. Some were on vacation, some didn’t open the mail, etc.
  2. Not every donor who received your initial mailing was convinced that it was important enough to respond to. Have you ever had to repeat something to someone who wasn’t really paying attention the first time? It’s the same thing here. Donors are generous, compassionate, busy people who aren’t always paying attention.

The Cost Is Clear

It’s pretty easy to figure out if you should add a follow-up mailing.

Say your Back-to-School appeal letter raises about $20,000 and costs $2,500 to mail.

You can assume your follow-up appeal will raise about $6,500 on costs of about $2,500. You’ve just created an extra $4,000 in revenue you can use for your Back-to-School campaign.

Usually, the only reasons not to do a follow-up mailing are if:

  • The cost of the follow-up appeal doesn’t cover the increased expense.
  • There’s something else you could be saying to your donors during that period that would raise more than the follow-up appeal would raise.

No Negative Effects

There are basically no negative effects to doing a follow-up mailing.

Your donors won’t unsubscribe or complain from too much mail. You won’t drive them away. They won’t give less later.

And if you’re worried about the follow-up letter bothering some donors, put a line in the letter that says, “I’m sorry if you sent in a Back-to-School gift and our letters have crossed in the mail. But I’m writing today because it is so important that the kids walk into school their first morning with everything they need to succeed…”

This Tactic Works

It works in the mail, in email, on social media, on the phone.

It works because not all of your donors got your message the first time. And not all of the donors who got the message the first time were convinced that it was important enough to respond.

I know I’m repeating myself from above, but it’s that important.

Repetition works, people!

LIST of what to “repeat” to save time and raise more money

Steven  |  Repeat
Repeat.

I know the idea of “repeating” fundraising you’ve done before doesn’t make sense at first. And it can feel weird.

That’s why we’re blogging this month about the secret of “repeating” – just think of it as a tool that savvy fundraisers use to save time and (surprisingly) raise more money.

What We Mean By “Repeat”

When we say you can “repeat” something, here’s what we mean in a nutshell: do the same thing again, but slightly differently.

  • Send the same letter again, but slightly reword it
  • Send the same email again, but slightly reword it
  • Run the same event again, but with a different beneficiary speaker
  • Send the same letter again, but with a slightly different design

Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

And in some cases you can send the exact same thing. Same email. Same letter. We’ve done both of them and they’ve both worked:

  • My podcast partner Jeff Brooks tells a story about an organization that sent an appeal every month. One month it accidentally sent out the exact same appeal that it sent the previous month – and it raised more money the second time!
  • In my last post I shared a story about an organization that took half their donors and sent them the same exact email the last four days of the year. Those donors gave more than the other half of their donors who received four unique emails.

Because remember:

  1. Most of your donors aren’t paying that close attention
  2. Many donors need to hear something twice (or more) before they pay attention and really think about it

When To Repeat Letters And Emails

Here’s how to repeat your appeal letters and your emails.

If you are doing something that you did the year before, you can repeat it.

Say you send out a Thanksgiving appeal last year, and you’re going to do another one this year. The first thing to do is to look at last year‘s Thanksgiving appeal and its results.

If the results were better than the previous year, repeat it. Don’t write a completely new email. Don’t design a completely new letter. Make only the minimal number of changes you need to make.

The same is true for anything you do each year. Here’s a list of things we’ve repeated to great success, and I’m sure there are more examples:

  • Year-end / Thanksgiving / Back-to-School / etc. – letters & emails
  • Facebook campaigns
  • Events
  • Giving Tuesday
  • Renewal
  • 13th Gift
  • Sponsorship/monthly giving upgrade campaigns
  • Monthly giving recruitment

You name it. If you do it every year, you should be repeating it and making slight tweaks to make it better, not reinventing the wheel.

When You Repeat, Watch Out For…

Here’s what to watch out for when you’ve decided to repeat a fundraising tactic…

  • Any detail that was true last year, but not this year. You need to update anything that’s not true. New ED? Update the name at the end of the letter. This year’s “Thanksgiving Meal” costs $1.93 instead of $1.92? Update the letter. Your organization now rescues Wombats? Add “wombats” to the list of animals you rescue.
  • Does the story need to be updated? Many letters contain a story about a person that illustrates the need. That story should be swapped out and replaced with a new story. But the rest of the letter doesn’t have to change.
    • Note: this is true for events as well.
  • Doing too much. Don’t make too many changes just because you’re in there.

Story Time With Steven

I used to write appeal letters and emails for The Salvation Army. They are a fundraising machine who has all of this down to a science. (You might read that they are a “fundraising machine” and think, “Well, that would never work with my donors.” Please be open to the idea that it would work. Many of your donors also give to the Army.)

Most of the time I would receive the following instructions when it was time to write a letter:

“Here’s last year’s letter. It worked great. Update it for this year and change only what’s absolutely necessary. Do not mess this up.”

Inspiring!

No, not really. At least if you’re a ‘creative type’ like me.

But that’s how you build a mature fundraising program that raises the big bucks. You take something that works. You repeat it. You refine it. You look for little ways to make it better. You watch the results closely and look for what donors love, as told through their giving.

Over time you build a money-raising machine that allows you to do so much good in the world that people come to learn fundraising from you.

