Tag: strategy

Fundraising Strategy Session

Lisa Sargent  |  Repeat

The following is a hand-picked guest post from Lisa Sargent.  Enjoy, and you can read more about Lisa below.

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As a fundraising copywriter I get asked a lot about strategy.

“How often should we communicate with supporters?”
“Is mail really better – or email?”
“What if our nonprofit can’t do the thing you suggest?”

For all the advice around strategy, you still have foundational questions. And you’re hoping for actionable, achievable answers. Fear not! Today we’ll get real-world answers to my most asked questions – sized for every organization – to help you grow your donor fundraising and retention communications.

Let’s dig in.

Question 1: What should an effective donor communications calendar look like for my nonprofit?

Answer:

First, let me say: I get what you’re facing. Everywhere you look, it feels like someone is telling you that you’re mailing too much or not enough, or the wrong stuff. But no one is sharing what a working (and workable), effective, sustainable, real-life fundraising calendar looks like. It’s time we change that.

I call this basic strategy the “dead simple donor comms calendar.”

Yes, there are variations. (After the basic plan, below, you’ll find two alternatives.) Yes, you may need to adapt these plans depending on the maturity of your donor communications program, the timing of milestone dates/events in your nonprofit, and the capacity/skillset of your fundraising team.

But this entry strategy is a great goal to work towards and, for the record, one of the plans my clients often use.

Basic 3X3 Donor Comms Calendar: [3 newsletters/3 appeals + reminder]
Approx. size of organization working this plan: $3 million+; 2-3 person team (**see Note2) 

Jan/Feb: Donor newsletter
Apr/May: Appeal
June: Donor newsletter
Sept: Appeal
Oct: Donor newsletter
Nov: Holiday Appeal
Dec: Holiday Reminder
Extra Mailings (*see Note1)

My design partner Sandie (aka Designer Sandie) and I have used variations of this to help clients achieve successes such as:

  • an organization that grew its active donors from 2,000 to over 20,000 (increasing to a nearly 70% retention rate), 
  • a nonprofit that grew its direct marketing income six-fold,
  • another that routinely saw 10+ percent response rates to newsletters,
  • another that cross-purposes its comms to attract new supporters, encourage legacy gifts, and promote new services.

*Note1: You will have other pieces happening at the same time. You may be modifying your calendar to incorporate other, special appeals. Bespoke TYs – custom-crafted to each appeal and newsletter – are built into these plans. For today, you’ll see these “extra” pieces labeled as Satellite Mailings at the end of each calendar.

**Note2: When I talk about the team, I mean on the client side. In my case, the other part of the team is me and Designer Sandie, plus the printer of choice [or print management company, etc.] our clients work with.

Here’s a second donor comms plan, one of the variations I mentioned a moment ago, a slightly expanded calendar…

4X4 Donor Communications Calendar: [4 newsletters/4 appeals + reminder]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $8mil organization; 3+ person fundraising team (+ temp helpers for holiday) 

Early Feb: Thank-You Newsletter
March: Special Services Appeal
April: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal
July: Newsletter [includes special gratitude premium]
September: Autumn Appeal
October: Autumn Newsletter
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder
Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

And here’s another for a larger organization, that incorporates multiple special mailings and replaces one of the newsletters with a stewardship mailing:

Expanded Donor Communications Calendar: [3 newsletters/Specialized packs and multiple appeals]
Approx size of organization working this plan: Approx $20mil+ organization; 6+ person fundraising team 

Jan: Winter Newsletter
Feb: Tax Mailing
Mar:  Special Appeal
Apr/May: Spring Newsletter
June: Summer Appeal
July: Supporter Survey Pack and Survey Follow-Ups
August: Summer Newsletter
September: Autumn Appeal
October: Special Stewardship Mailing
October: Tax Reminders
November: Holiday Appeal
December: Holiday Reminder

Extra Mailings (*see Note1 at basic plan above)

Hopefully this glimpse into real-life communications plans shines a light for you on how to chart your own donor communications strategy – and feel confident doing so! 

Question 2: Which is better – email or mail? (The answer everyone wants to know!)

Fast answer: tl;dr – The answer is both, whenever you can.

Full answer [with side story and statistics]:

Not long ago in response to my LinkedIn post about print and older eyes, a nonprofit consultant who is over age 50 – they said so, fyi – wanted me to know “older givers” are tech savvy too. So why was I STILL talking about print? They wanted me to know they immediately throw away everything that comes from nonprofits in the mail!

