Future Fundraising Now

Let's talk about great nonprofit newsletters

Seattle-area friends: I'll be speaking at the upcoming conference of the Northwest Development Officer's Association, along with Jill Perry of Providence Hospice of Seattle Foundation on Friday, June 7, at the Lynnwood Convention Center.

Our presentation: How to Create a Revenue-Producing, Relationship-Building, Donor-Centric Newsletter. We'll share the secrets of great nonprofit newsletters, including, how to write headlines, the right voice for a newsletter, design principles, and the common "money-saving" idea that kills newsletters.

Information and registration here. Early bird (that is, lower price) registration until May 24.

Hope to see you there!

How to make your landing page a place that welcomes people

Have you ever walked into a store and immediately backed out because the place was a random mess, blaring music that was hostile to you, and you couldn't figure out where you should go?

A lot of nonprofit landing pages are like that.

And that's a big problem. Because more and more donors give online -- and not any other way. If your landing page isn't welcoming, clear, and easy -- you are losing more money than you can count.

The Bad Language has some help, at 15 ways to improve your home page.

Here are most of them:

• Attractive things are perceived as being easier to use.
• Consistency: do not divorce your homepage from the branding on the rest of your site.
• Less is more.
• Keep your ideas simple.
• Think twice before including an automatically launching video -- there's a high likelihood visitors will click away to stop the video.
• Have the most important information clearly visible at the top: your contact information.
• Make it obvious what you do.
• Tell them how you can help them.
• If you want visitors to scroll, let them know there is something to see.
• Load time is still critical.
• Employ responsive web-design so your site is readable no matter what device your visitor is using.

Mathematical proof that "donor fatigue" isn't real

If you have ever cited "donor fatigue" as something that might be hurting your fundraising results, you need to read this article by Sean Triner at Pareto Fundraising: Donor fatigue fatigue.

I believe donor fatigue is a pretend thing (used by unsuccessful fundraisers to cover their ... tracks). If you don't believe me, listen to Sean. He has mathematical proof that there's no donor fatigue.

That proof: Good old RFV (recency, frequency, value) often called RFM or (recency, frequency, monetary.) A standard and time-tested tool from commercial direct marketing. Here's how it plays out for us:

• Recency: The more recently a donor gave the more likely she is to donate now.
• Frequency: The more times a person has donated, the more likely they are to donate again.
• Monetary: Donors tend to give around the same amount each time they give. This tells us what is the right amount to ask any given donor. Make sure it's about what they've given before.

These are utterly dependable truths in fundraising. And they are exactly counter to the donor fatigue hypothesis, which says that you'll get more if you ask less. That never happens. If you are pursuing that strategy, you are losing revenue and causing more of your donors to lapse.

Discarding the donor fatigue myth is a quick and easy change you can make to bring quick and meaningful improvements to your fundraising program.

Is your nonprofit website just a pretty face?

I was advising an organization on their website, and one of the things I advised was this:

Make your DONATE button a contrasting color from the rest of the page. Make it the easiest thing on the page to find.

The web designer flipped his stylish lid. "That would be a disaster, he said. "It would undermine the entire color palette!"

The conversation went downhill from there.

This often comes up in discussions with designers, brand cops, and keepers of visual identity systems. They really stand up for those color palettes. They see them as paramount to the integrity of their designs. Straying from the palette to create contrast? That would be like slapping a barcode across the face of the Mona Lisa! A disaster!

Okay, it would be a disaster indeed if the entire purpose of the website were to have a perfectly congruent color palette. But that's not the goal of any nonprofit website I've ever heard of. The real goal is something a little more action-oriented. Like producing donation revenue.

Or it would be a disaster if a perfectly congruent color palette were necessary to produce donation revenue. Except it isn't. Go ahead and test it for yourself, but calls to action in contrasting colors are clearly the way to go. If you want people to act on your calls to action.

The people who insist on perfect color palettes and other forms of brand consistency that depress fundraising results are choosing aesthetic satisfaction over funding their own mission.

Beauty matters. But I think most people would agree a well-funded organization with lots of supporters is a higher form of beauty than a nice color palette.

Why the rich give proportionally less and what to do about it

by guest blogger George Crankovic

When the likes of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates cuts a check to charity in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it attracts media attention and admiration all around.

High rollers like these can do lots of good in one stroke of the pen. Maybe that's why many people assume charitable giving is largely a story of those who have done very well doing good.

But according to a new book on charities and giving by Ken Stern, With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give, the people who can least afford it are the ones who give.

The top 20% of earners give about 1.3% of their income to charity. But the lowest 20% of earners give almost three times more -- 3.2% of their income. That's a huge gulf.

Working stiffs are giving till it hurts. And they're giving even without the benefit of tax deductions because most can't itemize.

What's more, the rich tend to give to colleges and universities, the arts, and museums. In 2012, not one of the top 50 gifts went to social services. Ordinary folks, on the other hand, give to social service charities and churches.

