Each individual donor is like a wave rolling across the ocean.
The wave formed before they met your organization. Their wave will continue rolling after they’ve left you.
Fundraising allows you to use some of a wave’s energy for your purposes.
But the creator of effective fundraising never forgets: your organization is tapping into their wave.
I’ve written many times about how an organization’s beliefs about fundraising play a major role in how much money they can raise.
Case in point:
Well, I have a new one for you.
I just returned from the fantastic Elevate conference, which is focused on helping nonprofits use their events to raise more money and cause more connections.
While at the conference, I had a conversation with a group of nonprofits who were extremely skeptical that they could raise money using the mail and email. It was clear that these smaller, event-driven organizations did not believe that it was possible to communicate powerfully enough in a letter or email to inspire a person to give.
Here was my advice to them. Don’t worry about the power of a letter or email to communicate your work. Instead, believe in the power of how much a donor cares about what your organization is trying to accomplish.
The donor’s desire to do something to help is so strong that a letter or email is all many donors need to send in a gift.
In the mail and email, you don’t need to convince donors. You need to believe that they already care, then give them a timely invitation to help fund compelling work that’s happening soon.
One of the most reliable reasons a letter, email or event resonates with donors is when it contains a moment that engages their emotions.
So I wondered, in the successful fundraising that Better Fundraising has created, what are the “ingredients” in the most powerful moments?
After reviewing a ton of top-performing fundraising, here are the ingredients that I noticed again and again…
Primarily about one “unit” of the nonprofit’s work. In other words, it was primarily about a child, not “the children.” It was about one acre, not entire ecosystems. It was about what needed to be done next month, not “the future of the community.”
There was real conflict. A person was in a brutal situation because they were unable to afford legal representation. The library had 50 children’s books, but 200 kids who need to learn how to read. The young man was struggling in college, but had aged out of the foster care system and didn’t have a trusted adult to help them.
There was real, obvious emotion. The piece of fundraising either highlights emotions of the people or situation, or brings emotion into the storytelling.
The stakes were meaningful. If the middle schooler didn’t catch up in math, their prospects for a good job were in real trouble. If the Missionary Kid doesn’t make friendships, they are likely to leave the church.
The donor can make a difference. It’s made clear to the donor that their gift will make a meaningful difference, and that difference was clearly described.
The gift needed isn’t large. The “cost to help one unit” was small, usually under $100. (If you read this and think that your organization doesn’t have anything meaningful that costs less than $100, you need to narrow your focus and “zoom in” a little further.)
The donor is asked to help. The letter or email doesn’t say things like “we value your partnership” or “please consider making a gift.” The donor is clearly asked to make a gift with language like, “Please, will you send in a gift today?”
There is a hopeful future. The letter talks about the change that will take place if the donor gives a gift. The donor knows and feels how the world will be better if they send in a gift today.
These ingredients, all used at the same time, create fundraising that causes donors to take action.
When combined, these ingredients create fundraising that’s full of emotion. And all that emotion can feel scary, which is why many nonprofits hide their emotion behind numbers, statistics, and qualifications.
But when creating your fundraising for individual donors, moments and emotions are more important than numbers. Why? Because information leads to conclusions, but emotions lead to action.
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PS — If you’re not sure how to do this for your organization, or not sure you have the right team in place to do it, get in touch!
As you begin your year, assume abundance.
When something bad happens, and you’re wondering if you can send an emergency email to your email list, assume abundance.
Later in the year, when you’re wondering if you can ask that major donor for a second gift, assume abundance.
When you’re architecting your fundraising event, and you’re discussing how to increase the average gift, assume abundance.
But there’s always fear around assuming abundance. We fear we’ll bother people, or offend people, or wear out our welcome.
I’ve been doing this for 30+ years now. The negatives we fear do not materialize, but assuming abundance does occasionally create a little friction. Case in point: just yesterday we heard from a client who “assumed abundance” last fall and began fundraising like it. They raised far more money at year-end than ever before. After sharing the results, they said: “we had a donor complain about our year-end appeal, and when our CEO met with that donor, the donor handed him a $1,000 check.”
To summarize: this nonprofit assumed abundance, raised more than ever before, experienced a little bit of friction, received a larger gift than they normally would have, and deepened a relationship with a major donor.
Assume abundance. Assume a tiny bit of friction.
It’s worth it.
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:
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.”
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!
There’s a blogger I like named “Gabe The Bass Player” who writes primarily for musicians. I find him thought provoking.
Talking mostly to musicians, he recently said, “You keep getting to do this because enough people continually add you as part of their story.”
I think the same thing is true about nonprofits and fundraising – your organization keeps getting to do its thing because enough people add you as part of their story.
Keep thinking about that last part: “…people add you as part of their story.”
There are a million different ways to think about fundraising. But any way that ignores the fact that an individual donor is primarily adding you to her story is not going to work very well.
Is it true that she’s also part of your story? Of course.
Is it true that she’s also part of the story of your cause or community? Of course.
But at that mostly sub-conscious “give or don’t give” moment, her story is the most important story to her.
So for your mail and email fundraising to really succeed, it must be created in such a way that the donor sees herself and wants to add your organization to her story.
If you feel like your appeal letters and e-appeals could be raising more money, let me ask you a question.
Are you appealing for help, or are you trying to make your nonprofit appealing?
I ask because, somewhere along the way, nonprofits stopped writing appeals that actually appeal for help.
Our industry calls these things “appeals” because that’s what they used to be — an “earnest request for aid” — a cry for help. They were letters about a negative situation and an “appeal” for the reader to send in a gift. (And later, in a newsletter, donors were given updates on what their gift accomplished.)
I see a LOT of appeals, and not many organizations follow the original model any longer. Instead of saying, “Right now, people are being trafficked through our local airport, and your gift will help put a stop to it,” they write, “Our holistic approach to training airport workers has successfully interrupted the trafficking of hundreds of people, please support this inspiring work!”
Which is a shame, because appeals that are cries for help raise materially more money.
So next time you’re sending out an appeal or e-appeal, read it out loud and ask yourself: would a stranger reading this letter know exactly who needs help and how their gift will provide that help?
If not, you’re probably trying to make your organization appealing instead of appealing for help.
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.
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.