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?
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.
So, am I hearing you correctly that if we issued an appeal for student field trip bus transportation money last March, we should ask for student field trip bus transportation money this March, too? With perhaps a more polished “ask”?
Thank you,
In a nutshell, yes! If last March’s appeal did well, it means you’ve identified part of your work that your donors enjoy funding. So if you have the same need (bus transportation) again this coming March, then run the same appeal/campaign again and try to make it a little stronger.