Tag: philanthropy

Who Is Shining?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Shining.

You know games like Monopoly or Uno or Exploding Kittens?  Well, of the Top 5 best-selling games in the world right now, three of them were created by one guy. 

His name is Elan Lee.  He is one of the top “game designers” of our generation. 

And here’s what Elan said recently when talking about creating games:

“We do not make games that are entertaining.  We make games that make the players entertaining.”

Read that quote again.  Seriously.  I had to read it three times before I really understood that second sentence. 

He wants players to have the feeling of, “I was fun to be with, and the people I played with were fun” – not “that game is so fun.”  He knows that if the players feel great about themselves when playing the game, they will want to play again.

Put another way, he wants the people playing the game to shine, not the game itself. 

This idea perfectly maps over to fundraising.

Think about your organization’s fundraising to individual donors for a second.  And think about your donors as “the people playing your game.”  Does your fundraising make the people playing your game shine, or does your fundraising make your organization shine?

For instance, is your fundraising to individual donors mostly about your organization, mostly about the great things you’ve already done, and then asks your donors to support your work?  If so, you’re making your organization shine.

But fundraising to individual donors is a lot like human relationships: if you can make someone feel good about themselves, they are likely to feel good about you.

Helping a person feel and be great is a surer path to relationship than telling them that you are great.

There are millions of people playing Elan Lee’s games because he designed the games to make the players shine.  If you’d like to have more people donating to your organization, design your fundraising to help your donors shine.

Embrace the ‘In Between’

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Waiting.

The time in between when you make a fundraising ask, and when you start to receive gifts, is tough. 

You’ve completed your work.  You’ve thought it through.  There’s nothing you can do to make it better and then of course you start to worry.  What if there’s a typo?  What if the link goes to the wrong page?  What if, as the people at your event pick up their giving forms, they aren’t inspired?

But also, it’s a time of excitement and expectation.  You can’t wait to have people react to it, to hear what questions they have, to see the money start to come in.

And you never know whether it’s going to work.  (Well, when it’s the 15th time you’ve done a Back To School campaign and they all work great, you are pretty sure.  But you still don’t know.)

And after the “in between” tension of waiting, there’s the first gift that comes in 3 minutes after you send the e-appeal.  There’s the long-lapsed major donor who calls after receiving your letter.  And sometimes it’s middling results and a realization of what you could have done better.  Every once in a great while it’s just mostly silence.

Always exciting.  Sometimes a little stressful.

This tension and expectation “in between” will always be a part of trying to grow your impact.  Because if you want to grow, you need to talk to more people than you can talk to one-to-one.  Which means that for the life of your organization you’re always going to be making asks of groups, and sending out letters & emails, and then experiencing the “in between.”

Embrace it.

Top Heavy

Steven Screen  |  Major Donor Fundraising
Unbalanced.

The following graphic is from a fundraising analysis on a nonprofit we serve.  Look at how much of their revenue from individual donors comes from their major donors:

This kind of revenue distribution is normal; a large percentage of a nonprofit’s revenue from individual donors comes from a small group.

In fact, the revenue distribution for this organization is not particularly top heavy.  About 65% of their revenue is coming from their $5,000+ donors.  We regularly see organizations where 80% or 90% of revenue is coming in from $5,000+ donors.

This is why – even for small organizations – we put such emphasis on managing your major donors well. 

It’s why “having a proven major donor management system” is one of the “core four” strategies we teach in this free eBook.  It’s the reason Major Gifts Engine exists (and is on sale right now, btw). We can wish the funding were more equitably distributed. 

We can even work to make it so.  But right now, intentionally managing today’s major donors is the best way to meet tomorrow’s revenue needs.

Little Jolts of Joy

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Jolts of joy.

Here’s a challenge for you:

Just for a moment, for every single gift your organization received last year, envision a person writing out a check, or their finger clicking your “donate” button.

And because “every gift” is too many to visualize, just take a moment and visualize five people making gifts.

Do it.  One after another, visualize five people writing checks and clicking donate buttons.  They can be donors you know, or they can be “generic.”  I’ll wait while you do it.

 . . .

I suspect you’ll find that, if you really visualized five people making gifts, you just received 5 little jolts of joy and amazement and gratitude.

