Future Fundraising Now

How disaster fundraising confuses us

When natural disasters hit, fundraising skyrockets.

That's a good thing, but it also creates a problem: It makes many fundraisers stupid. Because it leads them to believe that the everyday grind of normal fundraising is way too much work for far too little reward.

Disaster fundraising is nothing like normal fundraising. It's a matter of speed, simplicity, and just being there. Media coverage takes care of the rest, and people give like crazy.

During a disaster, you can raise funds through media that don't normally work, like spot radio and newspaper print ads. You can even raise funds on Twitter (well, some do). Heck, you could design a dumb, abstract, unoriginal poster and raise funds.

The rest of the time, fundraising is a lot more work: Finding realistic prospects, keeping costs low, telling great stories, building relationships. You do all that, and still don't raise as much as you do during a disaster.

What a drag!

No wonder we're all ears when someone comes along peddling disaster fundraising during non-disaster times. Mobile! Twitter! Media blitz! Skywriting!

Just say no. If they're promising a medium that normally doesn't work, say no. If they're promising young donors, say no. If they're promising over-the-top response, say no.

There are breakthroughs to be made in everyday fundraising. But the path to success is not imitating disaster fundraising.

Donor retention tells half the story

Keeping donors is just as important as getting them. That's been the focus over at The Agitator recently, and it's a good thing to focus on.

One recent post featured the case of a Canadian organization, Animal Alliance Environment Voters (AAEV): How To Retain 70% Of New Donors. The case, coming direct from the organization, included these powerful facts:

• 70% retention rate for new donors; 90% for those who have given more than one gift.
• All new supporters come through word of mouth and earned media.
• The organization has grown.
• Net income has increased dramatically.

For all this success, they credit their excellent treatment of donors. And I'm with them all the way. That is the path to success. But then they drop this bomb about donor acquisition:

We don't believe it is ethical to tell a donor that "your donation will save [something]" when in fact the organization is using all of the donor's contribution and most future contributions to pay off postage, printer bills, ad buys, or TV time.... In most direct response programs, new, modest and small donors will never make a positive contribution to an organization's mission unless they die and leave a sizable bequest.

That is not an accurate description of an organization that's actively acquiring donors. It's a description of an incompetent and/or unethical organization.

It's a foolish claim to throw out there, and it seems to reflect ignorance of how fundraising works.

And if that weren't enough, they go on to suggest that organizations should suspend all new donor acquisition for five years, and spend that time figuring out how to care for donors.

That's like advising someone to stop eating until they have a PhD in nutrition. Five years with no new donors would put most organizations into an irreversible death-spiral. All the enlightened donor respect in the world would make no difference.

So my guard is up. These comments make me wonder if AAEV understands its own situation.

One of the hallmarks of a dying donorfile is amazing retention rates, superb campaign response, and other excellent loyalty measurements. These numbers all get better and better as the file atrophies. When you aren't getting new donors, those who stay with you longest are your elite, the real believers.

I've known many organizations that were smugly proud of their retention rates -- and completely unaware that they were in the middle stages of dying.

It's possible that AAEV really does get enough new donors to keep them viable, or even growing. That's not normal, but if it's happening, good for them. But for now, I'm skeptical.

I can't go along with The Agitator and say AAEV deserves a raise. I think they need an in-depth performance review. This should quickly be followed by either that raise or by termination, depending on the findings of the review.

The easiest way to make your fundraising work better

Fundraising is hard. But there's one extremely easy way to make yours much, much better. This little-known but amazing technique is uncovered in Karen Zapp's Nonprofit Blog at Quickest way to KILL response.

The secret? Don't write or review fundraising copy by committee.

Really, that one move will raise your quality to astounding heights. Because committees are always destructive to clarity, emotion, power, and everything else you need for fundraising.

It goes like this:

Each person makes changes based on their personal preferences, whether based on data from testing or not. Besides that, how many members of this committee are representative of your target audience?

Don't believe me? Test it. It will work.

Fire your committee.

Stupid cartoons fail to make the point or anything else

It's common for nonprofits to get so caught up in the symbolism around their cause that they can't communicate clearly outside their circle. They think it's more important to get potential donors in philosophical lock-step than it is to just ask for donations from people who may or may not "get it."

They end up neither getting donations nor changing the way people think.