The answer I gave became a feature article called How to Write for Older Donors, in my newsletter. And, so you know, I also use tech and am over age 50… and I advocate for print (direct mail) because results prove me right.

For today I want to share an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book Thankology,which looks at why the answer to the email vs. mail question is always “Do both, whenever you can.” (fyi: all nonprofits described in the previous section on donor comms calendars do digital and direct mail, even the smaller nonprofits).

>> Statistic 1:  The effect of adding a communications channel***

Read as: What can happen when you add mail to an email-only program; or add email to a mail-only program:

A study of 2,000 nonprofits that ran from 2016 to 2019 and published in the Network for Good whitepaper, Our Digital Dilemma, found “a strong relationship between donor retention and consistent multi-channel engagement,” including:

“Nonprofits that increased the number of channels used to engage donors [from one channel to 2+] retained 11.89% donors year-over-year.”

>> Statistic 2: The effect of removing a communications channel***

Read as: What can happen when, for example, a decision is made that “no one wants print” and nonprofit moves from a mail/email combo program to only email:

“Conversely, nonprofits who were using a multi-channel framework but reverted to single-channel saw their median year-over-year retention drop by 31.32%. (A join Virtuous/NextAfter study of 119 nonprofits showed mult-channel donors give 3X more, too.)”

***Note for Statistics 1 and 2:
Network for Good is now Bonterra. I’ve searched for a new link to the Digital Dilemma whitepaper and can’t locate one. If I find it, I’ll update everyone in a future Loyalty Letter. You can, however, get the 2021 Virtuous/Next After study on free sign-up, here: https://www.multichannelnonprofit.com. The study also found that for “donors who give both offline and online…their first-year donor retention rate is two times higher.” 

To sum up?

Based on the research, and results we’ve seen over the years, the best answer is that if you want to keep your donors connected and giving, you’ll do both: digital and mail.

Question 3: For email vs. mail, what about thank-you letters? Do I send both? (What I told L.)

Below is the full text of the question that L. – a reader from a small nonprofit in the UK – wrote me about what to do if she can’t afford to mail everyone thank-yous, and needs to use email-only for some:

L. wrote:

As a small charity, with no real advice to hand, I am really focussing, at the moment, on creating and writing top notch Thank You letters to our donors. The one thing that perplexes me most is whether to email or write a letter and at what level of giving a letter is more appropriate or whether it is entirely acceptable to just send emails (bearing in mind the cost of postage in the UK is absurd).

Here’s my answer to L.:

If donors come to you via online donations, remember you need some kind of disclaimer that mentions you’ll communicate with them by post. (You want the option to do this.)

Gift acknowledgment may fall into the ‘administrative communications’ gray zone for charity regulations, but I’d check those rules first if you haven’t. It’s super easy to add a notice to your donation page, by including a variation of this wording below your opt-in boxes online (again run past your legal team or check charity regs first):

We’ll also keep you updated by post. You can update your communication preferences any time at [link to full email of donor care for your org here]. And for more information you can see our privacy statement here.

Then, for each appeal and newsletter, you can craft one version of a thank-you (TY) for post (mail), and one for email. All of my nonprofit clients send post and email TYs to every supporter who gives (and has given permission to contact). The reason for this is gratitude and acknowledgment firstly, and secondly because we know when donors give by more than one channel (online/post e.g.) they give longer and stronger (see data in Question 2).

With that said, knowing your charity is still small and growing, you could tier who receives both post and email TYs, and who receives email-only.

You’ll know your donors best. But for example, you might consider:

  • all new donors get both,
  • all monthly givers get both when they sign up
  • repeat givers (so, second gift especially which is huge in importance, and beyond if you can)
  • donors who give over a certain threshold/and loyal givers
  • tax-efficient givers
  • in memoriam/tribute givers, in-mems especially who we know have a connection to legacy.

Have a think on thanking these donors with an eye towards stewardship and retention, then as your organization grows, you can consider bringing more people into the double-thank-you strategy.

I went on to refer L. to my thank-you clinic on SOFII, free, no sign-up needed, gateway article here: https://sofii.org/article/how-to-write-a-better-thank-you-letter-and-why-it-matters   

Question 4: My head is spinning. Can you leave me with one suggestion to act on for today?

Answer: Yes! Spool up on – and start drip feeding across your communications – the opportunity to give through legacy donations.

By this I mean:  Help show donors how they can leave a gift to your organization in their will.

You’ll find tips on overcoming common bequest giving barriers – plus super easy ways you can start to incorporate legacy giving in your messaging, right here in my blog post, Legacy Logjams and How to Free Them.

