Future Fundraising Now

How fundraisers are getting it right in the mail

Here's another fascinating post from the Joy of Direct Marketing blog: B2C Direct Mail: Learning from charities. It looks at fundraising direct mail from a commercial DM perspective, and finds our stuff pretty darn good. (I noted a similar post from this same blog last month.)

Here's what they noted about fundraising mail:

• The mailings are in envelopes.
• The envelopes have teaser copy on the outside.
• Everything in the "package" looks easy to read even before you start reading.
• The writers are never showing off their brilliance; the copy is always in simple language.
• They have letters and the letters have a personal, one-to-one, feel about them.
• There's usually a (relevant) story of some kind that draws the reader in.
• The writer makes a point of establishing a one-to-one connection.
• Sometimes there is a brochure, sometimes not.
• They often contain involvement devices, something for the recipient to "play" with, however minor it may be: a sticker you move from here to there, for example.
• The copy might tug gently at your heartstrings, but it doesn't beat you over the head.
• The copy is as long as it has to be.
• They do what all sales managers wish their salespeople would do: they ask for the order in several different ways.
• They are positive, upbeat and focused on success.
• They usually feature testimonials.
• They keep coming.

What's funny about this list is that many of these things are under constant attack by fundraisers(usually inexperienced ones) who think these things are corny, old-line "techniques" that "nobody would respond to."

But this is the stuff that pays our salaries and makes our good deeds possible. If you're doing it right, keep doing it! If not, here's a good list to follow.

I have a dream too

My dream is somewhat less elevated than Dr. King's.

But here it is:

That nonprofits everywhere will start taking donors seriously.

That they'll start paying attention to what donors actually respond to, not what they wish donors would respond to.

That they'll do fundraising built on exciting calls to action, not irrelevant, cooked-up "brands."

That they'll actually let donors fund what they want to fund.

That they'll thank donors quickly, and show enough respect to report back to donors on the impact of their giving.

Because when that happens, the fundraising recession will be decisively over. A new era of nonprofit effectiveness will begin. More donors will benefit from the impact of more giving.

Unfortunately, my dream is not gonna come true. Not in 2012. Not in any year of the near future.

But here's what I believe will happen: A few organizations will get it this year. And a few more will next year, and each year after that. Fundraising that's about donors will become more and more normal. Donors will increasingly expect and demand being treated right.

The organizations that refuse to get it will fade and shrink and finally go away.

When that finally happens, my dream will come true.

How to thank your donors

I have a feeling that some day, fundraisers are going to spend as much energy on thanking donors as we do now on asking them.

We're going to build up a knowledge of what works and doesn't work, much the way we have for asking.

Until that time, we have to rely on common sense.

Here's some of that from the Fired-Up Fundraising blog: How to Craft a Killer Thank You Letter.

• Don't start out with "on behalf of."
• Don't Ask for another gift.
• Don't use thank you letter jargon: "we are deeply grateful for your continued support."
• Don't start out with Dear Friend.
• Don't ask anything else from your donor right now.
• Don't misspell their name.
• Don't Have errors in grammar, punctuation or misspellings.
• Don't go on and on. Ditch the verbosity. Do be concise.
• Don't keep selling.
• Don't re-use copy that you used in the solicitation letter to talk about your programs.
• Don't be formal. Or lofty.
• Don't be vague about how the money will be used.
• Don't sign it yourself if you can get a higher-ranking person to sign it.

I disagree with one of these: "Don't keep selling." On the contrary, you should always keep selling. Selling in your thank-you letter does two important things:

1. It strongly reaffirms the donor's decision to give.
2. It gives donors an opportunity to give again at the time when they are most predisposed to do so: Donors are most likely to give when they've given recently, and they're more inclined to give again when they feel good about their previous gift. Your thank you is a golden moment.

Thinking hard about thank-you letters is smart. We all should be doing it.

