Future Fundraising Now

The power of repetition in fundraising

If you've ever thought a fundraising message was faulty because it was repetitious, you got it all wrong.

Repetition is not bad in fundraising.

Too Busy To Fundraise noted this recently, at How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You?

Don't think that you will irritate people if you send a series of request, or inform them more than once about the things you do, and the things you need from them. Most of the time, what you send or say will be disregarded or, at best, vaguely noticed before being relegated to the back of their mind. And even if they do notice that you've said or written something, odds are, it won't be exactly what you said or wrote.

In fact, repetition is one of the core traits of successful fundraising.

You keep asking again and again.

You keep asking for the same thing every time.

Within one message, you repeat the same ask several times.

Yes, it can get boring. But it's going to take your donors a lot longer to get bored than it takes you. You read all the repetitions, paying full attention. Your donors miss most of your attempts to tell them the message, and those they do read, they read quickly, with half their mind thinking about other things.

Bore yourself. Drive yourself a little bit crazy. Be as repetitious as a cuckoo clock.

That's how you get through and motivate the gifts you need.

Is there any "seductive" fundraising out there?

Most marketers will not be surprised by the research reported at Neuromarketing: Don't Sell, Seduce! It found that ads using logic to sell affected the brain differently from those that used "non-rational influence" -- you know, those ads that just have some kind of beautiful photo and the name of the product. They're usually for fragrances and other products with uncertain benefits.

The non-rational ads stimulated lower parts of the brain -- those areas that make the real decisions.

I've never seen a truly non-rational fundraising message. (Though I've seen plenty of irrational ones.) I don't know if it would work. But I'd love to see it tried, as Neuromarketing suggests:

Need to shake up your advertising and boost sales? Run a test of ads that skip the facts and logical persuasion, and instead show imagery of a place and state of mind where your target customer would like to be. Bypass the rational analysis, and appeal directly to your customer's emotions.

I dare an enterprising nonprofit to try this!

What is the place and state of mind where your donor wants to be? What is a picture of that like?

I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in the next few months.

Does your email look like it's from a scammer?

A lot of the people you're emailing think you're a scammer. It's nothing to do with you, especially. It's just that there are a lot of scams out there, and people are wary.

The MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog has some advice from the commercial email world on not being seen as a scammer, at Beware of the Online Scammer: 5 Tips for Showing You're Not One:

1. Make sure that you have clear, easy-to-find contact details on your site.
2. A clear section about the team will help trustworthiness.
3. Client testimonials.
4. Professional design.
5. Make sure a secure server is used to process order information.

For nonprofits, I'd add one extra thing: Send relevant email. Stay on the topic of your cause and how the recipient can be involved. Don't send press releases and information that has nothing to do with the recipient. The moment someone has to ask, What does this have to do with me? your message starts to look like a scam. Or like spam.

How award-winning work destroys nonprofit organizations

A few months ago I wrote about some obnoxiously stupid nonprofit marketing that won an award from D&AD, an ad-industry organization in the UK. (See Stupid nonprofit ads: garbage in, garbage out.

Mark Phillips, of the excellent queer ideas blog, also commented on the same work. He was later invited to write at D&AD about the problem with ad-agency-style creativity when applied to nonprofits, at Fundraising would be better without this award.

Mark really put his finger on what's wrong with the ad industry approach to nonprofit marketing:

... expensive re-brands and advertising campaigns which tend to push donors and charities further apart by swapping an authentic experience of helping another human being, or fighting for a cause you believe in, with a 'game-changing' creative idea accompanied by another strict set of brand guidelines that demonstrate just how great the charity is.

The secret to successful fundraising is not a "supply-side" brand that does a great job of bragging about the nonprofit.

The secret is a donor-side fundraising offer that's authentic, emotional, and important to the donor.

Supply-side branding is what produces those gloriously stupid nonprofit ads. But worse than that, it's responsible for a lot of garden-variety ineffective fundraising. Stuff that will never get featured in a blog because it's not stupid, just weak or misdirected. These efforts waste billions of dollars in missed revenue every year. They are strangling many once-noble organizations.

If you want to raise funds, you're going to have to do fundraising. If you don't like that, you need to find a different profession, because you will not succeed in this one.

A fundraising offer you can't refuse

From the travel blog Asia Obscura, an example of extreme fundraising from southern India: Sweet Gruesome Statue (aka "Give Cash Now").

How many donors would say no to that fundraising offer?

I also wonder if the agency submitted the project with more entrails, but the client made them hold back with only a moderate display of entrails.

Thanks to alert reader (and fellow podcaster) Steven Screen for the tip.