The simplest of all? Get a legacy checkbox on your reply form (donation slip, reply device, etc.) It has not, for us, suppressed response to appeals, just so you know.

You can keep it simple:
[   ] Please send me details on how I can remember the work of [your charity’s name here] in my Will.

OR add emotion:
[   ]   I’d like to leave a legacy of love – please post free details to me on how I can leave a gift in my Will to [remember homeless pets, advance breast cancer research, etc].

One of our clients saw their first legacy donation about 18 months after we added these. We can’t prove this made the difference, but they had never mentioned legacy giving to their donors before that. 

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© Lisa Sargent and Lisa Sargent Communications, used with permission. If you adapt or repurpose this content in any format, please be a guardian of good karma and get your proper permissions. And, of course, remember that this information is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as legal advice on any subject matter.

Steven says: “Lisa Sargent is a fundraising expert and the author of Thankology, the best book on thanking donors that I’ve ever read.  You can (and should!) subscribe to her newsletter here.”

Lisa says: “If this mini-strategy session helped you, you can:

Subscribe to my Loyalty Letter newsletter for fundraisers
Connect/follow/say hello on LinkedIn
Check out Thankology (on Amazon or Bookshop)
Find free fundraising resources at lisasargent.com

“Thank you for reading today, and big thanks to Steven, Jim, and The Better Fundraising Co. for sharing a place on their blog.“

How ‘Tactic Stacking’ Helps You Raise More Money

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Tactics.

My last post was an introduction to the idea that donors often make decisions to give (or not to give) based on information that has nothing to do with the organization or its programs. 

When an organization first makes this realization, a whole new world is opened up.

They see that, instead of just looking for new inspirational ways to describe their work, they start using the tactics and approaches that the “Fundraisers who came before us” discovered were effective.

Examples include:

  • Matching funds – “matching funds will double your impact!”
  • A deadline – “Please send your gift by June 30th”
  • Highlighting a need that’s happening soon – “The kids start arriving at camp in just a couple weeks!”
  • A limited time opportunity – “If we don’t buy this piece of property for our new building, it’ll go up for public sale.”

The magic really starts to happen (and the money really starts to roll in) when you do what’s called “tactic stacking” – using multiple tactics at the same time.

Take a look at this paragraph, which “stacks” all four of the tactics mentioned above:

The kids will be arriving at our summer camp at the end of the month!  [NEED THAT’S HAPPENING SOON] And I’m thrilled to tell you that matching funds will double your gift – you can help send two children to camp instead of one!  [MATCHING FUNDS]  This is the only chance to send a kid to camp this year.  [LIMITED TIME OPPORTUNITY]  So please send your gift before June 30th! [DEADLINE].

See how all those tactics work together to create a compelling argument for a donor to send in a gift today?

And that’s just the copy.  Here are some of the Design tactics we could “stack on” to make this appeal even more compelling:

  • Use illustrations of kids doing fun camp activities
  • Have the reply device be designed to look like a “certificate” that’s “good for a day at camp for a child”
  • An insert that lists the daily schedule at camp, where a child has written in all the activities they are excited to do

Once you start to learn all the tactics, creating fundraising becomes an endlessly fun, creative endeavor.  You’re no longer constrained to just talking about the programs and outcomes of your organization; you’re unleashed to use human psychology and behavior science to build compelling cases for your organization.

Today, your organization is somewhere on the continuum between “we just describe our work and ask for support” and “using all the tactics all the time.”

So I’ll just ask you a simple question: what tactic or tactics could you apply to your next piece of fundraising?

Fundraising in the 2024 Election Year – The Noisy Spring

Steven Screen  |  Ask
Noise.

Fundraising during a presidential election year can be tricky.

But if you base your plan for this year on what’s worked best in previous presidential election years, this COULD be one of your best fundraising years since the pandemic.

There are four distinct phases of the election cycle that will impact your fundraising efforts:

Phase 1: The Noisy Spring (that’s right now!)

Phase 2: The Summer Slump

Phase 3: The Election Storm

Phase 4: The Year-End Rally

Today’s post shows you what do NOW, during the Noisy Spring (April through June).  Our next three posts will be about the next three phases.

The Noisy Spring

You may have already noticed election coverage ramping up. Political messages are flooding TV, print and radio, mail and inboxes, and social media feeds.

This makes your job harder (though not impossible by any means). But you will need to work harder to capture donors’ attention and inspire them to give.

