Tag: repetition

The Flawed Argument That ‘Fewer Donors Giving to Our Appeal Means Some Donors Are More Engaged and Will Give More Later’

Steven Screen  |  Ask

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago where someone said the following:

“I like what you’re proposing for this appeal, but we need to include more information about our organization and its programs.”

I replied that, in my experience, if we spend more time educating donors about the organization that we would raise less money.

Their response was, “I can see that we might raise less money but I’m OK with that.  Because if donors know more, they will be more engaged, and we know that more engaged donors give more.  Plus, how will we ever get long term donors if they don’t know more about us?”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the idea I want to focus on is the myth that “if a nonprofit educates people more about the organization, it will result in more long-term giving.”  Maybe said differently, “it’s OK to raise less money with each piece, because donors will give more in the long term if they know more about us.”

I’ve never met someone with numerical evidence to back this up.  And at Better Fundraising we have loads of experience helping organizations leave the “educate donors” idea behind; they start raising more money immediately, and they end the year with higher retention rates than they’ve had before.

Here’s how the math works…

Take an organization that is making sure to educate donors in their appeals, and they are getting a 3% response rate.  If they send 6 appeals per year, 18% of donors will have given to appeals.  (To keep it simple, I’m leaving aside donors who give multiple gifts per year.)

Compare that to an organization that’s following our approach (see my previous post) and is averaging a 5% response rate on its appeals.  If they send 6 appeals per year, 30% of their donors will have given to appeals by the end of the year.

Would you rather have your appeals cause 30% of your donors to give, or would you like to have your appeals cause 18% of your donors to give?

So if an organization is arguing that “less giving now” will cause more total giving, the organization must explain two things:

  1. How it is going to make up the lost gift from the 12% of donors (in the example above) who would have responded to appeals, but didn’t.
  2. How exactly the additional money is going to come in.  Will retention rates be higher?  Will gifts from major donors be higher?  Will average gifts be higher at year-end?  What’s the measurable evidence?

And while it’s true (in my experience) that “more engaged donors give more,” what is the evidence that a donor is more engaged?  How can you reach the conclusion that “because fewer donors responded to an appeal that there are also some donors who are now more engaged”?

As far as I can tell, there is zero empirical evidence for that.  (After all, if we were given an assignment to measure “engagement” for an appeal letter or e-appeal, wouldn’t the primary measurement be “how many people gave”?  Seriously here, if that’s not the metric, what is?)

I think you have to contort yourself into a very weird position to argue that “fewer donors giving indicates that some donors are more engaged.”

In my experience, the more people you have giving to appeals (and any sort of fundraising), the more money you’ve raised and the more donors you’ve retained at the end of the year.

Now, I can’t speak for an organization’s relationship with one particular major donor, where a smart major gifts officer builds a case over the course of a year and makes a bold ask and gets an amazing gift at the end of the year.  That’s a 1-to-1 situation.

But I can give you a data-driven recommendation for your mail and email mass donor programs, which are one-to-many.  For your next appeal, look for a part of your organization’s work that is happening soon, and is something that you think donors would be interested in funding.

Don’t try to educate your donors; share with them the important thing that needs to happen soon, and invite them to get involved by sending in a gift today.  You’ll raise more money in both the short term and the long term.

Two Letters at Year-End?

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Two mails.

Here’s a question we get asked a lot at Better Fundraising: “should our nonprofit send two letters at year-end?” 

Here’s what we’ve noticed over the years: a second letter between Thanksgiving and Christmas will reliably raise at least 1/3 of what your main letter raises.

So here’s an easy way to figure out if your nonprofit should send a second letter:

  • Figure out how much gross revenue your first letter raises in a normal year.
  • If 1/3 of your first letter’s gross revenue would more than pay to print and mail an additional letter, send an additional letter.

Let me give you a couple of examples and then give you one more helpful idea.

Say your primary letter raises $30,000 gross, and costs $5,000 to print and send.  Then I would send a second letter.  That’s because a second letter will reliably raise at least $10,000 gross (which is 1/3 of $30,000), and with a cost of only $5,000 you’ve raised an additional $5,000 in net revenue.

Important note: in addition to the extra revenue, you’ve also gotten gifts from all the people who donate to the second letter.  Statistically speaking, this increases the likelihood those donors will give to you again next year.

