Your Uniqueness is the Eighth Most Important Thing

A lot of smaller nonprofits believe that sharing their uniqueness will cause them to have fundraising success.

But in my experience, when an organization talks about their uniqueness in their fundraising to individual donors, it causes them to raise less.  (In fact, when we start working with organizations that have been making a big deal of their uniqueness, we stop mentioning it and they start raising more money.)

Here’s the deal: there’s nothing wrong with uniqueness, and it’s an important idea in a couple of contexts; but in your letters and emails to individual donors it’s something like the 8^th most important idea.

Here’s an off-the-cuff list of things that are more important to get right in your fundraising to individual donors than mentioning your organization’s uniqueness:

1. Earning and keeping the donor’s attention
2. Sharing the situation the beneficiaries or cause are in today
3. Sharing the size of a gift a donor needs to give to make a meaningful difference
4. Sharing what the donor’s gift will do to help
5. Sharing how the donor’s past gift made a difference
6. Making the letter/email effective for both Readers and Scanners
7. Making it clear that the donor’s gift is needed

If you’ve done all seven of those things well, and adding a mention of your uniqueness doesn’t diminish any of those seven, then by all means talk about it. 

The lesson we’ve learned looking at fundraising results over the years is that uniqueness matters most to insiders and experts.  For instance, your unique approach is often a very important point to include in a grant application.

But when you’re talking to your individual donors – the vast majority of whom aren’t insiders or experts – the results make it clear that there are other, more important messages to communicate first.