Here's a case from French charity CCFD-Terre Solidaire:

See more about the campaign here (website in French).

The copy is oddly stilted and unclear. I think it reads a little better in French: Le Sud mérite mieux que nos clichés. And is "back local initiatives" some form of jargon meaning "donate"? Not sure. (Hmmm. Copy in English, for no apparent reason. I wonder what that means?)

But bad copy isn't the real problem. There's no logical or emotional connection between the assertion of the headline and making a donation -- or any other type of involvement. It's just pointlessly hectoring an imaginary audience about an issue only insiders are aware of.

I get the point. The poor that many charities ask us to help are not just one-dimensional victims. They hold more of the solution to their poverty than donors do.

But it's just false to say a poor African is not a poor African. The fact that he's an entrepreneur doesn't exclude him also being something else, like a good soccer player, a jazz lover, or a poor African. Thing is, donors will give to help poor African, but there's really no reason to give to help an entrepreneur.

The distinction between poor African and empowered entrepreneur matters operationally -- but not in fundraising or marketing. If the organization's technical staff in Africa think of their clients as victims or subjects, they're going to do a lousy job. But there's no real payoff in changing the conceptual framework of the general public or even the donating public. Not that this ad series or any other ad series could accomplish such a thing.

But what really lifts this series from lame marketing to a truly Stupid Nonprofit Ad is this: It undercuts its own premise. The people in the ads aren't real people. They don't have names; they don't have stories; they're just cartoony drawings. Seriously, how does anyone expect loose sketches of imaginary people to help us see real people as more real?

If you want to change the way people think, you're just going to have to get involved in real life. Concepts and abstractions won't move people's hearts. And they won't raise funds.

Thanks to Creative Advertisements for NGO for the tip. Also see many more images from this campaign there.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

Update (5 p.m. Pacific Time, 27 April)

I thought it looked familiar.

Thanks to alert commenters Eva and Christine for pointing out that these ads are a direct tribute to The Treachery of Images by Belgian surrealist René Magritte.

That makes the ads a little less random. But it makes the point they're trying to make even murkier.

Opinions about fundraising are nearly always wrong

If your boss -- the executive director, president, or some hyper-vigilant board member -- is the source of much of your fundraising failure, you are not alone. And you should check out this post at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog: 9 Things to do when you're right but your boss thinks you're wrong.

One of those nine things is especially important:

Do not argue the merits of anything based only on your opinion.

Here's why: When it comes to fundraising, opinions are always wrong. Sometimes, by sheer coincidence, an opinion is aligned with the facts. But that's temporary and never trustworthy.

As long as the discussion is "what I like" pitted against "what you like," you are lost in the topsy-turvy world of marketing relativism. The winner of the argument is the one with the more vivid opinion. Or the boss.

Get facts instead.

Here's an example: Everyone who doesn't know much about fundraising believes we should keep messages short, short, short -- because "nobody" reads long messages. This seems intuitively correct. It will usually win the argument.

But it's wrong. Everyone who knows their stuff knows that long messages are almost always more effective.

The best source of facts is direct response testing of your own hypotheses on your own donors. If your numbers (or budget) are too small for valid testing, pay attention to the experts. Read books on fundraising. Follow the blogs. Hire somebody smart. And pay attention.

Any time a decision is being made on opinion, taste, or personal preference -- it is almost for sure the wrong decision.

If you need help setting your boss straight (and I'm quite sure you do), go read Katya's post, where you'll find eight more tips for getting it right.

Respect your donors

From the always amusing Indexed:

Talk to your donors like they matter. Let them actually fund cool stuff. Don't try to educate them into "better" people. Don't try to replace them with younger, hipper donors. Just approach them where they are and respect them for their enormous importance to you and to all the good causes they make possible.

They'll respect you back, and give to you more and more often.

How not to expand your donorbase

Mission Paradox Blog points out a challenge many arts organizations have: Expanding the audience. Read Low hanging fruit.

My own policy is to spend 80% of my time and resources going after folks who are already "cultural consumers". I want people who are at least comfortable with the idea of going to plays, opera, etc. on a semi-regular basis. Getting those people to choose my day job's work is challenging enough.

Then I spend 20% of my time building new audience. I do this with the full knowledge that those efforts may take years to pay off.