Hints galore on how to raise money with newsletters

A practical history-of-fundraising lesson from Tom Ahern: The Domain Formula for donor newsletters:

In the 1990s, a Seattle fundraising shop called the Domain Group took the garden-variety donor newsletter, stripped it down to its components, and began testing.... Domain eventually developed a formula that made a donor newsletter HIGHLY worth doing: some Domain clients began raking in more gifts through their newsletters than through their direct mail appeals.

Tom learned these things form the Domain Formula:

• Page count: no more than 4 pages (in tests, adding more pages did not produce more revenue)
• Article length: short
• Write for skimmers (i.e., requires professional quality headlines)
• Send in a #10 envelope, not as a self-mailer
• Include a separate reply device
• Don't get distracted: be fully donor-committed. Send only to your donors. You have to talk to a single target audience
• Make the voice personal (the word "you" dominates) rather than institutional; get intimate
• Focus on "accomplishment reporting" (tell donors how much they have changed the world through their gifts)

I was part of that intrepid Domain Group team back then. It was amazing to watch newsletters transform from a net cost to revenue-generators. Not only did we find that newsletters could pull in donations as well as (sometimes better than) appeals, we also saw that time after time, adding newsletters to the fundraising line-up improved donor retention.

It's been a long time since those discoveries. Here are a few things I've learned about newsletters since then:

• Page count: newsletters of fewer than four pages have not done well. Cheaper, but the loss in revenue more than undercuts the production savings.
• Full color: When tested against two colors, four-color newsletters usually at least pay for themselves -- though not always. (Back in the 90s, 4-color was not worthwhile; in fact, it often depressed response.) Full color seems to have the most positive impact for larger national organizations. It's worth testing, but not an automatic winner for everyone.
• A reply device printed in the newsletter usually gives a meaningful boost to response. Organizations get very few of these printed reply devices back, but they seem to have the function of driving more people to the separate RD that's in the envelope.
• Best teaser: "Newsletter enclosed."
• Newsletters are not equally effective for all organizations. They work better for local orgs than national ones. They generally work better for religious orgs than non-religious.

What's wrong with the Next Big Thing?

One of the most pointless and uninteresting things you can hear is that something is the Next Big thing in Fundraising.

Anything that's being bandied around as a "big thing" is not a big thing. Not yet, and probably not ever.

You'll know a thing is big when nobody's calling it a big thing any more -- but they're just using it successfully to meet their goals.

Another way you can tell a thing is big is when people start claiming it's "dead."

The two Biggest Things in Fundraising today are direct mail and the house of worship collection plate. Saying so won't get you a lot of retweets or invitations to speak at conferences. But they make all the hyped new "big things" look like tiny, mewing pipsqueaks. If you're serious about raising funds, you'll look into one or both of those truly big things.

There are other big things, some of them fairly new. Email fundraising is clearly a big thing, and getting bigger.

A few years ago, plastic wrist bands were the Next Big Thing in Fundraising. They were pretty big for a few organizations. But by the time hundreds of other nonprofits jumped on the bandwagon, chasing this Next Big Thing, it wasn't all that big.

So next time you read a blog post or hear a conference presentation about the Next Big Thing, make sure your hype filter is engaged. And meanwhile, put your energy into the Big Things that nobody's bothering to hype.

Fundraising without asking is hardly fundraising at all

When people are asked why they don't give to charity, one of the most common answers is, I wasn't asked to give.

Asking is our job.

And a recent study reported at the Neuromarketing blog shows how important asking is: Nine Words Nearly Double Results.

The study compared Salvation Army red-kettle bell-ringing fundraisers who simply rang the bell to those who also said to passersby: Hi, how are you? Merry Christmas. Please give today.

Those who asked got 75% more donations in their kettles.

Yeah, everyone knows what the Salvation Army kettle is for. But asking still makes all the difference.

You can download the study: Avoiding The Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving (PDF).

QR codes in fundraising and the mortality of kittens

Here's a quick, inspired talk about brain-dead uses of QR codes. The takeaway: Every time you use a QR code for something and don't think it through, a kitten dies.

(Or see it here on YouTube.)

One other ill-considered use of QR codes he didn't mention: When marketing to older people -- i.e. fundraising.

