Future Fundraising Now

Sorry, but It's Not the Economy

Here's my column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, Sorry, but It's Not the Economy.

Teaser: "... what you do has a lot more impact on your success than what the economy does to you."

And with that, the five-year run of "Easier Said Than Done" comes to an end. If you're really crazy, you can read all 51 columns here.

What's wrong with your fundraising?

Read this post at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog: 3 Diagnoses for why your message isn't getting through. The diagnoses:

1. "Field of Dreams" syndrome. Declaring your existence is not a marketing campaign.
2. "It's all about us" disease. Why should donors care? What can they accomplish?
3. "Call to inaction" problem. Be direct, specific and clear!

These are extremely common problems in fundraising, and if you have them, they are killing your results.

When editing makes your copy worse

I edit a lot of fundraising copy. And I work with veteran professional writers who know their stuff, so I'm not having to help them hammer out the basics.

Most of edits I make to others' copy (and my own) are in these categories:

• Removing the first one to three paragraphs. You'd be amazed. This works almost every time. Almost every writer (including me) spends the opening paragraph or so "warming up" before getting down to the real work.
• Removing the word "that." Not every time it appears, but most of the time. Sentences like I hope that you will give usually go better with out that that.
• Removing adverbs. Almost all of them. Adverbs seldom make verbs any stronger.
• Removing adjectives. A good adjective can earn its keep. Most of them don't.
• Removing complicated background material. Some details are good; they add specificity and authenticity. Too many make the copy hard to understand, and remove the focus from the important stuff.

See the pattern?

You can almost always make copy better by removing stuff. Even good, strong copy written by professional writers.

I bring it up because most of the time, the editing process adds stuff to the copy.

That's because it's done by committees. Each member of the committee wants certain things clarified or emphasized. So they add a word here, a phrase there, adjectives, adverbs, fluff, and lots of complicated background material.

Clear, muscular copy turns into fog.

If you want to make some copy better, make it shorter. If you want to make it worse, give it to a committee.

(If you struggle with committees, you might enjoy this: Death by Committee.)

Secret to success: slogging it out

Those hot-heads over at the Passionate Giving blog are at it again.

They're going after some recent coverage in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, at Why the Chronicle is Wrong!

Among the top nonprofits in the Chronicle's Philanthropy 400, many are suffering lower results in recent years. The Chronicle coverage, though, cites some organizations that are doing better because they're using social media and courting young donors. As typical with such stories, these claims are unsubstantiated.

The real secret for success in hard times? Focus on the basics:

It's hard work. And sometimes it feels like you're just slogging it out. But ... take solace that you are pursuing the "un-sexy" thing: working your major gift strategic plan, understanding your donor's passion, putting solid offers in front of them and asking for their support. And, everyday staying focused on it.

Doing new, cool stuff feels good. It makes you feel like you're smart and forward-looking.

And going after young donors is fun, because it allows us to abandon the old-fashioned ways of talking to donors who are inevitably older and less cool than the people we'd prefer to hang out with.

But the money is in the un-sexy stuff. The everyday, hardly-changing activities that won't get praised in the Chronicle or hardly anywhere else.

If you care about your cause, you'll spend most of your time on those activities.

Of course, you should be keeping your eyes open and learning new channels and new ways of reaching donors. But your job is to persevere with the basics.

How your donors are talking about you

There's an interesting infographic at The WOMMA Word and how word-of-mouth information about commercial brands spreads and is used: The Word and the World of Customers.

• 9 out of 10 conversations about brands happen offline
• 66% of these conversations are mostly positive
• 8% are mostly negative
• Average online review is 4.3 (out of 5)
• 55% of consumers recommend a company because of its customer service

What I find worth noting about these findings are these points:

1. How offline word-of-mouth is. Despite what they say, people talking about brands isn't something that was invented with Twitter. It's been going on as long as anybody has been selling anything. And it's still overwhelmingly happening offline. Don't over-focus on the social media part of it; you'll miss where the real action is.
2. How positive word-of-mouth is. Seriously, I thought it was mainly complaints. This is great news for nonprofits. We thrive in positive environments. You shouldn't be afraid of what people might say in public about you. They're pre-disposed to be positive.
3. How much service matters. Fundraisers who focus on service are going to benefit from great word-of-mouth buzz. Great service for us is: Flawless data, quick receipting, excellent and constant reporting back to donors, and giving donors control over the relationship. Among other things.