There's a similar challenge in fundraising. Many organizations put huge amounts of resources and time into bringing new classes of donors on board.

Very often, the sought-after new donor group is cool people in their twenties like the ones most of the staff hangs out with. Sometimes it's people living outside the community where the organization works. It might be people outside other demographic or psychographic profiles that are dominant among donors.

Your chance of success with these new groups is dramatically lower than it is with your core donor groups and people like them. It's going to cost more to find them, and you are going to fail a lot more often when you try.

That's not to say you shouldn't work to expand your donorbase. Just know the risk. Balance your budgets, time, and opportunities so you're delivering a good level of revenue at an acceptable ROI.

If you're seeking younger donors, look for those who are only slightly younger than the donors you have. If you want to expand geographically, go regional before you go national. If you want to broaden demographic, try the near-matches first.

The further away you get from the audience you have, the harder, less certain. and more expensive it gets.

When magic happens in fundraising

by guest blogger Annalise Briggs, Manager of the Monthly Giving Program at Mercy Corps.

As fundraisers, we try to be as efficient as possible with donors' money. Oftentimes conversations about emotional content are mixed in with conversations about testing, converting emergency donors, revenue, retention, ROI and LTV.

That's how it was when a small team of us at Mercy Corps came up with a "Comfort a Kid" idea -- write a note to a child in Japan and we'll give them to survivors of the earthquake in our Comfort For Kids program. New donors would receive a monthly giving ask and current supporters would land on a thank-you and 'share this with others' message. (See our message here.)

We wrote the copy, chose photos, developed the light box and landing pages, tested the email and then something magical happened:

Donors responded.

I read through the hundreds of personal and heartfelt notes from supporters to these children in Japan and tears welled up in my eyes. That was a magical moment in fundraising -- to connect donors to a cause most will never touch or feel or experience in person, but who had the opportunity to be part of the solution.

It was beautiful. It was fleeting.

I then went back to look at open rates, click-through and monthly giving conversions.

But the magic, beauty, and emotion -- that's the real part of fundraising. The technical stuff, the numbers, and three-letter acronyms -- those are just our tools.

You probably aren't sending spam, but you are sending bacon

Have you noticed how you don't get as much spam in your email as you used to? That's because the anti-spam programs are getting smarter, and finally out-smarting the spammers.

So of course, there's something new to take the place of spam as the annoying inbox-clogger. It's called bacon, because it tastes better than spam, but it's pretty much just as bad for you. Check out this post and nifty info-graphic at What's worse than email spam? Bacon.

Bacon is legitimate email, mostly commercial sources. It's stuff we signed up for. The only problem with it is the cumulative volume of it. According to some sources, there's now as much bacon in people's inboxes as messages from real people -- and there will soon be more.

Thing is, it's growing because it works. Emailing your customers with news and offers is just smart business -- or fundraising.

If you're emailing to your supporters and people who've subscribed -- and you really should be -- you are part of the rising tide of bacon. That means sometimes your message is welcome. But inevitably it sometimes isn't welcome, and the unwelcome state is likely to be more and more often as bacon increases.

Here's what happens to bacon now:

• 18% is wanted
• 61% is deleted
• 14% reported as spam
• 7% unsubscribe

You aren't going to solve the problem by just cutting back on the number of messages you send. You'll just be less present in the bulk of bacon your people are getting.

What you really have to do it make sure you are relevant. It's the less relevant messages that get deleted. And a few less-relevant messages in a row will cause people to assume the next one isn't relevant.

If you're like most nonprofit emailers, you have nondonors in your email file, and their response rate to email appeals is extremely low. That's a sign that your appeals are dangerously near irrelevant for those people. So make sure at least some of the time you're giving them opportunities to act in ways other than giving. This can keep them engaged, which will improve their chances of giving eventually.

The other thing to do is make it easy to unsubscribe --better they walk away than report your email as spam, which can make your messages undeliverable even to some who want it.

Thanks to @spurdave for the tip.

Are You Sending Too Much Mail?

Here's my column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, Are You Sending Too Much Mail?.

Teaser: "The fundraisers who don't get it are the ones who produce all that annoying junk mail -- that self-centered cacophony of competing look-at-me claims. One of the quickest ways out of the junk-mail pile is to talk about the donor...."