Future Fundraising Now

How to raise funds in an election year

Terrified about what the upcoming election might do to your fundraising? Don't be.

Handle things right, and the election will not bulldoze your fundraising results.

Tom Harrison's column in Fundraising Success magazine has some great tips, at Electoral Dysfunction?:

1. Beware of the self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the most damaging things elections do to fundraising is they cause fundraisers to pull back in fear, thus raising less money. It's your own fault if you do that.
2. Know your audience. Political donors and charitable donors are largely different people.
3. Choose mail-drop dates wisely. Avoid dropping direct mail in the month or so leading up to the election.
4. Do not skip a mailing. See #1. Re-arrange drop-dates, but don't omit any.
5. Check your formats. Mailboxes will be full of standard #10 packages and oversized postcards. Use different formats to stand apart from the political noise.
6. Rethink DRTV and radio fundraising. Avoid placing on news networks. Place lightly in the weeks before the election. Go heavy after the election, when broadcasters tend to have a lot of extra inventory.
7. Optimize your digital spend. Shift more toward search, display ads, and email.
8. Shift your messaging. If you can, take advantage of the public discourse that surrounds the election -- which is mainly about the economy. If your cause or your needs are connected to the state of the economy, talk about that.

Elections don't take slices of "our" pie. The danger they pose to us is the noise they create. It can make it harder for donors to hear our messages. You can mostly get around that.

The right way to experiment in fundraising

I hope you test your fundraising messages often. If you don't, you're flying blind. I also hope you test in ways that will yield meaningful learning.

Seth Godin recently commented on this important topic at Getting serious about experimentation.

The best experiments are experiments on purpose. They are done with rigor and intent. They are measured. They are designed to either fail or create an approach that can be scaled.

Always know what you intend to discover by a test. State a clear hypothesis. Know what will constitute success. Isolate variables, so if something goes right (or wrong), you'll know what caused it.

Do that, and even failed experiment are valuable.

Almost everything you need to write better

Here's a possibly exhaustive list, at Copyblogger, of 48 Elements of Persuasive Written Content:

1. Anxiety
2. Authenticity
3. Authority
4. Boxes
5. Breaks
6. Bullet Points
7. Buttons
8. Catch Phrases
9. Catchy Headlines
10. Color
11. Commas
12. Common Language
13. Contractions
14. Dashes
15. Depth
16. Email Addresses
17. Emotional Response
18. Extras
19. Eyes
20. Facts
21. Fluency
22. Guarantee
23. Images
24. Instructions
25. Locality
26. Logic
27. Meat
28. Opinions
29. Paragraphs
30. Periods
31. Phone Numbers
32. Phrasing
33. Polish
34. Post Scripts
35. Presence
36. Questions
37. Quotes
38. Rationale
39. Seals and Stamps
40. Short Introduction
41. Short Sentences
42. Signature
43. Social Connections
44. Spacing
45. Testimonials
46. Texture
47. Tone
48. Voice

Go see the post for detail on each of these things. It'll help you write better.

Stupid misconception about the inner lives of children

Hey, I have a great idea for a fundraising campaign. Here's the brief:

• Even though it's about suffering children, don't show any children. (Nobody is emotionally connected to children anymore, right?)
• The centerpiece will be a series of images that most people will not be able to identify. (That'll make them pay more attention, right?)
• Explain the image with a slogan that completely undercuts the cause. (Cognitive dissonance!)

Okay, not such a good idea. But it seems to be the brief for this agency-created campaign for War Child, a UK nonprofit. Here's one of the ads:

There are several other print ads (or posters?) in the campaign, and even a video on YouTube, none of which sheds any more light on the message:

It's easy to convince children that killing is a game.

Think about that slogan for a moment. If you personally know any children, the falsity of it is breathtaking. In fact, the monsters who create child soldier don't lure them in with fun and games -- they do it with appalling violence and drugs. They psychologically destroy the child to turn him into a killer.

