Bring your donors to life with a great newsletter

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25 February 2013

Bring your donors to life with a great newsletter

If you produce a newsletter and it's not bringing in revenue, you need to see this video at Movie Mondays for Fundraising Professionals.

It features my podcast partner Steven Screen, recounting what he did to a nonprofit donor newsletter to increase its revenue from $500 to $35,000:

3 simple changes to a newsletter that caused donations to skyrocket

Here's how you do it:

Write for one person -- don't address a large audience.
Make it about the wonderful things that have happened because of the donor.
Design for skimming.

Believe me, it works.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 25 February 2013 at 08:35 in Fundraising | Permalink

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This sounds great- sign me up

Posted by: susan Phipps Carr | 25 February 2013 at 13:20

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What this blog is about
The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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About the blogger

Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing, has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 20 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff.brooks [at] truesense [dot] com. More.

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Instead of talking at donors, TrueSense is proving it's smarter to listen. Asking donors how they prefer to give. Because we’re about creating relationships and building trust and communicating honestly and powerfully. One to one. Want to talk fundraising? Drop me a line.

Read the book!

At last, the book you really need to read about fundraising. I wrote it for you: All the stuff you wish you (or your boss) knew about fundraising that motivates donors to give, give frequently, and give joyfully.

Some of what you'll find here may seem contrarian. It's not. It's proven, tested, real-life stuff that actually works. If you care about fundraising, about your donors, and about supporting your cause, you need to read The Fundraiser's Guide to Irresistible Communications by Jeff Brooks.