Many fundraisers live in fear that they'll contact their donors too often, resulting in a catastrophic loss of love. There's even a scary name for this: Fry the file.
That's kind of like being a smoker who worries all the time that his cell phone is going to give him cancer.
Too much contact is theoretically possible, but it's not something you should worry about. There's simply no proof that increased contact leads to donor attrition. There's plenty of evidence that too little contact quickly erodes your donorfile, leading to painful drops in revenue.
The real danger you should focus on is being irrelevant. That's the common and proven way to annoy donors and make them stop giving.
When you are irrelevant to donors, they seldom complain about it. They just ignore you. Which is far worse than the handful of "too much mail" complaints you're going to get no matter how much or little you mail.
Here are common ways fundraising makes itself irrelevant to donors:
- It's all about the organization -- how wonderful they are in every way. It's not about the donor and her opportunity to change the world.
- It's about things organization insiders care about, not what donors care about. You want to "build sustainable communities." Donors want to save lives. Your work accomplishes both. But the fundraising is aimed at pleasing the insiders.
- It's aimed at the wrong age group. Design, color choice and other elements are what staffers in their 20s and 30s believe they would respond to. It leaves their real donors -- who are typically 60 and up -- out in the cold.
- The segmentation is sloppy. It talks to non-donors as if they're donors -- or vice versa.
- There's no context. The organization only asks, never reports back on the impact of donors' giving.
That's how you really fry the file.
