As someone who cares about your beneficiaries and your donors, you want your fundraising materials to be special. You want your fundraising to stand out, to look great, to show everyone that your nonprofit is different and better.
I’m writing today to say one thing: as you do this, be careful.
I say “Be careful” because the things that professional nonprofits do – things that might look generic or wasteful or even dumb – are almost never accidents. The “rules” they seem to follow are the results of millions of dollars and years of testing, and the rules are followed on purpose because they work great.
Let me show you what I mean with two quick examples.
A person at a small nonprofit receives yet another letter from a large charity. They think, “Why does the large nonprofit keep wasting so much money mailing me? I never want to be like that. I’m going to send fewer letters.”
But that large nonprofit is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars with every letter they send. Each letter has a return on investment of around 4:1, meaning for every $1 they spend on the letter, they raise $4. That letter might seem like a “waste” to you, but to assume the nonprofit is wasting its money is to assume that a team of deeply experienced fundraisers doesn’t know what they are doing. They know. The letters keep going out because they keep raising money.
Second example: the Board member who says, “I don’t like all this bolding and underlining, it makes our fundraising look like everyone else’s. Our fundraising should look different!”
But the fundraising from the big nonprofits is formatted that way – the bolding, the underlining, all of it – because testing keeps showing that one particular formatting approach (large type, large margins, underlining, etc.) tends to raise the most money.
It is absolutely OK to make your fundraising your own. I want you to! But as the line attributed to Picasso goes, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”