Tag: philanthropy

Assume Abundance

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Abundant tree.

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.

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!

Whose Story Is It?

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Guitar storytelling.

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.

Appeal vs Appealing

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Cry for help.

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.

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.