And I suspect the joy and gratitude you just received will “charge up your fundraising battery” a bit.  If you think about it, you’re probably just a little more willing to do the emotionally hard work of fundraising than you were a few minutes ago.

I asked you to visualize that here, at the beginning of the year, because fundraising can be tiring.  Asking for gifts can be hard.  What’s more, we Fundraisers usually don’t feel gifts because all we experience are numbers on a spreadsheet or in your CRM.

But when you remember that behind every single check or click is an act of generosity… and a vote of confidence in you… and the funds needed for your organization’s work… then every gift should bring a little jolt of joy and amazement.

***

Hey, if you’re considering hiring Better Fundraising to create your email & direct mail fundraising, keep reading.

We have a special going: if you fill out the form on the bottom of this page, you’ll save $3,500 because we’ll give you last year’s prices for all of this year.

Here’s an example of a nonprofit’s experience hiring us about 3 years ago: they report a 36% increase in revenue and a 17% decrease in expenses.  The increase comes from fundraising messaging & storytelling that connects with their donors better than ever before.  And the decrease comes from eliminating projects and practices that weren’t helping the bottom line.

So if you’re interested in chatting, click here because the form is at the bottom of the page.  You’ll be eligible for the discount, you’re not committed to anything, and we’ll set up a call to see if we can help you.

Cheers!

“Did my gift make a difference?”

Steven Screen  |  Report
Make a difference.

At Better Fundraising we have come to believe that a large number of your individual donors are wondering something:

Did their gift to your organization make a meaningful difference in the life of one of your beneficiaries?

We think donors are wondering that because when an organization shows & tells donors the specific differences their gift made possible, and uses stories about the individual lives of beneficiaries to illustrate the difference, the organization retains more donors and raises more money.

So as you look at your communications plan for your individual donors, do you show and tell them that their gift made a difference?

If you’re not already doing this, you’ll be surprised at how powerful it is for donors to read the phrase, “Your gift made a meaningful difference” and be told a story about one person that illustrates the difference.

Spidery Handwriting and Responsibility

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Responsibility.

The note from the donor was scrawled in spidery handwriting at the bottom of the appeal:

In case that’s hard to read, here’s what it says:

“I strongly suggest you remove this statement.  Never imply obligations to donors, or make us feel responsible for what might happen if we don’t give.”

Though I’m sorry that the letter caused the donor to feel distress, she perfectly expressed one of the reasons that fundraising is so powerful for our society:

Fundraising reminds us that we are responsible.

Each of us bears some responsibility for what happens when we give.  And each of us bears some responsibility for what happens when we don’t give.

At Better Fundraising, we believe one of the functions of fundraising is to “remind people who care that there is work that needs to be done.”

That’s not the only function of fundraising, of course.  Fundraising should show the power of beneficiaries to triumph, show how the world can be made better, and show all of us what’s possible.

So in addition to reminding people that they have responsibility, fundraising also reminds people that they are good and they have power.

But the fact remains: if what your organization is working on is important, make it visible.  Remind your donors what’s needed and what’s at stake.  (Our world isn’t very good at solving problems that it can’t see and doesn’t know about.)

You’ll get the occasional comment like the one on the letter above – because humans don’t always like being reminded that they carry responsibility.  But at the same time you’ll build an army of devoted donors who love “doing work that needs to be done” with you.

Yesterday’s Successes, Today’s Truths, Tomorrow’s Hopeful Futures

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

I just noticed that almost all of the fundraising our team helped create last year can be divided into three groups:

  • Yesterday’s Success.  These are stories of people who have already been helped, and of things the organization has already accomplished. 
  • Today’s Uncomfortable Truth.  These are stories of what’s happening today, right now, that causes the work of the organization to be needed.
  • Tomorrow’s Hopeful Future.  These are stories of what will happen if a donor gives a gift.  For instance, “If you give a gift today, 1 square meter of wetland will be preserved from development” is a story about the positive future that will be created if a donor gives a gift.

Organizational insiders tend to think that sharing Yesterday’s Successes will motivate donors to give today.  And it will, to a limited extent.

But consistently telling donors about things that happened yesterday means you’re not telling donors what’s happening today.  And in our experience, the best way to motivate donors to give today is to talk about what’s happening today. 

The fundraising programs that we see succeed wildly are programs that intentionally share what happened yesterday, and what’s happening today, and what could happen tomorrow with the donor’s support.

