Future Fundraising Now

The easy way to kill your online fundraising

Tired of pesky e-fundraising projects?

Here's a quick, easy, and surprisingly effective way to kill your online fundraising program. Only a few applications of this amazing technique will put an end to all that online fundraising misery.

Just include this option on the response page for an e-appeal sent to your donors:

I would like to receive communications

A large percentage of your donors -- people who want to be on your file and regularly make online and/or offline donations will uncheck that box. And you'll have to stop communicating with them.

Asking people to opt in to email communication before you can start emailing them is something you simply have to do. Giving current donors an easy opt out is not the same thing at all.

I've seen this well-meaning disaster happen more than once. It decimates an online file, removing a large part of the best donors.

So if you're sick of online fundraising, give it a try. You'll soon have no donors. Thus, no work.

But if you want to keep raising funds online, don't do this.

Easy (and not-so-easy) ways to write better

Great writing advice from Write to Done: 5 Quick-Start Tips to Help Improve Your Writing.

1. Write How You Talk
2. Keep It Short (Note from Jeff: Maybe not in fundraising. Longer copy almost always motivates more giving than short.)
3. Use Simple Words
4. Use a Simple Style
5. Forget What You Learned In College

These are good. Try 'em.

Stupid ad agency gives fundraising the runs

It's hard for most people in the Western world to grasp the fact that diarrhea can be a fatal disease. Those of us who have worked to raise funds for water projects know the difficulty.

It looks like WaterAid of the UK may have hit the wall and tried to solve the problem by bringing in an ad agency.

Bad move.

Here's a TV spot, the centerpiece of the Dig toilets, not graves campaign.

(Or watch it here at YouTube.)

Okay, it's cute to watch a bunch of kids joyfully singing a potty-humor song about diarrhea. Twenty seconds have gone by, and there's not a clue about what the spot is about.

Then it gets even weirder. I can just hear the agency presentation: "When the sad African boy sings When it's just killed your sister and you're really going to miss her, diarrhea, diarrhea. -- it will jar viewers into reality."

Really, now.

You had -- on camera -- an English-speaking, sympathetic little boy whose sister died from diarrhea -- and you thought using him to provide a perceptual jolt was the way to go? Really? Really?

Once again, an ad agency screws up a fundraising message because they think word-play, mind-games, and symbolism communicate more than telling a story and making an offer.

I'll give them this, they actually managed to mention pit toilets. That's more real than a lot of agencies would manage. Unfortunately, they then majored on the size of the unsafe-water problem. That's a proven way to make sure people don't respond.

The other way to make sure you don't get any response is to leave out any response options. There's no URL, no phone number, not even a mailing address. I'm not sure what they think anybody who happens to be moved is going to do.

Fundraising isn't easy. Some situations -- like unsafe water -- are harder yet to get traction for. But don't make it worse by drinking the ad agency Kool-Aid.

Thanks to Adrants for the tip.

More Stupid nonprofit ads.

Six reasons donors will give to you

I love this pep-talk for marketers at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog: 6 Reasons Why People Will Buy From You -- Not Your Competitors. Here are the six reasons, along with my translations for fundraisers

1. Their experiences with you. Giving to your organization will feel more real, more like making a difference. You go out of your way to make giving an experience.

2. Your benefits. All giving to anyone has great benefits. But you make it special, because you aren't afraid to remind donors what giving to you does for them.

3. Your trustworthiness and reputation. You will never, never, never have a scandal. No one in your organization will ever cut an ethical corner.

4. The value they receive. You've found ways to give your donors leverage with their giving. And you never forget to tell them.

5. Make transactions easy, safe, and secure. No clunky website giving forms that put up barriers or make giving painful and ambiguous.

6. How well you articulate their most pressing concerns. You realize that the point isn't how excellent your organization is at making the world better. It's how you connect with each donor's personal mission of making the world a better place.

Sola fundraising!

Here's a great reminder from Jonathon Grapsas' blog, at Decision paralysis: harming good fundraising.

Don't try to do more than one thing when you're fundraising. You'll end up doing less than one:

... in any fundraising piece, talk about one thing, and one thing really bloody well. Don't stray from the original message. We've tested this over time and proven it to be the most effective way to maximize return.

I've tested it too. More is less! Don't throw in something about planned giving, or the upcoming event, or news about your staff. If you're raising funds, just raise funds. That's enough of a decision to ask people to make. Don't pile on more -- too many of them will just give up, leaving you in the lurch.

Two ways to improve subject lines

From the Lyris HQ Blog, here's a post: Creating Extraordinary Email Subject Lines. It offers two great ways from commercial email marketing to improve subject lines:

1. Personalization. The donor's name in the subject line can grab her attention. But so can other things you know about her. Like her location. Or date of last gift. Or something else you've noted in her behavior. (Be mindful of seeming too "Big Brother" by displaying a creepy amount of knowledge in the subject line.)

