Future Fundraising Now

Fundraising mistakes and how to avoid them

Over on SOFII there's a great new tutorial from Jerry Huntsinger called Mistakes that Brenda doesn't need to make. These are real-life mistakes that a lot of fundraisers make.

I want to point out just a few of the more common and costly mistakes I see made all the time:

• Believing that your donors are going to read your letter word for word.
• Failure to understand that most literate people, highly educated or not, are most comfortable reading at a basic level.
• Failure to understand and respect elderly women.
• Being brainwashed by the philosophy that 'our donors are busy and only have time to read short letters'.
  
• Writing a package and then surrendering it to an artist.
• Letting your donors go for months and months without having the opportunity to make a gift to your organization.
• Pulling your large donors out of the communication flow.

But go read the whole tutorial. He gives 35 mistakes, all of them terrible, and all of them dismayingly frequent.

How to be a boring pest on social media

My bank wants me to "like" them on Facebook.

I'd rather eat a bug.

I have no problem with my bank. They do a fine job with my money. The tellers are friendly and professional. But I don't want to see their inane, boring updates about yet another way to charge me interest.

To me, the ideal relationship with my bank is they handle the business I've given them, and I never think about it. It's not a social relationship. It shouldn't be one, and it never will be one.

Apparently, though, the bank would like a more intense relationship.

In my case it's not going to happen. They can approach me by every social media channel in existence. They can have stalkers hang out in front of my house. I still don't want to be their pal, and I don't want to waste one more second of my time than I have to interacting with them.

Is your nonprofit acting like my bank? Trying to be people's pals on Facebook and other social media so you can talk about yourself to them?

Well, stop it!

If you're going to interact with donors, you need to figure out what they care about. Social media aren't a giant free classroom; they're more like a party. If you go in the way my bank does trying to educate and inform, you're an irrelevant and annoying party-pooper.

And be prepared to learn that your issues are not as universally exciting to people as you think they are.

Social media operates a lot like real life. Those who go on and on about themselves don't keep getting invited to join conversations.

Donors make their predictions come true

The Neuromarketing blog reports on some research that shows how getting people to predict their own behavior makes them more likely to do what they said they'd do, at Prediction Power: Asking Gets Results:

Research shows that if you want to get people to do something, you should ask them to predict if they will do it. An affirmative answer greatly increases the probability that they will follow through.

People want to be consistent and trustworthy.

This is probably why fundraising built around surveys often works. Surveys ask questions that urge the donor to start saying they stand with you. That makes it easier to say yes to giving. When used effectively, survey appeals don't produce useful research results -- but they raise funds.

Another way to put this tendency to work in fundraising: Find ways and places to ask donors about their intended future support for the cause. It can't hurt to seek their prediction.

Subject line secrets for fundraising

Here's some interesting research on subject lines from Eloqua's Chart of the Week.

In this study:

• Using a recipient's name in the subject line improves open rate of email.
• Using a recipient's company name slightly decreases open rate.
• Using other personalized information in the subject line improves it by nearly 10%.
• An exclamation mark hurts, but only a little. Surprisingly little, given the alarmism of spam filters about exclamation points.

What might fundraisers do with this information?

Use donors' names in subject lines now and then. Like Meet the kids you helped, DONORNAME

Find other things from your data to include. Like Homeless heat emergency in DONORCITY or Build a bridge from Africa to DONORSTREETNAME.

Thanks to the Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog for the tip.

How not to muck up your fundraising

Ageless Marketing reveals why so much advertising fails so dismally to reach the huge and lucrative older market, at Why Seniors Don't Buy Your Ads.

Short answer: Ads are usually aimed at younger people, even when they are meant to be aimed at older people. Because many young and naïve ad creators don't understand that older people aren't just like them.

This matters to us fundraisers, because our target market is overwhelmingly older people. And younger, inexperienced people who create the messages often don't know (or refuse to believe) that making fundraising they think would work to persuade them will work with their actual audience.

Here are the Agesless Marketing ways to get it right (slightly reinterpreted by me for fundraising):

• Avoid hyperbole. Older donors aren't impressed.
• Be authentic. Older donors can tell when you're faking it.
• Connect with their values. Values matter more and more as we age.
• Don't appeal to self-centered benefits. Older donors really are into helping others. The self-focused benefits that advertisers use when marketing to younger people are less interesting to older people

The big, overarching rule for fundraising: Don't use your own taste and preferences to guide you. That will make you do it wrong!

The curse of the journalism degree

If you're looking for a good fundraising writer, you might want to talk to folks with journalism degrees. They know how to gather information, write clearly, and meet deadlines.