How to win an award and not dirty your hands with revenue

There's a great post at Direct Creative Blog, 6 secrets for winning pointy plastic creative advertising awards, that helps explain a lot about why stupid nonprofit ads are the way they are.

To win a spiffy lucite ad-industry award, just follow these steps:

1. Start with a "concept." Start with a pun, an obscure cultural reference, a witty visual, or some idea that proves you're ultra creative.
2. Feature stunning photography or artwork. Irrelevant visuals and minimal copy are the keys to stifling response and stocking your lobby with those clear resin obelisks!
3. Design it first and fill in the copy later. Leave little blank spaces and tell the writer to fill them in.
4. Get fancy with type. Treat the copy as a visual element instead of thoughts and ideas you want to communicate clearly.
5. Make your phone number really, really small. Nothing is more off-putting to judges than appearing too eager to conduct business.
6. Use a coupon with an unusual shape. A square coupon with a dashed border is so old fogy.

If you are boring and pedestrian enough that you must raise funds, ignore all these steps.

Give yourself time to be creative

Isn't it great? You never have to be apart from your email, the news, celebrity gossip, or stupid, angry political discourse.

It's not great at all. It's ruining our ability to think new thoughts, have ideas, be creative. We're always plugged in, always running like hamsters in wheels, but never getting anywhere.

That's the important point in a recent article at The 99 Percent: What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space.

The article is worth reading, because it offers suggestions for creating your own "interruption-free spaces." It prescribes these things for people who need to keep space in their lives for being creative:

1. Rituals for unplugging. Create ways to separate yourself from the stream of information and activity. Think Sabbath.
2. Daily doses of deep thinking. Spend some time every day just thinking.
3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.
4. Self-awareness and psychological investment. We often avoid silence and thinking because we'll have to confront ourselves. Deal with those issues that keep you from being quiet. So you can be quiet.
5. Protect the state of no-intent. Sometimes the best path forward is to stop running ahead. Just do nothing for a while.

Thanks to Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog for the tip.

Who's the devil? You are!

This post on 101fundraising makes me happy: I Am The Comms Devil.

Here's why: The writer, Margaux Smith, attended a workshop led by Australian fundraising hero Sean Triner at the recent International Fundraising Congress (IFC), where she made an important discovery about the difference between messages that win awards and please professionals -- and messages that actually work:

I love award-winning drivel. I guess you can hear something a million times but you need to be shown in order for it to really sink in. This was my ah-ha! moment.

Congratulations, Margaux. You've learned something that many in our profession never quite figure out: We fundraisers are not our own target audience.

You see, probably the most common cause of bad fundraising is fundraisers mistaking ourselves for our donors -- and creating messages that make us feel good. Once you've made that leap of the imagination so you can step outside the closed loop of your own taste and preferences, you are free to do things right.

There's nothing wrong with liking what you like. There's nothing wrong with your taste, but that's all it is -- your taste. It tells you nothing about what donors will respond to. In fact, anyone who's been around the block a few times will tell you: The more we like it, the worse it will do in the marketplace. In other words, your personal preference works best as a counter-indicator of quality.

It took me several years and many painful experiences to figure this out. The young fundraiser who establishes this knowledge early is going to do very well in our profession.

Check out Stupid Nonprofit Ads for more "award-winning drivel."

One big fundraising mistake that leads to many other mistakes

From Karen Zapp's Nonprofit Blog, 5 Most Common Mistakes in Fundraising Copy. Here they are:

• Assume a level of knowledge and familiarity that just isn't there.
• Every letter or email tries to cover everything you do.
• Fail to show how a donor makes a difference.
• Fundraising appeal written by committee.
• Copy is NOT donor-centric. It doesn't put the reader in the hero's spotlight.

In my experience, all of these super-common mistakes are symptoms of an even more common mental error: Fundraising from yourself.

It's so easy to aim your fundraising message at yourself -- to create the message you find compelling. That's what causes you to assume the donor knows and cares about things they've never considered. It's what makes you try to say too much. It's what makes you skip telling the donor she's critical to the cause. And it allows committees to grab control of projects -- because, after all, we have to make all the insiders happy, don't we?

Remind yourself every day that you are not the donor. Neither is your executive director, your consultant, or any of your board members. Keep that in mind, and you'll be a lot less likely to make those copy mistakes.