I've you have an blog, or you're thinking about starting one, don't miss this recent post by Britt Bravo at BlogHer: 10 Elements of an Effective Nonprofit or Do-Good Blog. The ten elements are here, but you'll want the details:
Make it easy to subscribe
Make it easy to share
Make it easy to put faces and names to blog posts
Make it easy to find out more information about your organization, or project
Make it easy to skim, but irresistible read
Link to other bloggers
Facilitate commenting
Post about a range topics (i.e. it's not just about you)
Engage your community and participate in other online communities
Seth talks about the downside of empathy -- or rather thinking you have it when you don't.
Being certain about how someone else feels or what motivates them is foolish. Don't declare that you know exactly why someone made a choice or predict what someone is going to do next, and why.... you're probably going to be wrong.
Fundraisers do this all the time, making wild assumptions about how donors feel. Like this:
Donors are so ticked off by the large amount of mail we send, they're lapsing at higher rates than ever.
Maybe it's not the frequency of your mail. Maybe it's that your messages are dull and irrelevant. Maybe you aren't sending enough mail. You simply don't know how they feel. Your false claim of empathy will lead you to make possibly disastrous decisions, solving the wrong problem.
Even worse, we often project our feelings onto our donors. As in, I hate (or love) this message. That's exactly how other people are going to feel.
Not necessarily. In fact, your feelings about fundraising messages are likely a good counter-indicator of how your donors will feel.
The point is, you don't have enough empathy to accurately predict how donors feel about things. It's far better to gather facts about their behavior -- and act accordingly.
Here are your simple instructions for a direct-mail fundraising letter that will raise buckets of money for your nonprofit organization:
Make a list of everything that's cool and praise-worthy about your organization.
Throw that list in the trash.
Write down everything that's cool and praise-worthy about your donors.
Figure out exactly what you want your donors to do.
Figure out why they would want to do it (given the ways in which they're cool) and write it down. (This piece of writing, by the way, is probably the P.S. of your letter.)
Repeat steps 4 and 5 a whole bunch of times.
Keep the best ones, string them together.
Congratulations! You have a darn good fundraising letter!
The video was produced by a London ad agency, and that explains a lot: We see the danger of abstraction that ad agencies seem unable to keep out of nonprofit marketing. This video's task is a tough one: It seeks to motivate people to "get involved" in various campaigns, apparently by writing letters. That lack of specificity certainly makes it hard to craft a compelling call to action.
But reducing action to visual symbolism doesn't get people closer to action. It pushes them farther away.
When you write a letter, it's an act of communication. It goes somewhere and is read by somebody, who, we hope, takes a proper action as a result.
Your letter is not a big colorful domino that starts knocks over other colorful dominos, that begin knocking over bulldozers, slitting open fish nets, and rescuing a polar bear trapped on an ice floe.
The ad may be cool to look at, but reality -- boring old literal reality of people making the world a better place in specific ways -- is far more compelling. And far more likely to motivate people to action.
If you need to make a video that works to stir real people to real action, find someone who isn't bored with reality.
Colleges that win the most contributions ... have done so in part by spending more money than other institutions to hire full-time staff members to conduct research on alumni and other potential donors, according to a new survey.
Of course, that's like saying pedestrians who look both ways before they cross the street have a lower rate of getting hit by cars.
Access to social media improves productivity. ("Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway?")
Blocking kills engagement.
Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware.
Millennials will not work for companies that block.
Bandwidth is a bogus issue.
If you've got a problem employee you're afraid will while away the whole day on Facebook -- guess what: That guy is already spending the day playing solitaire.
Blocking social media virtually guarantees that you won't figure out the way fundraising is going to be done in the coming years. If that's what your IT people want, you need new IT people.
Here's an excellent set of design principles from Direct Creative Blog: Design and legibility: 7 tips for high ad readership. The focus is on print (publication) ad design, but you'll find these things useful any time you're putting ink to paper with the intent of communicating clearly:
Assist the left to right Eye Rhythm. (Using serif type, avoiding steeply angled type, not too wide leading.)
Avoid unnecessary Fixations and generate necessary ones. (Only use things like italics, underlines, and bold subheads, where you want to eye to stop.)
Work within the natural Eye Span. (Use narrow columns with 5 to 8 words per line.)
Divide the copy into logical Thought Units.
Stick to standard Configurations. (Don't use all caps or put spaces between letters.)
Use Familiar type and layouts.
Help the reader avoid Eye Fatigue. (Use large enough type, break up long copy into smaller chunks, indent paragraphs, use black type on white paper.)
These principles are widely ignored by designers in all fields. Your work will stand out if you pay attention.
Reminders of how donors (i.e. people) think in Katya Andresen's column this month in Fundraising Success magazine: You Talk, Donors Listen. Main points:
Small, not big. The bigger the scale of what you're communicating, the smaller the impact on your audience.
Hopeful, not hopeless. If your problem seems intractable, enormous and endless, people won't be motivated to help.
True, not false. The more you talk about the myth, the more airtime it gets and the more people remember it.
Remembering these things will help you every time you set out to raise funds in any medium. Check it out.
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.
About the blogger Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 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 [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.
I'm a Fundraisingologist at Moceanic, the company that can help you transform the way you do fundraising through one-on-one coaching or membership in The Fundraisingology Lab. Find out what we can do for you and with you!
A proud member of The Case Writers, a collective of the smartest, most donor-loving creative professionals in the business.
Writing for fundraisers
Admit it: Fundraising writing is weird.
So many people get thrown into the work of writing fundraising without ever being told about the weird they need to live with -- and master -- if they're going to succeed.
How to use rhyme to make your message more memorable and persuasive.
How to tell stories that motivate donors to give.
How to meet donors' emotional needs.
Whether you should use guilt as a motivator.
Whether you're working on your very first fundraising writing assignment or you're a seasoned veteran ... whether you want it for yourself or need to show someone else how the pros write fundraising -- or both -- this is a book you should order today.
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Discover how to make branding improve your fundraising in The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving. It's easier -- and less expensive -- than you may think!
If your organization is even vaguely considering "branding work," you need to read The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand by Jeff Brooks. Read more here.
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