Listen, a lot of people don’t like hearing this. They want to be creative. They want to love the fundraising they send out.

I’m the same way. I get bored writing the same emails for the second (or tenth) year in a row.

But over time, if you look at the results, it becomes really obvious that if you repeat what worked before, you’re going to raise more money.

Please trust me – I’ve banged my head against that wall enough time to have a small dent in the middle of my forehead. (Well, actually that scar is from my sister throwing a Hot Wheel at me, but it’s a better story if it’s a fundraising scar.)

You are going to be tired of what you’ve been doing. So will your boss and your Board. You’re going to want to do it differently. You’re going to want to ‘come up with a new theme for this year’!

Don’t give in. Keep doing what’s been working great. You’ll raise more money each year.

If you invent a new approach each year you’ll be causing two problems: #1, you’ll be raising less money; and #2, you’ll be taking a LOT of time you could be using to do something else. Like, you know, focusing on major donors, where 90% of your individual donations come from. Or acquiring new donors, who are the future of your organization.

But Whither Innovation?

I’m going to write a post later this month on ‘how to innovate when you’re in a culture of repeating what’s worked in the past.’ Because you have to innovate.

But you want to innovate in a way that minimizes your risk. And I’ll share how to do that. But here’s an analogy to tide you over…

If you’re Apple, do you decide to stop making the iPhone and replace it with something completely new? No. You keep on updating, tweaking the iPhone to make it better each year. And you keep releasing different versions of the iPhone to try out new ideas.

Sheesh

Enough rambling. I hope the concept of “repeating” is making sense. I know it’s not how normal nonprofits operate. But it’s one of the secrets that savvy fundraisers have discovered – and you should be using it. You’ll save time, and you’ll raise more money.

If you’d like to have me help your organization know what to repeat – or to tweak what you’re doing to make it even better – get in touch!

How to Use the Mail to Raise Money at Fiscal Year-End

Steven  |  Ask

We’re teaching and blogging this month on how to raise money at Fiscal Year-End.

First we wrote about why it works so well. Then we gave you a sample Fiscal Year-End letter and told you how to write the letter.

Today we’re going to show you exactly what to do in the mail to raise money at Fiscal Year-End. It’s pretty simple:

  • Send the letter to your donors around June 1. There’s no magic to that date. You can send it a little earlier or a little later. But that’s about the sweet spot to A) be close enough to the end of June for it to make sense to donors, and to B) give your donors enough time to respond.
  • Send the letter to all donors who have given a gift in the last 24 months. If you mail your donors often, say eight times per year or more, you probably should only send the letter to donors who have given a gift in the last 12 or 18 months. But for most organizations, mailing to all donors who have given in the last 2 years/24 months is worth it. Do not mail this letter to non-donors or to volunteers.
  • Send the letter with first-class postage to Major donors, and non-profit postage to all other donors. Using first-class postage to your major donors costs more, but it also increases the chances that they will open the letter. It’s worth it!

We’ll talk about what to do online later this month. (You’ll have more time to get ready for that!)

Our Goal This Month

It’s a simple goal. If your fiscal year ends on June 30th, our goal is for you to fundraise for it and use the tips and tactics we share this month. If you follow our time-tested advice, we know you’ll be surprised by how much money you can raise!

So follow along this month. If you haven’t already, sign up to receive our blog in your inbox. We’ll walk you through how to create a great fiscal year-end campaign – one that you can use every year to raise money in June!

SAMPLE Fiscal Year-End Fundraising Letter

Steven  |  Ask

There is a model that works really, really well for fiscal year-end letters; I’m going to share it with you. You should follow it because you’ll raise more money than you expect.

Remember: no one thinks fiscal year-end fundraising is going to work, but it works like crazy.

So if your fiscal year ends June 30th or September 30th, keep reading. If not, you can click away and go do something to delight your donors. 🙂

Today I’m going to share a letter that successfully raised a ton of money for one of our clients. They raised so much more than they were expecting that they want other organizations to be able to do the same thing.

I recommend you do three things: copy this letter, customize it for your organization, then send it to your donors on or before June 1st.

  1. What you want to do is copy the approach: the directness, the focus on the deadline, the short sentences and paragraphs. You can copy some of the phrases. Even the formatting. Copy all that.
  2. But customize your letter to be about meeting the need your organization exists to serve. Think of it like Mad-Libs: where this letter talks about what the donor’s gift will do, customize it to talk about what a donor’s gift to your organization will accomplish.
  3. Then mail it to your donors on or before June 1st. You want to give them a couple weeks to get back to you. Only send it to donors who have given a gift in the last 24 months. (We’ll talk about how to use email in a post later this month.)

Here’s the letter. You can click on the images to download the PDFs.

Fiscal year-end letter sample.


My Fiscal Year-End gift.

Our Goal This Month

It’s a simple goal. If your fiscal year ends on June 30th, our goal is for you to fundraise for it and use the tips and tactics we share this month. If you follow our time-tested advice, we know you’ll be surprised by how much money you can raise!

So follow along this month. If you haven’t already, sign up to receive our blog in your inbox. We’ll walk you through how to create a great fiscal year-end campaign – one that you can use every year!