There’s a conversation we’re having more and more as young people enter the fundraising profession and older people on Boards are replaced with the next generation.
The conversation always starts with a question that goes something like this…
We could talk about this for hours, but if this is coming up for your organization, let me give you a couple of quick reasons these tools are still so useful to so many nonprofits.
- Email and the mail help small organizations scale. There are only so many people you can personally know, and only so many people who will go to your event. So the ability to communicate effectively with thousands of people at once is necessary in order to scale (particularly to break the “raising $1m annually from individual donors” threshold.)
- Email and the mail make your organization more resilient and less fragile. Two ways. First, you want to have the skill of fundraising and being in relationship with donors even when you can’t meet with them. (We all saw what happened to event-driven organizations during the pandemic. Ouch.) Second, having a good mail and email program spreads your revenue across the entire year, so you’re not so dependent on the world running smoothly (no wars being started, no natural disasters) the month of your event.
- The mail and email help you identify new mid- and major-donors. You watch giving patterns, you identify prospects, and you raise up your next generation of majors. (A friend of mine used to run the individual donor program for a national organization with hundreds of thousands of donors. He said, “Yes, we raise a lot of money with the mail and email, but our real job is to identify major donor prospects.”)
And that’s just three reasons. There are all sorts of other reasons, like “lots of majors still give via the mail” and “mail & email keep you in touch with Majors who don’t answer your attempts to get in touch” and “you aren’t dependent on the whims of the social media algorithm because you own the relationship.”
The mail and email are proven and effective; that’s why they’re still in use!
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
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