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.”
Blogger, author, and fundraising copywriter Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years. He believes that success in fundraising comes from sharing our hearts and our stories with donors, and from keeping our eyes on the facts and the data that are in front of us.
- Jeff Brookshttps://betterfundraising.com/author/jeff-brooks/
- Jeff Brookshttps://betterfundraising.com/author/jeff-brooks/
- Jeff Brookshttps://betterfundraising.com/author/jeff-brooks/