But here's the really interesting part. One study showed differences in giving even among the wealthy. Rich people living in more homogenous neighborhoods gave less than rich people living in somewhat more racially and economically diverse areas.

So what conclusions are drawn from all this -- and how can we apply it to fundraising?

First, the wealthy tend to put their own interests above those of others. That's just the way it is. So if you're approaching a person of means in a face-to-face major gifts setting or through a communications channel, you must demonstrate what's in it for them. Think donor benefits. That's what you should always do in fundraising, but in the case of wealthy donors, it's even more so.

Second, the wealthy are less exposed to poverty, economic injustices, social barriers, and other challenges, so they may be less able to empathize with these problems. That's why, instead of dialing back the need in an appeal in the belief that it will be more palatable to wealthy donors, you should show the raw reality and do it boldly. Especially for big donors, it's sympathy, empathy, generosity, in that order.

3 things that will make your fundraising work

It's pretty simple. You can really increase the chance that donors will care about the thing you want them to fund with just three steps, as articulated by Tom Ahern at Nonprofit Hub: How Nonprofit Fundraisers Can Build a Breathtaking Case. The three steps:

1. Make it big.
2. Make it simple.
3. Make your donor the hero.

Really, it's that simple. Do that, and the only thing that can shoot you down is having a mis-match between your offer and your donors.

Your nonprofit logo in real life

Maybe you've seen the breathless unveiling of the New Logo: So often, it's presented by a proud designer on a large piece of glossy paper, a high-end multi-color process of some kind that makes the logo look just superb.

This is the beginning of your woes with the new logo. Fundraising Coach advises 3 things to consider when designing your nonprofit's logo:

1. Will it work in one color?
2. Will it be identifiable reduced to a 32 pixel x 32 pixel square?
3. Will it be easy to embroider on clothing?

In real life -- unlike the beautiful presentation -- your fundraising happens in some pretty low-rent situations:

Tiny (in print or online), ink-jetted or similar low-end printing, crowded in among other elements, shown on a screen in a presentation. All of these things can distort, muddy, or confuse your logo.

That's why you need to have it designed to still look like itself, even when it's abused in these ways. That's why I ask designers to present logos not only in huge idealized formats that will never happen in real life, but also as postage-stamp sized, black-only formats. That's how you know what you're really getting.

Fundraising trends for major (and minor) donors

What's the difference between a major donor and a regular donor?

The major donor gives bigger gifts.

Most of the other differences are less important and have more to do with the ways we can afford to cultivate high-dollar donors. We'd do the same strategies for regular donors, except if we did we'd spend more raising funds than they gave.

Here are some observations about major donors from Fired-Up Fundraising. Most of them also apply to regular donors. Top 10 Trends: How Major Donors are Changing and What To Do About It:

1. Donors are wary of trusting us.
2. The Boomers are becoming the #1 donor population.
3. Older ladies are THE major donor demographic.
4. Donors want Donor-Centered communications.
5. Major donors who volunteer give more. Much more.
6. Major donors are all over social media.
7. Major donors look at their gifts as investments. They want to see impact and ROI.
8. Major donors are assured when they see the financials and the numbers.
9. Like most of us, donors are feeling overwhelmed, jaded, and even bored.
10. Major donors love a Big Idea.

Are you fundraising from the wrong donors?

One way to really screw up your fundraising is to make bad assumptions about your donors. The most common way we do this is to assume donors are (or should be) exactly like us.

Another common way we make incorrect assumptions about donors is to think all of them are just like the small number of donors we interact with personally. This error is outlined at PhilanTopic, at Blinded By the 'Sophisticated Donor'?

The donors you most likely talk with face-to-face are major donors and institutional donors. What they know, and what they want, are very different from the large mass of more typical donors:

Not everyone is a "sophisticated" donor. Not everyone is a professional fundraiser or works for a foundation or corporate giving program. In fact, very few people do. And people ... seldom give to a charitable cause or organization because they're looking to achieve impact or based on a chart of performance metrics; they give because it makes them feel good, or because it's a worthy cause, or because, like me, they want to help a friend.

I've rarely seen a fundraising message that failed because it was too simple.

I've seen hundreds of fundraising messages that failed because they were too complicated.

We are constantly tempted to fundraising from ourselves or our friends -- or those atypical donors we know and like best. Complexity and sophistication do not translate well to normal donors.

How not to be a boring fundraiser

How many nonprofits have truly boring missions?

I think it's none, or nearly none.

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of really boring fundraising out there. But most of the boring stuff is that way because its creators are not connecting with donors. They're talking to themselves.

Here's how you can change that, from Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog: Reader question: How do I make my mission sound more exciting?.

It's pretty simple, really:

Describe your mission as a destination. Don't talk about your process or philosophy. Talk about your outcomes.

Not everyone has causes like sick children, abandoned puppies, or natural disasters with lots of innocent victims. But I've worked with people who had those causes and were hell-bent on making them boring -- because it was so important for them to talk to themselves, about their processes and philosophies.

If your mission sounds boring, it's largely your own fault.