2. Urgency. Use a time or date. Or a deadline, or scarcity of some kind. But put the urgency in the subject line.

Most of all, test those subject lines. Test, test, test. It's the element that matters more than any other, and you can get a good read fast.

My embarrassing writing style

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I ran some of my writing through I Write Like, and got the startling result: I write like Dan Brown (you know, the author of The Da Vinci Code and other masterpieces). First I tried a blog post. Then I tried a direct mail letter. Dan Brown. Dan Brown. I'm thinking (hoping) there's something terribly wrong with I Write Like.

My friends were being compared to authors like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Me? I write like a guy whose bestseller starts out like this:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

(You can find more zingers at Author Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences)

After some self-recrimination, I settled down a bit. By putting both James Joyce and Dan Brown in the same database, they imply that the two authors are somehow alike. But they aren't, beyond the fact that books are published from their writing. Joyce created art. Reading it can be a challenge -- to put it mildly. The struggle of reading Ulysses or Finnegans Wake is part of their power; hard insights don't come easy.

Brown's books are not art. They are all about being read -- by lots of people -- people who have no intention of struggling to gain insight. They just want a story. Who am I to say there's anything wrong with that?

If you're a fundraising writer, you have a lot more in common with Dan Brown than with the Big Names in Literature. You want to be read. Not studied.

So I write like an author that a lot of people enjoy reading? There are worse things for a fundraising writer. (But darn it, why couldn't it say I write like Richard Brautigan, whose style is utterly lucid and easy to read, yet full of deep stuff?)

The self-centered nonprofit website

Here's a fun video from the Proper Discord blog about symphony orchestra websites that pig-headedly refuse to serve up what people are there looking for: What would your website say?

(Or watch to it here on YouTube.)

It's frighteningly realistic. Check out this little exchange:

Concert-Goer: How do I buy tickets?

Website: We have a shop.

Concert-Goer: What does the shop sell?

Website: Mugs and t-shirts and CDs.

Concert-Goer: Not tickets?

Website: No.

Unfortunately, orchestra websites aren't the only ones that act like this.

Visit your website thinking like a donor. Are you offering the things they want, or is your website designed to serve up the things you want them to see?

Crummy copy hurts, even if it's buried

Is your organization's official self-description at all like this one?

[ORGANIZATION] tackles underlying causes of poverty so that people can become self-sufficient. Recognizing that women and children suffer disproportionately from poverty, [ORGANIZATION] places special emphasis on working with women to create permanent social change. Women are at the heart of [ORGANIZATION]'s community-based efforts to improve basic education, prevent the spread of HIV, increase access to clean water and sanitation, expand economic opportunity and protect natural resources. [ORGANIZATION] also delivers emergency aid to survivors of war and natural disasters, and helps people rebuild their lives.

Sadly, this is real, taken from the "About" page of a large US nonprofit. Even more sadly, it's not unusual.

Many, maybe most, nonprofits describe themselves in dull, bloodless, jargon-laden deadweight statements that will never move anyone to action.

Fortunately, this statement is only found on the "About" page of the website. It's not going to do a whole lot of damage there.

But really, why put up with marketing that bad anywhere?

Why not be lively, interesting, personable, and outward facing everywhere? Even on your half-buried web pages.

For how long do you think donors are going to be attracted to organizations that pour out tedious baloney?

Because, like it or not, what you say in places like your About page is what really defines your personality. If you're dull and inhuman there, you're probably dull and inhuman. And that's going to catch up with you.

Think it through. Then go on a "search and destroy" mission for terrible copy. Because you can do better.

Make your e-newsletter sound worthwhile

If you haven't found it yet, go see the blog Which Test Won. It's a great place to test your online direct-response smarts, because it shows two head-to-head tests -- and to see which one performed better you have to cast a vote for the one you think won.

I'm going to give you an answer on a recent test shown there, at Which Email Newsletter Opt-In Form Boosted Sign-Ups by 52.8%?

It's a sign-up page for the New York Public Library. First we see the control. This is how a lot of nonprofits handle e-newsletter sign-ups -- as if everybody wants newsletters

And here's the winner. It takes time to sell that same newsletter.

Getting folks to sign up for your e-newsletter is a critical part of building on online donor file.

As this test uncovers, you're going to get a lot more sign-ups by specifically promoting what's good, useful, and interesting about your newsletter.

It seems not so many folks just want another newsletter showing up in their in-box. But they're happy to sign up for cool, useful stuff from an organization they respect.

Same stuff, different way of talking about. Very different results.