And if it were true that it's easy to convince children that killing is a game, saying so would be an ineffective way to arouse the empathy of potential donors. Apparently, in the alternate universe where this ad agency is located, children are just one step away from being war criminals.

Like most Stupid Nonprofit Ads, the whole premise is an insanely ill-conceived visual metaphor. You probably didn't realize those things on the posters were weapons made from balloons -- much less the point they're trying to make.

I hope nobody paid for this disaster. Even more, I hope nobody outside the "look-at-our-cool-pro-bono-ad" echo chamber sees the misleading message.

Thanks to Creative Advertisements for NGO for the tip.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

The power of texture words in copy

It seems certain words do more to activate the brains of readers than others, as reported at the Neuromarketing blog: Persuade with Silky Smooth Copy.

A recent study (Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex) compared people's unconscious reactions to "textural metaphors" compared to non-textural phrases. Like these:

Having a bad day?
or
Having a rough day?

The use of "rough" in this context caused sensory areas of the brain to be activated while "bad" did not.

What can we fundraisers do with this information? Easy: Look for those texture words:

Say "sharp pain" instead of "severe pain." "Smooth" instead of "easy." Find ways to use words like gravelly, crunchy, bumpy, silky, hard, soft.

Your fundraising can still perform poorly if you do this, but if you're getting everything else right, prompting more action in your donors' somatosensory cortexes can only help.

What nonprofits should know about social media

Here are 5 Myths About Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations from the Good Counsel blog:

1. Social media is a great way to fundraise.
2. Social media will get people to do something for us or drive more traffic to our website.
3. A nonprofit's 'follower' numbers directly translates in to memberships, dollars in the door or increased event attendance.
4. Social media will fix all the problems, and is a great strategy for nonprofits.
5. Social media is a fad, and we can just ignore it until it goes away.

I half-way agree with #5. Actually, for fundraising purposes, social media is largely a fad (actually several rising and falling fads), but it would be foolish to just ignore it. Social media in some form is likely to become much more than a fad, possibly even a great medium for raising funds. Pay attention, because the switch is likely to be subtle and quick.

How to get your email newsletter read

E-newsletters are tough to make work. I think we're still in the midst of discovering what really works. But here are some thoughts from the VerticalResponse blog: 5 Golden Rules to Creating a Significant Email Newsletter:

1. Be informative
2. Lose the (sales) hype
3. Keep it brief & aim for a click
4. Be reliable and consistent
5. Let them opt-out easily

It's a start.

How to create ideas that make a difference

Some of my coolest ideas have little chance of making a difference in the world. Because they're complicated. I understand them, but nobody else does.

MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog points out the difficulty of this situation at Want Your Idea to Be Loved? Keep It Simple:

A great idea is only great when others can understand it and easily act on it. The best ideas are similar to magic; they are amazing yet easily understood on the surface. In a time of an overwhelming abundance of information, data, and options, the more efficiently you can explain your strategy, the better it most likely is.

If your idea is still complicated, it's not finished.

The first and biggest mistake of fundraising copywriters

Very important point from Pro Copy Tips, at Why good copy goes bad: are you stupid or just ignorant? Here it is:

One of the worst mistakes you can make as a copywriter is to assume your job is about writing.

It's true, I'm sad to say.

In fundraising, you'll do better if you're a fundraiser who writes well than if you're a writer who's stuck doing fundraising.

Because real-world professional fundraising writing is not about finding your voice or baring your innermost soul. It's about knowing a lot of things about donors, how to motivate them, what a good offer is, and a dozen other details -- and being able to write all that in clean, clear, vivid prose.

If you want to be a "pure" writer -- a Sylvia Plath or a James Joyce whose writing is a form of art -- you're most likely going to live in poverty and obscurity.

If you want to make a difference -- and a paycheck -- your writing talent is merely one of many tools in a well-stocked toolbox.

This is often the first and hardest hurdle for young aspiring professional writers, in fundraising or any other writing profession. The quicker you get past it, the more happy and successful you'll be.