Here’s how to break through the noise:

  1. Communicate with your donors more frequently and assertively. This means ratcheting up your digital communications (e-appeals, e-stories, social media posts) and adding creative tactics with direct mail packages (think colored and odd-sized envelopes, handwritten addresses, etc.).
  2. Increase the urgency in your appeals, highlighting the critical needs of your beneficiaries and the incredible changes your donor’s giving makes. Lean into storytelling to create emotional responses in your donors. Don’t shy away from talking about the needs of your beneficiaries and the problems your organization solves. An election year is not the time to sugarcoat the situation for your donors.
  3. Ask for larger gifts and trust that committed donors will rise to the occasion despite the distractions of the election. This is especially true for major donors. Ask a donor for more than you think they will give you, then if the donor chooses to give you less, they’ve made that choice.  Don’t make the choice for them!

Right now is the time to get your strategy set for The Noisy Spring of the 2024 election year. They key is to break through the noise and communicate with your donors, increase the urgency, and ask for big gifts with confidence!

Next time… what to do during The Summer Slump.

Read this series of blog posts:

The Core Four

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Core four.

“We want to raise more than 1 million dollars each year from our individual donors.  What should we do?”

That, my friend, is a great question that more small nonprofits should be asking. 

We were curious, so we looked at our clients that had broken the “raise $1mm in a year from individual donors” barrier.

This post shares the four strategies that had the largest effect.  And how using all four strategies at the same time had a supercharging effect…

Optimized Events

They professionalized their events by having a tighter schedule, fewer people on stage, a tighter script, and left the “we have to convince people to give” thinking at home.

Perhaps most importantly, they changed their content strategy.  The first thing they did was to figure out what the ask would be for, and then designed the content of the event to make the ask as powerful as possible.

They raised more money at the event, and their donors had a better time.

Strategic Major Donor Systems

They installed a proven system to manage their major donors.

Major donors were identified and ranked, relationships were cultivated, and the right amount of time was spent on the right donors.

The systematic approach retained more major donors year over year, and lifted more major donors to higher levels of giving.

More Donor Communications

They increased the amount of fundraising sent to individual donors beyond what they previously believed was possible. 

They saw that they were not going to grow into a larger organization until they embraced one of the key behaviors of larger organizations: communicating more often.

And they started raising more money every year.

Segment Appropriate Messaging

They embraced the wisdom that different audiences should be communicated to differently.  So they spoke differently to a Foundation, and differently in an email to individual donors, and differently to a long time major donor.

This caused consternation among staff, but the organizations started raising more money.

The Flywheel

Those four strategies work together like the proverbial “flywheel” to accelerate growth…

  • Because the event is optimized, more people come back the next year, plus more people invite their friends.  So there are more people at the event, and they tend to give more because the event is well constructed…
  • The major donors are identified, and then systematically cultivated, so the organization has a growing major donor file…
  • Because segment-appropriate messaging is used, each piece of fundraising raises more money because it’s relevant to that audience…
  • Because there are more donor communications, the organization raises more and retains more donors…
  • This leads to more donors going to the event… and the circle continues.

To show you what it looks like when it all comes together, here’s the event performance for an organization that we began serving in 2016:

Gross revenue chart.

Impressive, eh?

Virtuous Circle

Those are the “Core Four” strategies that, working together, create a self-reinforcing virtuous circle that helps organizations experience crazy growth.

Which of the Core Four could your organization improve at? If you’d like help, send an email to info@betterfundraising.com.  Or go here to see how we help organizations like yours!

Not All Complaints are Equal

Steven Screen  |  Repeat

Not all complaints are equal. 

For instance, a complaint from a non-donor who is subscribed to your email newsletter should be given less time and attention than a complaint from a beneficiary or staff member.

So, a smart organization responds differently to different complaints.

As an organization responds to a complaint, there are three main “variables”:

  • Change the level of energy put into the response
  • Change the fundraising the complainer receives in the future
  • Change the fundraising all donors receive in the future

Change the Level of Energy

You can vary how much energy you respond to a complaint with.

For instance, the complainer can receive a pre-written email that acknowledges their complaint and thanks them for submitting it… or be met for coffee and an hour-long conversation… or anywhere in between.

Don’t spend more energy than needed when responding to complaints.

Note: this principle also applies to an organization’s internal response to complaints.  A complaint can kick-start worried discussions and hijack future meetings… or it can be quickly submitted into a system and handled professionally.

Change What the Complainer Receives

You can vary the amount or selection of fundraising you send to the person who complains. 

