At the beginning of a nonprofit’s fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,
“How can we describe our work to be as inspirational as possible?”
Farther along on their fundraising journey, when deciding what its fundraising should be about, the nonprofit wonders,
“What do humans tend to be motivated by, and how can we talk about our work in a way that taps in to what motivates people?”
The second question results in creating fundraising that’s more interesting and relevant to drastically more people, which increases the amount of money the organization can raise.
Why? Because there aren’t that many people interested in your work itself, no matter how inspirationally you describe it.
But there are millions of people who are engaged by emotions, who want to see justice done, who want to right wrongs, and who want their gift to make a meaningful difference. Focus your fundraising on how those elements are part of your work, and your organization becomes a lot more interesting to a lot more people.
When writing appeals, it’s a natural instinct to tell individual donors more about the organization itself.
This results in copy like:
Founded in 1971, we’ve been…
Our three pillars are…
Our program, Uplifting Kids, addresses the needs…
All of this is educating the donor under the belief that “if our donors knew more about us, and knew how competent we are, they would give more.”
However, in 30+ years of looking at fundraising results, what I’ve seen is that appeals raise more money when they educate less. (The two most successful appeal letters of my career don’t even mention the organization.)
Here’s my interpretation of the data: by eliminating the education, you remove content that is unimportant to a donor’s decision. This results in appeals where more of the content is relevant, which causes increased giving.
Put differently: when you remove the noise, the signal is stronger.
Reminder – I’m talking about communicating with individual donors and non-donors in the mail and email. Not at an event, not at lunch with a major donor, not a tour, etc.
Here’s how I advise nonprofits to think: “It’s a generous act to simplify our mail and email fundraising for individual donors. They don’t need to need to know the details – that’s what they have us for! If we get a chance to interact in person or at an event, they are showing interest so it’s appropriate to go into the details. And if they keep giving faithfully through the mail or email without ever interacting with us another way, that’s OK too.”
Remember, you’re already removing lots of details about your organization from your mail and email fundraising. You don’t talk to donors about your accounting practices, or whether you own or rent your office space, or your approach to HR.
So, just remove a few more details about your organization.
When you make the generous act of not requiring donors to know your organization’s details, you unlock more generosity from more donors.
Two weeks ago at the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference, I shared an idea that’s challenging to some fundraisers and organizations:
Many effective appeals & campaigns are “sequels” of previous successful appeals or campaigns.
Here’s what I mean…
Say you send an appeal in March and it works great. When it’s time to make next year’s March appeal, you make a “sequel” of the successful appeal. You do that by looking at last year’s package. You make any copy improvements you can, maybe replace the story with a new one, perhaps make the design a little cleaner.
Now you have a “sequel” to a successful appeal. And the sequel is highly likely to raise just as much money as the first appeal, if not more.
Then the following year you make another sequel, making it better yet again, and raising even more money. And you keep making sequels until your results start to decline, or there’s some other good reason to stop (the program ends, you discover a better idea in another appeal, etc.).
I used AI to generate an image to illustrate the concept. This is meant to be a nonprofit with their original March appeal on the left, and the two sequels they’ve made…
As you move from left to right (in other words, as you make more sequels), they get better and more interesting than the original successful appeal. Each year’s appeal raises a bit more money than the previous year’s. This is what getting really good at fundraising in the mail and email looks like.
Now, let’s compare that approach with the standard approach of, “We have to come up with a new theme for every appeal.” Here’s what that looks like…
Here we’ve got three totally unique appeals, and each year’s revenue is a bit of a guessing game.
Large organizations and agencies follow the “sequel approach” because it has all sorts of advantages over the standard approach:
Revenue tends to grow each year
Revenue is more predictable
Lessons are learned faster
Sequels take less time and effort to create
And of course, when an appeal or campaign doesn’t work, there’s no sequel. Plus it’s important to experiment every once in a while.
The thing I don’t like about the “sequel” analogy is that in movies, the sequel usually isn’t as good as the original. The seventh sequel of an original movie you loved probably isn’t very good.
But the opposite is true in fundraising: the seventh “March appeal” raises tons more money than the original, because you’re so much better at it and have learned so many lessons.
Let me really bring home the benefits of this approach for you: if you have a small handful of successful sequels to use every year, it means you have a steady stream of increasing revenue plus the time to work on other things.
As you look at your fundraising calendar for 2026, what appeal or campaign can be a sequel of a successful appeal or campaign you did this year?
It happens all the time at nonprofits – you want to include a story in your next appeal or e-appeal to help donors understand the situation better… but you don’t have a story.
In case that ever happens to you, here’s a technique we use all the time. I call it “telling a true story about a person you know exists but you have not met.”
Here’s an example for an organization that sends missionaries and is raising money to provide training for the missionaries.