But if your primary letter raises $15,000 gross and it costs $5,000 to print and send, I would not send a second letter.  Reasoning; 1/3 of $15,000 is $5,000, so you’re raising an additional $5,000 gross with expenses of $5,000.  You’re only breaking even.  Instead of sending a second letter, I’d spend the time and budget on something with a higher ROI.

The Fear

When I’m walking a nonprofit through this exercise, and they see that sending a second letter will make sense for them, we then run into what is often the real barrier: even if the second letter is projected to make money, the nonprofit fears there will be some un-named and unknown negative consequence to asking again.

Getting past the fear of sending a second letter is a very real part of helping a nonprofit increase how much money they raise at year-end.

Here’s what I tell people: the negative consequences they fear do not come to pass:

  • There’s a fear that the “threshold for donor fatigue” will be reached by sending a second letter, and even though more money is raised this year fundraising for next year will go down.  Doesn’t happen.
  • There’s fear that a significant number of major donors will react negatively to a second letter, and reduce their giving next year (or leave entirely).  Doesn’t happen.
  • There’s fear that the second letter will “steal revenue” from the first letter.  This does happen, but in such small amounts that it basically doesn’t matter.  To give you a sense of scale: a second letter might “steal” $2,000 in revenue from a first letter, but raise an additional $10,000 in new revenue.  So yes, the first letter raised $2,000 less.  But you have $8,000 more in total net revenue to use to make the world a better place.

Every larger nonprofit I know sends at least two direct mail letters between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Many send three.  It’s a tactic that works.

And now you know how to come to a first draft conclusion for whether it makes sense for your organization.

My suggestion: do the math, figure out whether it pencils out, and if it’s even close I would “assume abundance” and send it!

Want Your Fundraising to Get Luckier?

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Lucky clover.

Jason Roberts is an entrepreneur and writer who has a simple idea he calls “luck surface area.”  It’s a useful tool for how to think about your organization’s fundraising, and here’s the gist:

The amount of good luck that comes your way is roughly equal to how much you do, multiplied by how many people know about it.

Doing × Telling = Amount of Luck  

I love this idea because it names something we all already intuitively know: the more you do, and the more you’re out there, the more things tend to happen.  (And it’s good to mention that some of those things that happen are good, and some are bad.)

This aligns perfectly with something we see in fundraising all the time: when organizations increase the amount of fundraising they send to individual donors, they receive more “unplanned” (lucky) gifts.

But there’s one thing to watch out for: you can’t just “tell” people what your organization is doing.  That results in the kind of awareness that’s not particularly valuable.  Make sure you are asking people to get involved. 

The asking is where the lucky breaks come from:

  • The donor who upgrades her gift because your e-appeal happens to land on a good day for her
  • The board member who forwards your appeal letter to a friend who’s been looking for a cause
  • The lapsed donor who comes back because you invited her to get involved
  • The major donor who finally takes the meeting because she missed the first three messages

None of those things happen if your organization stays quiet.  They only happen if your organization shows up – often, and on purpose.

(And yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “We don’t want to bother our donors.”  I’d gently suggest that your donors are less bothered than you fear, more forgetful than you’d like, and far more tolerant of additional asks than you think.  But that’s a different blog post.)

So if you want 2026 to be a luckier year for your nonprofit, that means one more email in October.  It means an ask at the end of your spring newsletter, along with a reply card, instead of a hint and a URL.  It means sending a new mailing in February.  It means picking up the phone and calling a donor you haven’t heard from in a while.

Each one of those actions is a small expansion of your surface area.  Each one is another chance for something good to happen.

Hit Songs

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Hit songs.

You know the songs that were hits years ago, but you still love listening to?

Those old hit songs are what allow a band or artist to make a living making music.  Because to have a career in popular music you need at least a couple hit songs that people still love years later.

The same thing is true in direct response fundraising for nonprofits – you need a couple hits, a couple fundraising offers or campaigns that people love. 

The nonprofit equivalent of “hit songs that stand the test of time” are things like:

  • You can sponsor a child for $X
  • You can provide surgery to repair a cleft palate for $X
  • You can give a goat for a family for $X

Does your organization have a hit song you can rely on?

Are you doing the work of trying different things, paying close attention to your audience’s reaction, and looking for potential hits that people will listen to again and again?

