Future Fundraising Now

The power of underlining in fundraising

What's with all that underlining in fundraising letters? A classic appeal can look like an over-zealous college freshman with a blue pen and time on his hands got at it.

It's so tacky and unattractive.

But it works.

Underlining helps readers find their way into and through a fundraising message. Without it, a page can be a forbidding sea of gray that most people will find hard to pay attention to.

Think of underlining this way: Look at a page of type and ask yourself, What two or three things on this page do we most want donors to read? It might be the call to action. Or an especially dramatic part of a story. Underline those things.

That's how you create an entry point into the letter -- which is an entry point to response. Get them reading, and you've moved the ball that much farther down the field toward response.

Don't miss the opportunity to pull readers in.

Do you really want to have a viral video?

Why are there so few nonprofit videos that really go viral?

It's not for lack of trying. Everywhere you turn, there's another cute, clever, nonprofit video that's gunning for the big V -- and most of them have a couple thousand views. Or a lot less. They aren't going viral.

Sure, it would be great to have tens of millions of YouTube views and have everyone on planet Earth see your message.

But really, what's the point of that?

Those videos that go mega-viral are usually funny, subversive, surprising, and most of all entertaining.

Being entertaining to "everyone" is almost for sure a long, long way from engaging and motivating people to take action in your cause. Even if you could pull it off, it probably wouldn't get you anywhere. It would be empty fame.

You aren't the Trololo Guy. Not even his remix. You aren't, you can't be, and you shouldn't be.

Don't try to take the entire internet by storm.

Just create something compelling for the slice of people who are or could be your supporters. Spread it around in a reasonable manner. Make sure it leads to some kind of action.

You can accomplish more with a few hundred or thousand well-targeted views than by going viral.

Suddenly the mailbox is full of photos of babies

I love the studies researchers in psychology do. Where do they get their ideas? Here's an interesting one, reported at the Neuromarketing blog: Baby Pics Boost Altruism.

Researchers "lost" hundreds of wallets on the streets of Edinburgh. In each wallet there was a photo: a smiling baby, a cute puppy, a happy family, or a contented elderly couple. Some had no photo.

About half of the wallets were returned to their "owners." The amazing thing was the huge disparity in return rates for the different photos"

• 88% of the wallets with the baby photo were returned.
• 53% with the puppy photo were returned.
• 48% with the family photo came back.
• 28% with the elderly couple.
• 14% with no picture were sent back.

Okay, it's not fundraising. But it sure is tempting to draw a connection with direct mail and other fundraising media. If a photo of a baby stirred people who found wallets to higher levels of altruism, would it encourage more people to give?

There are a lot of layers of complexity between some photo of a baby and actual response, but think about it: Can you legitimately work a photo of a baby into your fundraising? It might help.

Test it.

How to tell if your brand is useless

In this short video, branding guy Ije Nworkorie addresses the question, Does brand matter in a recession?

His answer: If it's about image, probably not. Check it out; it's only two minutes.

Or watch it here on YouTube.

The key point: The best brands let customers know what they get from an organization. Not what the organization wants people to think about it.

And that's why so much branding is dysfunctional: It's all about "image," not about what customers actually care about.

Same with nonprofit branding. When its purpose is to guide the way donors think, it's not worth much. If its purpose is to show donors what their gifts make possible, it's doing its job.

Short version: If your brand is about you, it's pointless. If your brand is about your donors, it will help you grow.

I doubt the end of the recession will change this.

Thanks to queer ideas for the tip.

Weak acknowledgements can drive away donors

I have an unprovable theory that one of the reasons direct mail response rates have been dropping across the board for several years is that dreadful common ways many nonprofits acknowledge donors.

These bad actors (and there are a lot of them) have trained the giving public that giving is unrewarding. Not a connection with the causes they're passionate about. They do so by not giving back when donors give.

Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog notes that at It's not what your donors give you, it's what you give them:

It is a very personal, emotional choice to give away money to something you care about. You as the organization these donors support want to handle those strong feelings of your donor with care. They have acted in a way that is deeply meaningful to them. If the only way we react to their gift is with a tax receipt, we're not only being rude, we're being disrespectful.

Not only is the choice to give emotional, in many cases it also represents a real risk by the donor. There have been enough charity scandals and scams that many people are afraid their gifts will be squandered, misused, or outright stolen.

It's not easy to be a donor! That's why these very common acknowledgement practices are so harmful to donor relationships:

• Taking a long time to acknowledge a gift. When weeks or months go by before a donor gets acknowledged for a gift, the suspicion grows that her gift wasn't appreciated or didn't matter.
• Acknowledging in a generic way. The ask was clear and strong, specific and full of emotion. The acknowledgement has the warmth and humanity of a tax form from a totalitarian nation. The message is clear: We got your dough; that's all that matters.
• Failing to adequately report back on the impact of the gift. If you're putting donor dollars to good use, let the donors know. Don't hammer them with all the other things you do that they didn't give to -- thank them for what they did. Show them they made a difference. That gives them reason to give again.

Is your fundraising copy fat?

Here's some quick good copywriting advice from Bad Language: 10 ways to slim down obese copy:

1. Zap filler text.
2. Cut paragraphs before you cut sentences.
3. Don't lock down the word count before you start.
4. Delete hype words, clichés, adjectives and adverbs.
5. Shorter sentences.
6. Use 'you.'
7. Give instructions.
8. Shorten or delete quotations.
9. Write with information.
10. Use a bigger font (in your word processor; it's harder to write lots of words if your screen fills up quicker.

It's important to note that this is about "fat" copy, not long copy. In fundraising, long copy is almost always good. But fat, bloated, sloppy copy -- not good. It's not readable and it's not persuasive. Slim it down.

How to understand older people

If you're under 60, you don't get it.

There are reasons our donor files are dominated by the elderly: For one, accumulating years bring wisdom, and wisdom tells you that giving stuff away is one of the better things you can do.

Even more, changes in brain chemistry that come with age push older people toward being more empathetic and other-focused. Both prime qualities for generosity.

Unfortunately, a lot of us just don't "get" these people. We just see their unstylishness, their tendency to do things slowly, the odd habits they bring from a past we don't share with them.

With so many older Americans living in age-segregated communities, we don't come into contact with as many older people as often as we used to.

So if you want to get it, you're going to have to seek them out. Spend time with your own older family members. If that's unbearable, find some others. Maybe you'll need to volunteer at a retirement or assisted living facility.

Notice what annoys them. What makes them laugh. What breaks their hearts.

See what concepts just go over their heads, and what they grasp easily and immediately.

Note how much time they spend trying to see clearly, fussing with their glasses and the distance between their eyes and what they're trying to read.

Listen to how they talk, what they talk about, what they avoid talking about.

In most of these things, they will be different from you.

And that difference is the fundraising gold you'll mine from your time with them. Never mind the wisdom and pleasure that's in store when you find old friends.

A pack of wild dogs gets rebranded

Here's a delightful story of the power of words to change the world by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof: Every (Wild) Dog Has Its Day.

It's about the work of Painted Dog Conservation, which used to have the painful task of protecting African wild dogs, but now has a much nicer focus: painted dogs.

It's just marketing. But that's the power of marketing:

If clever marketing and strategic thinking can take reviled varmints such as "wild dogs" and resurrect them (quite justly) as exotic "painted dogs" to be preserved, then no cause is hopeless.

I know a lot of nonprofits that, faced with a situation like this would stick to the name "wild dogs" like limpets, cultivating a sneering disdain for people who don't "get it" about the wild dogs. They'd try to educate everyone in Earth that a "wild dog" is a beautiful, noble creature, not at all how it sounds.

