Bragging is not Reporting (example)

Steven Screen | August 5, 2021August 3, 2021Report

In our experience, most organizations don’t Report enough (especially to major donors). And when they do, they focus on what the organization did, on the organization’s role in the story.

We call that bragging. As in, “Our programs provided holistic care to 345 people…”

That leads to “Ask, Thank, Brag, Repeat” instead of the far more successful “Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat.” Remember … focus on your donor’s role in the story, not your organization’s!

Example Time

Here’s part of a newsletter story – a Report – that a client of ours sent to donors a couple months prior to working with us. Notice the bragging.

Our Dentists on the Road Program provides free, urgent dental care to low-income children and adults who lack insurance or a realistic way to pay for treatment. The service is provided in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Our fleet of dental vans provides up to 30 clinics per week.

Last year with the help of dedicated volunteers, we provided approximately $5 worth of care to patients for every $1 invested in the program.

In 2017, our 12 Nebraska Dentists on the Road vans treated more than 17,000 people. These people are no longer battling the intense pain and preventing future systemic complications associated with advanced dental diseases as well as socio-economic challenges associated with severe dental problems.

Children from lower-income families are almost twice as likely to have decay as those from higher-income families, yet they face disproportionately high barriers to receiving care. While in theory all Nebraska children are covered by Healthy Kids insurance, there are many reasons why they may be having trouble accessing it, such as difficulty finding providers that will accept it.

Notice how:

The donor is never mentioned?
There’s a lot of numbers, medical jargon and education?
Notice that when you run into all that detail you start to skip ahead? So do your donors.

Now look at the next time we talked about this program. We told the story of one person who had been helped, we prominently mentioned the donor’s role, and we gave the donor the credit:

Emergency Root Canal Saved Schoolgirl’s Tooth!

Your kind gift helped save the smile of 14-year-old Cecelia who needed urgent dental work.

When Cecelia bumped her tooth, it seemed like a harmless accident.

Her mother thought the soreness and swelling would go away, but the pain went from bad to worse and Cecelia begged to stay home from school.

But thanks to your gift, Cecelia was able to be helped by the Dentists on the Road program.

It turned out that Cecelia had nerve damage and an infection in one of…

There are a handful of things to notice here, all of which work together to make this an effective Report. This story:

Focuses on a person, not a program.
Quickly summarizes the need, then showed the donor how they helped meet that need.
- ➣ We do this because eye-tracking studies show that most donors don’t read the whole story.
Directly credits the donor for causing the transformation.
The language and paragraphs are simpler and easier to read quickly.

Now your donor knows – at a glance – that her gift made a difference. And she is more likely to give to your organization again.

Prior to working with us, this organization didn’t keep performance results for each newsletter. So, we don’t know exactly how much the new version outperformed the old.

But…

…after applying these guidelines for 6 months their net fundraising revenue was up 53%!

This post is excerpted from the Better Fundraising e-book “Storytelling for Action.” Download it for free, here

How to Make Good “Fundraising Bets”

Steven Screen | May 13, 2021May 13, 2021Repeat

At the beginning of your fundraising career – or when you start doing more direct response fundraising than you have in the past – you need to make “bets” on what you think your donors will be most likely to fund.

You’re writing an e-appeal and wondering, “Should I talk about this program, or that program?”

You’re writing an appeal letter and wondering, “Should I ask donors to fund this, or to fund that?”

Each decision is a bet.

The more bets you make, if you pay attention to the results, the better you’ll get at making bets. And ultimately, the better you get at making bets, the more money your e-appeals, appeals, newsletters, and events will raise.

The way to get better at this is for your organization is to practice.

Let me give you an example. It’s an outlier for most of us, but it makes the point.

My mentor spent his career doing direct response fundraising for some of the biggest nonprofits in the country in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, including most of the national Christian nonprofits.

True story: by the end of his career, he had sent so many pieces of direct mail, to so many of the lists available, that he could make accurate predictions for how each letter would perform.

He would hold the mockup of the letter in his hand, look at the offer, and look at the writing and the design. Then he would look at the mailing list that it was being mailed to. Cultivation, acquisition, didn’t matter – he could tell you with relative certainty how many people would respond, what the average gift would be, etc.

I walked into his office once and he was concentrating so hard he didn’t notice me for a couple minutes. He was as “in the zone” as it’s possible to be. I watched him write some numbers in the margins of a printed-out spreadsheet, then I asked him what he was doing.

He said, “I’m writing down my predictions for how each letter to each mailing list is going to perform.”

Here’s the amazing thing: he was usually correct to within a 10th of a percentage point on response rate, and within a dollar or two on average gift size.

It was remarkable. It was otherworldly.

He was able to do it because he had done it so many times before. He was very, very good at making “bets” for what an organization should talk about, how they should talk about it, and who they should talk about it to.

And when he was wrong – when one of his predictions didn’t match up with what actually happened, he would say, “Huh, I wonder what I missed?” And then he’d look at the letter and the list to figure out where he had gone wrong, so that his next bet was more accurate. So that his next bet raised more money for whatever nonprofit he was serving.

You and your organization can get great at knowing what to talk about, how to talk about it, and who to talk about it to.

But you have to practice. A lot.

It’s not a gift, not a talent, not an ability. It’s an acquired skill.

Every* Client Raised More

Steven Screen | February 5, 2019February 5, 2019Repeat

Allow me to share some news we’re proud of: every client we worked with raised more money at year-end than they had the previous year.

The fundraising industry is reporting that a lot of organizations saw decreases at the end of the year. “Overall the shortfall may be as much as 25% for some organizations” said The Agitator.

So we’re thrilled that our clients did so well.

The organizations with the best performance applied our Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat system throughout the year.

But even the clients who hired us just for year-end raised more than they did the year before. (Even the ones who were worried they wouldn’t get invited to parties!)

The EASY System

The year-end system we’ve developed really works. We leaned on it more heavily this year, for more clients than we’ve ever worked with before, and it worked better than ever.

What I enjoy the most is how EASY the system makes it for most of our clients. It’s not color-by-numbers . . . but it’s close.

It’s all part of our efforts to help nonprofits work less while raising more. Because there’s more good you could be doing if only you had time to do it.

The Reason for the *

There was one client that raised less. Sort of.

Our one client who raised less at year’s end is the one client that did not ask us to help with their year-end fundraising.

As you can imagine, when they asked us how our other clients did, it was a little awkward.

2019

If you’d like to see exceptional growth in 2019 (or if you just want to make sure your organization is prepared in case the economy turns), get in touch.

And if you’re not ready to hire us, No problem. Keep reading the blog. Download our free eBook on Storytelling. And our free eBook on Asking. Get on our mailing list for the free resources.

In case you’ve never heard me say it before: Better Fundraising’s mission is to increase the fundraising capacity of small- to medium-sized nonprofits. So we give away as much of our field-tested experience and knowledge as possible.

There’s no secret special sauce we keep just for our clients. We try to put every approach, every piece of testing knowledge we can on the blog and into our resources.

And for the organizations that want to go deeper, we relish the chance to work with you on your fundraising.

Regardless, our hope is to be helpful. And our clients’ results at year-end prove that our approach is working.

We’re bullish on fundraising in 2019. Follow-best practices, stay centered on your donors, and you can raise a lot of money to do a lot of good!