Who donors are really giving to when they give to you

Here's one of those important points that's so easy to forget, from The Far Edge of Promise blog, at Giving Through:

Do you ask your donors to give to your institution? Or... Do you ask your donors to give through your institution to your students, patients, clients, etc?

That's pretty much the main question you should ask yourself about your fundraising.

Donors don't give because of who you are. Most of them don't give a rip about your wonderful organization. They like what you enable them to do. They'd walk away from you in two seconds if a better way for them to accomplish their good deeds came along.

When you make it all about you, you miss the point. Successful fundraising is about the donor and what she'll accomplish when she gives.

It's easy to wander away from this and start building incredible cases for giving that are built on the premise that our organization is utterly great. It doesn't work. People aren't giving to you.

How to critique effectively

Too often, when people critique fundraising messages, they talk in the first person. They make it seem as if the critiquer is a donor telling her story of her interactions with the piece and why it did or didn't work. These critiques are full of phrases like these:

• I don't like it.
• That confuses me.
• I feel good about that.

This is the wrong way to critique. Saying I wouldn't respond is the wrong information.

Nobody should care one bit how you or I react to a fundraising message. It's not important what you like and dislike -- it's how donors respond in real-life situations. And even when we know how donors responded, we don't know why they did what they did. We only know what they did.

So when you make a first-person critique, you are claiming you know things you can't possibly know, using information that can't possibly be relevant. You give people the false impression you're telling them something true.

Chances are, when you use the first-person voice to make a critique, you're misleading yourself, as well as those you're talking to.

Sometimes first-person critiques are in fact solid critiques based on known response facts about what donors did. They're merely using first person to dramatize the situation.

Even then, the first-person voice is misleading. It makes people think they need to reach you, when they should be striving to reach donors.

When you critique a fundraising message, be very clear about what you really know and what you're just hypothesizing. Use the third person (he or she), and don't describe how donors felt, but what they did.

That's how you'll get closer to wisdom, truth, and success.

Podcast: Beauty is overrated

Are you creating fundraising that looks great or that gets results? Often, you can do one or the other, not both. In this look at the power of the odd, unattractive, and unfashionable in direct mail, broadcast, and online, we'll show you how the quest to make your fundraising aesthetically pleasing usually leads to lower results.

To listen, click here to download the audio file or visit the Fundraising Is Beautiful page here, where you'll find several listening and subscription options.

Or subscribe with iTunes:

Researchers also discovered that water is wet

Wow. Some researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have really hit it out of the park with this one: When it comes to charitable giving, people respond to their immediate emotions.

They painstakingly uncovered what any fundraiser who usually does their work while awake has always known:

When considering giving money to humanitarian crises people often donate in response to events that grab their immediate emotions....

Okay, it's not really cool to make fun of the research. After all, the findings are not bogus, and that's an accomplishment. And maybe these finding will prompt some brand-bound, look-at-us fundraiser to break free from the bad and do some donor-aimed fundraising instead.

Or maybe someone can show the research to their clueless ED and thus get permission to actually address things donors care about while raising funds.

Here's to discovering the obvious!

Thanks to @joannefritz for the tip.

Restraint: the quick path to losing donors

Survey research could kill your fundraising.

Here's an example, from Burk's Blog: The Profitability of Restraint.

This is an extreme use of qualitative research that leads to unsupportable conclusions. Namely, in this case, that the top reason donors stop giving is "over-solicitation."

... donors feel bombarded, and their giving patterns reflect their growing frustration. Today, over-solicitation ranks first among reasons why donors stop giving. More than 90% of donors who start giving to a particular charity stop giving within five appeals....

The conclusion: "There is much more money to be made by holding back, by giving donors time to think...."

This is not supported by evidence.

(Any charity that's experiencing the claimed "90% of donors stop giving within five appeals" is in deeper trouble than anyone I've ever worked with -- and I've seen organizations in serious tailspins.)

It would be seriously irresponsible for you to follow this advice, because it's not based on actual behavioral reality.

Every test I've been involved in or heard about tells a very different story: "Holding back" will cost you big. You'll get less net revenue in the short run, and you'll lose more donors in the long run. You are in a lot more danger from under-communicating than you are from over-communicating.

Don't believe me? Do you think your donors are different from other donors? There's a small possibility that they are.

If you think your donors are completely different and restraint would be profitable, do this first: Set aside two groups of donors. For the first group, send X appeals in the course of a year (X being the number you normally send). For the second group, send X/2. Then track the response and retention of the two groups over the course of the year.

I can almost guarantee that the first group, the one you communicate with more, will not only give more, but a higher percentage of them will stay with you over the long term.

Only watching actual behavior can tell you if your quantity of communication frustrates them into not giving. Anyone who says otherwise, citing opinion-based research like surveys or focus groups, is selling you dangerous snake-oil.