As I write you today, there’s a missionary who could use a little help. Their faith is strong, their marriage is strong, but they could use a little break and a little encouragement. That’s why I’m excited to tell you that your gift of $XX will provide a day of respite and training.
Because in the life of a missionary, there should be times of rest. These are people who think about their calling 24/7! And with as rapidly as today’s world is moving, it’s hard to build deep cross-cultural relationships and stay on top of the latest missionary knowledge.
Your gift will allow one person to do just that.
Imagine the relief when a missionary hears, “A generous donor has sent in a gift to help pay for your training. And the cost for this break and trip will be paid for – it doesn’t come out of your personal budget!”
If you put yourself in a tired missionary’s shoes for a moment, I’m sure you can image tears, and relief, and joy, and wonderment.
See how there’s no traditional “story”? But can you also see how we’ve painted a true word picture that helps the donor see the situation and what their gift will do?
Here’s the thing: you are an expert in the people or cause you’re working on. You know the details, the circumstances, and the emotions.
So you can share details that you know are true, even though you don’t know the people themselves.
This technique is not a replacement for “a great story from the field.” (There are details and emotions in real stories that even the best writers can’t create.)
But sometimes you don’t have a story. And when you know your work, and you know your fundraising would be more powerful with true details, this technique is helpful.
The online fundraising platforms we’re currently using are going to change.
Think about it. For any Fundraiser who has been fundraising online for a decade, they’ve had two dominant platforms: Facebook and Instagram.
Now podcasts, texts and TikTok are coming.
If you work in Fundraising for the next 20 years, I bet there will be three or four more platforms.
The technology changes every couple of years. Human psychology barely changes at all.
It’s good to know the ins and outs of whatever platform you’re using now. But what will make you an exceptional Fundraiser is knowing the ins and outs of what makes people give and then give again.
Then you’ll succeed on any platform.
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PS — writing this post made me realize that the two channels that have the most staying power are probably the mail and email. I suggest that’s true because mail and email are experienced by the recipient as a direct message to them.
Texts have the same feature.
If those are the three “platforms” that are going to stick around, I would prioritize getting good at them. Plus, they have a feature that is always a benefit: they allow you to “own your list” instead of being at the mercy of the algorithm.
Back in the 90’s I received a lesson in giving directions, and I use that lesson in fundraising every day…
I was writing and producing radio commercials for a national chain of bookstores. At the end of each ad, there were 8 seconds to describe the location of one of their stores. And I was responsible for writing the description of each store’s location.
When I started writing these, my instinct was to start the description in the context of the store. This resulted in descriptions like, “you’ll find us at the NW corner of Harlow and Prescott, across from the museum, in Byron Center.”
This approach puts significant cognitive load on the listener because they must remember a lot of details (which corner? what streets? across from which landmark?) before they even know what town the store is in. And if the town turns out to be close by, the listener then has to “go backwards” and remember the details from before.
Thankfully my boss corrected me and said something like, “don’t start the description from the store, start the description from a place the listener knows. Always write from the known to the unknown.”
This advice changed how I give directions, and how I write.
My revised store directions were much more helpful to people: “You’ll find us South of Grand Rapids, in Byron Center, across from the museum, on the corner of Harlow and Prescott.”
My fundraising writing was better. Before, I tended to write from the context of the nonprofit: “We have 4 programs to help people in our community. And all our programs take a holistic approach to addressing the needs of junior high students who are behind in math.” Today, I start with something the listener knows or understands; “There are local junior high students who are behind in math. Our approach is holistic, and we serve them with 4 different programs.”
Going “from the known to the unknown” makes your fundraising easier to understand quickly because it reduces the cognitive load on your readers.
This ability to meet donors on common ground – to write fundraising that they understand that then helps them see what their gift will make possible through you, is gold.
If you do this, more people will read your fundraising. And when more people read your fundraising, more people tend to give to your nonprofit.
I’m going to show you a four-page direct mail appeal I wrote awhile back. I had an unusually strong story to work with, and I was tempted to over-focus on it by using the techniques of creative writing and journalism. Fortunately, I caught myself in time and turned it back into a fundraising message.
I’m encouraging you to read this because the letter is very good, and it’s always good to be exposed to effective fundraising. And because, as Jeff walks you through the letter, he also shares helpful lessons about how to tell stories that move people to give.
The following is a hand-picked guest post from Jeff Brooks. Enjoy, and you can read more about Jeff below.
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In fundraising, it’s smart to get more than one pair of eyes on anything you plan to send out.
But not everything you ask people will give you useful or accurate information.