Because your goal is not to do something “fresh and new” every time.  Your goal is to experiment, find out what works well, and then get the most out of that “hit” that you can.

And later on, you might get tired of your fundraising “hit song,” but the people giving won’t.

How to Improve

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Keep trying. Keep growing.

The path to improving your fundraising in the mail & email is the same as it is to improve at anything:

  • Make lots of attempts
  • Have a tight feedback loop with good data

In tennis, want to get better at your backhand?  Hit lots of balls and pay attention to where they land.  In writing, want to get better at dialogue?  Write lots of dialog-heavy scenes, have other people read them and give you feedback.  

In fundraising, want to get better at the mail & email?  Send lots of appeals and reports, then review your response rates, your net revenue, and your retention rates.

Remember, your fundraising is just as important as your programs.  Your nonprofit has two jobs, and both must be done or you don’t have a nonprofit any longer:

  1. Deliver programs that solve a societal problem
  2. Inspire and retain supporters to fund the programs

If you want to scale past a few hundred donors, it’s highly likely you need to get good at using the mail & email.  Which means your best bet is to make lots of attempts with a tight feedback loop.

‘By November, your year-end cake is already baked’

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Bake a cake.

At last year’s Storytelling Conference, Chris Davenport shared storytelling advice from successful movie directors.  Here’s one of my favorite things he highlighted:

“What an audience feels at the end of the movie is entirely dependent on what they felt earlier in the movie.”

Here’s the parallel to that in fundraising:

How much you raise at the end of the year is dependent on the fundraising you sent your donors earlier in the year.

Here are some examples:

  • If a nonprofit has shown up often in donors’ lives throughout the year, with relevant content, its year-end campaign will raise more.  The organization has earned its place to be one of the organizations a donor thinks of at year-end.
  • If a nonprofit has not done any fundraising for several months, its year-end campaign will raise less.  Because it disappeared for months, the organization is less top-of-mind for donors and won’t receive as many gifts.
  • If a nonprofit has made it clear through the year that its work is needed, its year-end campaign will raise more.  The organization has made it clear that it’s working on something important, and donors tend to support causes and organizations that they feel are important.
  • If a nonprofit has spent the year only talking about how well things are going, it will raise less at year-end.  The organization has shared only success stories, so it sounds like things are going great and help isn’t really needed, thank you very much.

A friend of mine put this memorably.  He used to run the annual fund for a national nonprofit you’ve heard of.  Over beers one night he said,

“Look, by November, your year-end cake is already baked.  All that’s left to do is see how it turns out.”

What he meant was the fundraising you do throughout the year has a large effect on how well your year-end campaign performs.  (You can, of course, have a strong year-end campaign without communicating much during the year.  But a strong year-end campaign after a strong annual campaign will raise even more.)

I share this here in January so that, as you’re creating your fundraising this year, you set yourself up during the year for the best year-end campaign you’ve ever had.

Pie and Sisyphus

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Downhill walk.

To repeat one of the best lines I’ve ever heard about fundraising:

Fundraising is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for eating the most pie is that you’re asked to eat more pie.

“You raised 4% above projections this year,” the Board says, “let’s aim for 6% over projections in 2026!”

It’s kind of like Sisyphus, doomed to push a boulder up to the top of a hill but always having it slip from his grasp before reaching the top.

But there’s an unsaid part of the Sisyphus myth that was pointed out to me a few years ago: each time the rock rolls back to the bottom of the hill, Sisyphus has a restful, unencumbered downhill walk before he starts again.

So today – when the appeals have been sent, the calls have been made, the emails for today and tomorrow already programmed and ready to go – I hope you are enjoying your “restful, unencumbered downhill walk” as all the money comes in.

Enjoy your walk, and happy new year!

How Things Work

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Owner manual.

I’ve always liked to understand how things work.

Engines, supply & demand, how plywood is made, you name it.

Early in my fundraising career, when looking at detailed fundraising results, I noticed the following three things that go a long way to explaining how mass donor fundraising works:

  1. Appeals raise more than stewardship pieces.  OK, great.  An appeal is the best thing an organization can do increase revenue.  And if an organization wants to raise more money, its annual plan should prioritize sending appeals.  Appeals are also great at getting donors to give again, which is the definition of “retaining” a donor.
  2. Stewardship pieces increase donor retention.  Great.  We need to make sure that every annual plan has some stewardship pieces – but need to remember that they raise less than appeals.