Perhaps they only want to receive a certain type of your fundraising impacts, like your newsletters but not your appeals.  Or they’d like to receive fewer overall pieces.

Code that person’s record in your CRM appropriately and/or make notes to future list pulls, and move along.

Change What Everyone Receives

You can change all of your fundraising that every donor receives.

This is making changes like, “We can’t ever use that phrase again” or “Let’s reduce the number of mail pieces and emails we send.”

This is the most drastic approach.  It’s the approach that smaller nonprofits tend to gravitate towards because of fears that the complainer is speaking for untold numbers of people.  But it’s the approach least used by larger organizations, because they know that one complainer does not speak for anyone but themselves.

Right-Sized Response

The trick is to right-size your response. 

Our advice is to always value complaints and the person making them.  It’s important to respond warmly  because when a person complains, the response or interaction they have with the organization is often the only customized, personal interaction they’ve ever had with the organization.  The person will form a lot of their opinion about the organization based on this interaction.

And at the same time, respond to each complaint with the right amount of energy and the right level of response. Over-reaction gives recipients more power than they deserve.

In a nutshell, one person’s fundraising preferences should not drive your organization’s fundraising strategy.

Read the series:

  1. Getting Used to Complaints
  2. Outline for How to Respond to a Complaint
  3. Not All Complaints are Equal (this post)
  4. Natural, But Not Productive
  5. The Two Times Smaller Orgs Get More Complaints
  6. So. Many. Reasons. To. Complain.
  7. The Harmful Big Assumption
  8. Turning Complaints into Gifts
  9. “Friendly Fire” — Complaints from Internal Audiences
  10. Our Final Thoughts on Complaints

You Need to *Not* Do Some Things in 2019

Steven Screen  |  Measure
<Other

This month we’re posting about the fundraising strategies and tactics that worked well in 2018.

Here’s a piece of hard-won advice: if you want to raise more this year, you need to actively decide not to do some of the things you’ve done in previous years.

Here’s this strategy in a catchy quote:

All strategy is sacrifice.

And here’s how I explain this in a simple decision tree:

  1. You have limited resources (time and money)
  2. You have to decide what to do with your time and money
  3. Which means you also have to decide what not to do with your time and money.

Smaller nonprofits, in my experience, are bad at deciding what not to do. Specifically…

Smaller Nonprofits Have a Hard Time Stopping Doing Things

They have a harder time cutting projects and strategies that are no longer the highest use of limited resources.

I suspect this is mostly because of the collaborative nature of fundraising and communications in small- to medium-sized nonprofits. There’s always somebody who values a thing you’ve done in the past. Here are some recognizable examples:

  • You keep mailing printed annual reports to all donors because some board member or major donor rep says that they simply must have it.
  • You keep doing an event that loses money each year (not to mention the investment of time) because a major donor loves it and has made it their pet project.
  • You write, format and send out an e-newsletter every month because “we have to tell people what we’ve been doing” even though 1 out of 20 people actually open the email.

Sound familiar? And in a collaborative environment, it’s hard to tell stakeholders that their project is going to be cut.

It’s especially hard when the fundraising that’s actually raising the money (and keeping your donors) isn’t well-measured. Because when no one can point to a line on a spreadsheet and say, “Look, THIS is where we raise most of our money, we should do more of this” … then all projects are equal.

And when all projects are equal, the stakeholder with the loudest voice / most passion / highest ranking wins.

Your Nonprofit Needs to Make Hard Choices

Here’s my advice in a nutshell:

Measure and track what really produces your fundraising net revenue.

Then relentlessly focus your resources on doing more of those things.

Be willing to endure some interpersonal conflict in exchange for raising more money and doing more good.

There’s no silver bullet here. For most nonprofits it’s about making hard choices, measuring, and being “sold out” to doing more good – instead of doing what someone thinks is best.

If This Is Your Organization and You Want to Change…

We have one piece of advice for you: measure your fundraising inputs and outputs.

If you don’t already know, figure out how much everything costs and how much everything raises. That’s your preparation for starting the hard conversations.

Data doesn’t always win, but it sure helps. And the practice of gathering and evaluating data is a skill that is incredibly valuable in the nonprofit world.

Final Days of the Sale

Our sale ends in a few days! You can raise more money in 2019, and have more time to focus on important projects, by having Better Fundraising create your appeals, e-appeals and newsletters.

And you can save thousands of dollars.

Visit this page to learn more and fill out a simple form if you’re interested. We’re genuinely excited about how 2018 went for our clients, and would love to work with you in 2019!