On the other hand, one of the worst qualifications you can seek for a fundraising writer is a journalism degree.

Here's why: A principle of journalism is conveying the story in an objective, uncolored, facts-only way. This is very difficult to achieve, so a lot of effort goes into teaching and learning the skill. And that's great, because that's how news reporting should be. (Would that it actually were more often.)

But objectivity is completely inappropriate for fundraising. Effective fundraising copy is wildly biased, incredibly subjective, advocacy to the max. Properly written fundraising should make a journalist's hair stand on end.

So be aware. Those journalism majors bring some useful skills to the party. But you're going to have to radically re-program them on objectivity before they're ready for the fundraising Big Leagues. And not everyone is willing or able to be re-programmed.

Don't make your copy hard to read even if your donors are educated

I heard a horrible rumor.

I heard there are writers out there who work hard to increase the grade level of their writing.

Seems some writers think grade level means education level. They believe if they're writing for an audience that's college-educated, the copy will be inappropriate, even insulting, if it's not at least at 13th grade level.

Big mistake.

Writing that way guarantees fewer people will read your copy, and those who do will be less engaged. If you apply this reasoning to fundraising, results could be deadly. When people don't read your message, they're a lot less likely to respond.

Copy written at a low grade level copy does not "talk down" to educated readers or treat them like children. Sixth grade level copy isn't just for 6th graders. It's just easier to read. For everyone, no matter how educated they are.

We typically use the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, and by that measurement, fundraising copy shouldn't go above 6th grade level.

On average, donors are more educated than non-donors. They're probably also smarter (though I've never seen any data on that). And they respond better to easier copy.

The whole idea of grade level equaling education kind of falls apart at the lowest grade levels:

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss has a grade level of −1.3. Which if you're counting education level, is a little more than a year before kindergarten. The lowest possible grade level is −3.4, which is what a passage consisting entirely of one-word, one-syllable sentences would be. That means it's appropriate for a child who's not yet two years old. Which is just silly.

If you want people to read, understand, and respond to your writing, keep it somewhere between 4th and 6th grade levels. Your donors will reward you for your consideration.

When beautiful design is ugly fundraising

Beauty is better than ugliness. But sometimes beauty can be your worst enemy in fundraising -- when it gets in the way of your real goals.

That's the useful message in a recent post at BeaconfireWire, Wasted Pretty: Create design that matters:

Making something beautiful is the easy part. Communicating a visual message that moves people to DO something is the holy grail we should be striving for.... If your design is nothing more than a piece of art to admire instead of moving the needle on a purposeful action, you've missed the point. Wasted Pretty.

Sometimes it seems like fundraising is largely a battle against ill-conceived design that looks great, but fails to do the job.

How often we see fundraising design that does these things:

• Makes the message unreadable. Attractive but hard-to-read fonts, type over color or images, over- (or under) saturated color palettes ... these things can look fantastic, but shoot down readability. And it doesn't matter how good your design is if people can't read the message.
• Undermines the message with design and images that contradict what the message is trying to say. The message is "There's a big problem and we need your help solving it." But the design is happy, slick, and nice. Often, design speaks louder than words.
• Misses the audience. Hip young designers forget that in fundraising they are reaching out to older folks, not themselves.

Really, beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholder -- subjective labels that mean different things to different people. But fundraising results -- response rate, average gift, net revenue -- those are not at all subjective. They are pure measurable facts that mean the same thing to every sane person.

And in my book, good results are beautiful; bad results are ugly. No matter how wonderful the design.

Why most nonprofit storytelling drives away donations

There's a very important point about nonprofit storytelling at The Far Edge of Promise: Why Better Storytelling Won't Lead to Larger Gifts.

How many of us have said, We need to tell people our story?

And how often have we meant by that, If we could put our facts and beliefs into other people's heads, they'd become faithful donors?

That's exactly what we don't need to do:

Everyone agrees that donor engagement is a key to receiving a commitment. But donor engagement doesn't occur because we tell them what we want them to know. Instead, donor engagement occurs when they tell us what we want them to know. My counsel is that a donor is ready to make a meaningful gift when she says to me, "Jason, we need that new science building!"

The stories we tell should not about ourselves -- how effective, and cool, and world-changing we are. The stories should be about how donors connect to the cause we mutually care about.

The donor who tells you that you need a new science building is one who has made your story part of her story. That doesn't happen when you endlessly brag about yourself. It happens when enter the donor's world by telling her story as it relates to the cause.