The immediate next question is, “What’s the right mix of appeals to stewardship pieces?”  Back to the fundraising results I went.  I looked at the nonprofits who were out-raising similar organizations while also retaining a high percentage of their donors.  And that’s when I noticed:

  1. The organizations that had the healthiest mix of Revenue and Donor Retention sent roughly 2 appeals for every 1 stewardship piece.  The 2:1 ratio maximized their revenue & impact today, while also retaining donors so that next year went great.

I’ve used that rough ratio successfully for hundreds, probably over a thousand nonprofits since then.  It keeps on working.

(It is, of course, a little different in a major donor context where you are in relationship with the donor.  The 2:1 ratio does not apply.)

Here’s one of the things all this makes you realize: you can over-steward your mass donors, and there are real negative consequences to doing so.  If a nonprofit over-stewards its mass donors, it raises less money in the short term and retains fewer donors in the long-term. 

Think of stewardship as “planting seeds” and appeals as “picking the fruit.”  If you plant a lot of seeds, but don’t pick the fruit very often, you have less of a harvest than you earned.  Fruit doesn’t pick itself.

Interestingly, the biggest hurdle to smaller nonprofits sending out more appeals is emotional resistance.  People cannot believe the 2:1 ratio is correct.  They don’t enjoy sending appeals.  They can’t believe that donors enjoy giving in response to appeals.

That’s why much of Better Fundraising’s work is sitting with nonprofit leadership, talking to stakeholders, sharing examples & stories, and helping them be comfortable trying one or two steps of a different approach.

If you’d like to have that conversation, let’s chat.  It’s what we do.  You do the dreaming about the impact you could have if you raised a great deal more in 2026, and we’ll help you have the conversation and start raising more money and retaining more donors!

It Can Be Hard to Change Your Ideas about Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Self-reflection.

I wrote a couple days ago about how smaller nonprofits must often create fundraising messages that they don’t prefer for their fundraising to be more successful.

Today, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that changing your ideas about fundraising can be emotionally difficult. 

For a Founder, or for someone who is passionate about their fundraising, it can be a very real struggle to try a fundraising message or strategy that doesn’t personally resonate. 

Let me share my own experience with this, in hopes that it’s helpful. 

Here’s the thing to know about me: I strongly prefer not to make mistakes.  In fact, I hate mistakes.  I fear being wrong.  I fear being judged.

My fear around avoidable mistakes has positive consequences – for instance, it made me a fantastic student.

But it also has negative consequences.  For instance, I’m occasionally a pain in the neck to work with.

So it was challenging for me when I learned that the easiest way for smaller nonprofits to raise more money is to send out more fundraising.

Wait, I thought, wouldn’t the best way be to make each piece of fundraising more perfect?  We’ll eliminate all the mistakes, get everything up to best-practices… wouldn’t that bring all the money in?

Nope.  I saw again and again that the nonprofits that grew their individual donor fundraising the fastest were seeing that “showing up regularly in donors’ lives” is more important than “showing up perfectly in donors’ lives.”

It didn’t seem possible that “sending more fundraising” could work.  It didn’t seem possible that the occasional typo or “wrong thing showing through the envelope window” could work.

But if I’m honest, the real conflict was with my personal preferences and fears.  I was thinking, If we have to move faster we’re going to make mistakes.  I don’t want to focus on the total number of pieces, I want each piece to be an un-critique-able jewel box of fundraising brilliance.  <<pounds podium>>  I’m a copywriter and a storyteller, dammit, not some cheap content machine! 

I’m poking fun at myself here, but my feelings of discomfort were real.

And you’ll smile at why my thinking on this issue eventually changed; I saw the strategy of “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” succeed so many times for so many organizations that eventually I realized I would be making a mistake if I didn’t change my thinking.  And you know I don’t like to make mistakes.  Sheesh.

Anyway.  I still don’t prefer the “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” approach to mass donor fundraising.  But I embrace it because it so obviously helps small nonprofits raise more money and increase donor retention rates.  And because making the world a better place is more important than my own personal preferences and fears.

So… acknowledging that we all have preferences and fears… and acknowledging that doing things in a non-preferred way can be difficult… is there anything about your organization’s fundraising that should be changed in order to raise more money and fund more work, even if you don’t prefer the change?