When you give your donors the full picture, they’re more likely to give you their full support.

Messaging Mishaps

Steven Screen  |  Ask
What not to do.

There’s a difference between the messages most organizations want to send, and the messages that make donors want to give.

This is a Big Idea for organizations who want to grow their fundraising programs. Let me explain…

Most organizations have a way they like to talk about their organization and their work. They create this “way of talking about the organization” by having staff and core stakeholders come together and talk about why they think the organization is so effective and why its work is meaningful. And they talk about why they think people should give gifts.

Those ideas come together to form an organization’s messaging. And in some cases, those ideas are codified into a brand.

There are two important things to note here, and I believe they are the cause of most of the ineffective fundraising that’s out in the world.

First, note that the organization likes this messaging. Remember, the messaging is made up of the reasons staff and stakeholders think the organization is effective & meaningful. The “reasons for support” are the reasons those staff and stakeholders believe are the most important. The organization is sharing the reasons the staff and stakeholders think the donor should give a gift.

Second, most individual donors are markedly different from staff and stakeholders. The vast majority of individual donors – especially if an organization wants to scale past a few hundred donors – know less and care about different things than staff and stakeholders do.

Here’s a thought exercise for you…

If an organization sends out fundraising with messages that would motivate staff and stakeholders to give… but the people who receive the messages know less and care about different things than the staff and stakeholders… how well do you think the fundraising is going to work?

Not very.

The Leap

What happens for organizations that make “the leap” to the next level of fundraising success is that they start making their fundraising more other-centered.

The organization sets aside what staff and stakeholders like about their organization. They set aside why staff and stakeholders think people should support them.

The organization then does the hard work to figure out what donors tend to support. The organization does the hard work to figure out the messaging that causes regular people to respond.

So, are your appeals sending the messages your organization likes sharing? Or, are you sending or the messages that you’ve figured out are more likely to get a response? Because the messages an organization wants to send aren’t likely to be the messages that are most effective at causing individual donors to give.

***

If you’d like help creating and sending fundraising messages so that your organization makes “the leap” to your next level, get in touch. We stop taking new customers around the end of October because there’s so much to do for year-end, so if you’re interested, I’d encourage you to fill out this form for a free conversation.

Don’t Limit Your Donors

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Don't limit your donors.

Thought you’d like to see some advice that Jonathan Steck shared recently around the ol’ Better Fundraising water cooler. 

We serve a bunch of organizations who – perhaps like people at your organization – are worried about the increased amount of fundraising they plan to send out during the last few weeks of the year.

Jonathan is our Creative Director, and he sent the following email to our team:

Hey gang,

We’re getting a handful of clients lately who are pushing back on the amount of fundraising content we’re recommending be sent at this time of year. 

This is not unusual. 

I mentioned this in our traffic meeting yesterday, but one of the better responses you can provide clients who are concerned with volume at year-end is this:

We shouldn’t decide when the donor gives, or how they should spend their money.  Let the donor make that decision.  

The moment we (as fundraisers) stop sending appeals, we immediately limit a donor’s opportunity to give.  Organizations think they are being considerate of their donors, but they’re really robbing them of the chance to make a difference in the world.  

So, if the objection comes up, just encourage your clients not to cancel their year-end content.  Let the donor make the decision to give or not.  

Happy fundraising! 

I love this.  It treats donors like adults.

Don’t let fear set your boundaries for how much fundraising you do in the next few weeks.  (Or ever, for that matter!)

Quick Example

And here’s a quick example for you.  Jonathan and I just got out of a meeting with a nonprofit who followed our advice.  They just completed a campaign where they sent 18 emails in 18 days. 

They are thrilled with how much money they raised.  They raised 60% more than they did last year.  And they didn’t see any of the negative consequences that some of their staff feared: no mass amounts of unsubscribes, no angry calls from major donors. 

Just money coming in, day after day for 18 days.  Money they can use to do more of their mission.

Our Job as Fundraisers

Our job as Fundraisers is to be “sold out” for our beneficiaries or cause – and NOT to limit how much or how often a donor can give.

If you’re thinking it won’t work for your donors, or that your donors are special for some reason, read this.

This year-end, use optimism as a tool. 

And as Jonathan says, Happy Fundraising!