About 20 years ago, I hired a freelance designer to design an appeal letter for a nonprofit I was serving. The nonprofit wanted the letter to feel personal, and we decided that the entire letter would appear handwritten, instead of typed or printed.
The Designer went to work. And a few days later I opened a PDF with the coolest looking letter I’d ever seen… that was almost unreadable.
The “handwriting” the Designer used was cool, full of angles and interesting shapes. I’m sure it took them a long time to create.
But I knew that for an appeal letter to raise a bunch of money, it needed to be highly legible – both to old people and to people moving quickly.
So I told the Designer that even though I loved how the letter looked, I needed it redone because it was too hard to read.
The Designer refused.
“I can’t do it any better,” they said, “it looks great.”
“I know it looks great,” I said, “but it’s too hard to read, so we need to redo it and make it easier to read.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” they said, “it won’t look as good.” I don’t recall how the conversation ended, because after that moment I realized that I needed to hire a new Designer and that I was probably behind schedule.
I share this story today because it’s a great reminder that when we’re making fundraising, we’re not getting paid to make art. We’re not getting paid to express ourselves. We’re not getting paid to create designs or messages that we like.
When we make fundraising we are getting paid to fulfill a “business function” of building relationships with donors.
Fundraising that starts with the makers in mind – the aesthetic taste of the Designer, the language taste of the Executive Director, etc. – is more like art than Fundraising. It may resonate with donors, it may not.
Contrast that to fundraising that starts with donors in mind. It uses design that resonates with donors. Vocab that donors already know. Concepts donors already understand.
Fundraising created with donors in mind does a better job of retaining donors because it does the work to meet donors where they are at, instead of requiring donors to do the work to understand the organization.
So, if your organization is having a hard time retaining donors, look at your fundraising and say, “If we kept our donors more in mind as we made our fundraising, what would we do differently?”
Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