Of course, you can't change that many minds that much. You can't even reach that many people.

But these guys did an end run around the problem. Instead of trying to change the entire world's impression of "wild dogs," they changed the game. Rather than expend their limited resources on bringing the mountain to Mohammed, they did the much more achievable -- took Mohammed to the mountain.

Do you have seemingly unsolvable problems that may have simple answers?

Whether "painted dogs" catch the imagination of enough people remains to be seen. But a glowing New York Times article is a great start.

What's the value of a bogus study of Facebook fans?

Marketers trying to figure out social media produce the most amazing volumes and varieties of crap.

Here's one that has to make you either laugh for cry, as reported in AdWeek: Value of a 'Fan' on Social Media: $3.60. (It's also reported in the Chronicle of Philanthropy at What's the Value of a Facebook Fan?)

So a social media vulture company called Vitrue did some seriously sketchy calculating and came up with this "fact": 1 million Facebook fans translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

The crap level of that finding is off the charts, but it gets worse.

It's being thrown around now by some who should know better that a Facebook fan is "worth $3.60."

The research, as bogus as it is, doesn't claim that. The claim is that the value of advertising impressions you making on a Facebook fan over the course of a year is equivalent to spending $3.60 in traditional media. If the number were meaningful or accurate at all (it isn't), an advertiser could easily decide on a cost basis whether to spend on TV, print, Facebook, or elsewhere.

Thing is, Facebook isn't an advertising medium. Anyone who's counting costs of impressions in social media apparently hasn't ever spent any time participating in social media. Additional thing is, those ad impression figures really don't make any sense even in traditional advertising media. That whole paradigm is falling apart -- or maybe finally being exposed as the fraud it's always been. Direct marketers all along have laughed at measuring "impressions" -- they know response is where it's at.

Okay, why even bother about dumb blather generated by a dying industry? Because this story has three useful takeaways:

1. It you want to measure your Facebook and other social media involvement (and you should), measure actions, especially donations, not just large numbers of people who clicked a "like" button. The whole point of engagement is action. Counting bodies who don't take action is just an exercise in vanity.
2. Don't believe every study you read about.
3. Don't hire Vitrue. They're either clueless or charlatans. Either way, they'll take you for a ride and it won't be a fun one.

Award winner lets donors fund specific cancer research projects

Congratulations to the first-ever winner of the Fundraiser of the Future Award.

It's Cancer Research UK for its My Projects fundraising website.

The geek name for this approach is crowd-sourcing, because it pulls together a crowd of people to accomplish things individuals can't on their own.

As you can see, users can sift through cancer research projects and choose to fund one they like. They can search by cancer type or location of the research. Then they can either donate, join a "giving group" created by another donor, or start their own giving group and recruit people into it. (I don't know how they inform and update donors to specific projects; I hope it's rich and detailed.)

Donors can fund a project for any reason they like: Maybe a project sounds promising; maybe they know the researchers; maybe it's aimed at a cancer you or a loved one fought. The choice is the donor's

And as far as I'm concerned, that's the magic. It connects people's passion to their giving, which is how it ought to be.

Nay-sayers will note that this cedes the role of deciding what projects should be funded to non-experts, which could lead to important but harder-to-understand projects going underfunded. While I don't doubt that not all projects get equal donor attention, I thumb my nose at that objection. It's an anti-donor smokescreen that a smart organization can (must) solve.

I'm especially glad to see this being done in health fundraising; as a sector, health has been least open to empowering donors. These guys are doing it -- it's possible. The old excuses for traditional top-down, trust-us fundraising are falling away.

This is the way a lot of fundraising will be done in the coming years. Giving donors choice. Treating donors as partners, not ATMs.

Congratulations to Cancer Research UK!

This award is given periodically to fundraisers who get it right in a notable, creative way. If you know of others who deserve the Fundraiser of the Future Award, let know.

Thanks to Giving in a digital world for the tip.