Here are two questions fundraisers often ask others that often lead to fundraising failure:
Do you like this? Fundraising isn’t meant to be liked. It’s meant to connect and persuade. Those are not at all the same thing. In fact, it’s common for the most effective fundraising to be disliked. And when nonprofit staff “like” the message, it is very likely to do poorly with donors. They are the wrong audience entirely. Good fundraising will often rub them the wrong way.
Would you give to this? This might seem a more on-target question. But it’s not. Because rationally thinking through whether or not you’d respond is radically unlike encountering a message, paying attention to it, and following through with a donation. Those two situations are so different, there’s no correlation between the two. If there’s a correlation, it’s the strong negative correlation between insiders saying they’d give and donors actually giving.
If you’re hoping to improve your fundraising, don’t ask anyone either of these questions.
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Steven says, “Jeff Brooks is the brilliant author of Future Fundraising Now (which you should subscribe to). I’ve been lucky enough to know Jeff since we both had hair that was longer and browner. He’s the best, clearest voice on direct response fundraising that I know of.”
The following is a hand-picked guest post from Tom Ahern. Enjoy, and you can read more about Tom below.
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Do low grade scores read as dumbing down?
If you write an appeal at the 6th-grade level, you’re not targeting kids. You’re helping busy adults “get” your ask as fast as possible.
[The subhead above was written at the 6th-grade level, as scored by Flesch-Kincaid. It has a reading ease score of 76 out of 100, far ABOVE the desired minimum of 55. Did you recoil? Did you instantly think: “Dammit, Tom. Stop talking down to me!”]
——
There it was… in my email in-box: the Bat signal … from a friend and colleague…
Hi Tom,
I have a work problem and need your help, please!
When I got to [insert charity name here; it’s in NYC], they were passing the foundation’s quarterly impact reports verbatim on to major donors.
My boss saw that I have the comms knack and let me take over editing these to make them “individual-donor friendly” – mainly choosing one impact story and highlighting a person receiving benefit from our programs, with photo, etc…
Now we have a new VP of Development. The guy who writes these foundation reports directly reports to her… and she is now letting him stick his nose into what we are doing. He has no training in fundraising.
While I was at a doctor appointment a few weeks ago, my junior colleague agreed to share the draft he and I had been working on with this guy, who proceeded to torture him for 45 minutes and tell him how stupid he was for using low Flesch-Kincaid grade scores as our benchmark. To summarize the marcomm rant: “Our donors are not stupid” etc.
You’ve heard it all before.
So I have a very small window in which to educate this ignoramus. I have a big folder of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years plus books.
Do you have any sort of executive summary of Tom’s laws that I can share? If not, I can provide the kit and kaboodle to my colleague, and he can distill it down.
Best, [name deleted]
PS: I can’t believe this is happening.
——
My reply to [name deleted]…
Preach, sister. (And so sorry!)
Clearly, your marcomm guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t yet know. And weren’t we all in those shoes once upon a time?
It’s almost an unbelievable story, after all.
Who would guess that the Flesch-Kincaid readability scales are one of the best-kept trade secrets of the world’s most successful direct-mail copywriters?
Or who would guess that these same Flesch-Kincaid ease-of-reading scales dictate how the U.S. Navy writes its maintenance manuals? Keeping that sophisticated machinery humming are bright, recent high-school graduates. Hey, sailor: Got a problem? Here’s how to fix it quickly. Even though you’re not a nuclear scientist.
So, my friend, here’s an excerpt from a book I compiled from experts around the world: If Only You’d Known….
If you’re looking for the equivalent to “Tom’s laws,” this is as close as I have.
Chapter 15
What’s the preferred “grade level” of reading for a direct mail appeal?
[ ] 6th grade [ ] 9th grade [ ] 12th grade
Grade level and speed reading
[Answer to the quiz above] You’re not sure, right? Well, what if I told you that this particular direct mail appeal hoped to raise donations from alumni of a prestigious university?
In that case, you might assume “12th grade.” The thinking: write at the same grade level as a person’s educational attainment.
Otherwise you commit the insult of “writing down.”
Not exactly
“Grade level,” as measured by the standard Flesch-Kincaid readability scoring system,[1] has nothing to do with your intelligence or how far you went in school.
The system scores just one thing: How quickly my brain can move through your prose. Below, on the left, are the readability scores for a successful direct mail letter.
On the right are the readability scores for a university-written case for support. The one on the left will be a brisk read for everyone. The one on the right will be a slog for everyone, including the Ph.Ds.
You decide.
Your writing can bring me clarity and quick understanding. Or your writing can bring me labor. Which do you think is more “reader convenient”… or appreciated?
Steven says, “Tom Ahern was described by the New York Times as “…one of the country’s most sought-after creators of fundraising messages.” Tom has what I’d call the industry-leading newsletter about fundraising. Being mentioned in it was a career highlight for me. You can (and should!) subscribe for free here.”