Show your compassion for the world's kittens: Lay off the QR codes. Until you have donors who actually use them.

What do donors really want to do?

One of the most important principles of fundraising is this: What people say about their charity has little to do with what they do.

Once you believe that, you'll stop taking terrible advice.

But don't just take my word for it. Here's evidence from Nick Aldridge's blog: Does actual giving behaviour match expressed giving preferences?

This interesting study compares what some UK survey respondents said they'd give £1 to with what people actually gave £1 to on eBay, when asked to donate during the checkout process.

• "Help small UK charities stay open and help local people" did well in the survey but poorly in real giving.
• "Give a child in Kosovo a pair of shoes and warm gloves that they can wear to school" did poorly in the survey but pretty well in real giving.

Conclusion?

... potential donors may turn out be more responsive to simple, emotive imagery than they claim or indeed believe. Conversely, donors may overestimate their interest in discriminating between causes on rational grounds. In shaping fundraising campaigns or messages, fundraisers should not imagine that potential givers will make a rational judgment in response.

The important thing here is this: People's opinions and their actions do not line up. Don't expect them to. And don't build your brand or fundraising platform based on what people tell you in surveys or focus groups.

Telling someone "I'd give to that" is a fundamentally different action from actually giving to it. When you just say you'd give, you have no skin in the game. It's easy to say yes because it's politically correct or because you think saying yes will make you look good. That's why complex and intellectual offers do well when people are asked about them.

But when it actually comes to shelling out money, a different dynamic is in play. You respond to what actually moves you, not what you think should move you -- or what you think others think should move you.

That's why the offers that work best are super-simple, emotional, and often a bit short-sighted. Providing a meal for a hungry child will always beat creating systems that keep the child from going hungry.

You can spend your whole fundraising career trying to change this fundamental quirk of the human mind -- and you'll have a miserably unsuccessful career. Or you can work with people as they really are -- and raise more money to actually get stuff done.

I'd choose the latter.

Thanks to Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog for the tip.

How to write headlines

Headlines are difficult. There are a lot of formulas that can help you write good ones, or at least avoid writing bad ones.

Here's a new formula for writing headlines, from the KISSmetrics blog: Can You Write a Better Headline Than This? Not Using Old Headline Formulas You Can't. Here's the formula:

Specificity
Helpfulness
Immediacy
Newsworthiness
Entertainment value

(Read the whole post; it has a lot of helpful detail on each of these elements.)

Charity name-change usually leads to fundraising disaster

The most self-destructive, revenue-killing act nonprofit organizations can make is one a lot of them are tempted to do: A name change.

Typically, a name change hurts fundraising. Sometimes catastrophically.

Cascade Land Conservancy, a venerable and much-liked environmental organization headquartered in Seattle, changed its name to Forterra.

No, that is not a typo. Yes, it does sound like a new erectile dysfunction drug.

And yes, it's likely to be a fundraising disaster.

The reasoning for the change is given in the press release. It seems the Cascade Land Conservancy opened an office in a county that has no actual Cascade Mountains in it. That and the fact that they have many programs that are not located in or on those mountains unleashed the dreaded "our name limits us" virus.

That's what explains statement like these that appear in the organization's literature about the virtues of the new name:

• "a testament to our organization's continued dedication to the region"
• "represents our holistic approach to land conservation"
• "leaves us room to continue evolving to serve the needs of this dynamic region"

And then, the icing on the cake -- here's what the branding expert whose company visited this disaster on the organization, pro bono, had to say:

Simply stated, Forterra means they are for the earth. It is an open vessel that allows them to continue to adapt to the needs of the community and effectively advance their important and broad mission.

Ah, the old "open vessel" gambit, used to explain something that's meaningless: Don't worry about the fact that it's meaningless; it can mean anything!

Problem is, it actually means nothing.

Just in case there was any doubt that this is an ill-conceived and poorly executed project, take a look at the new logo. It makes the confusing name even more confusing.

That "E" is actually a fancy ampersand. Which makes it look like the name isn't the somewhat nonsensical Forterra, but the completely wacko FORT & RRA.

If the good people at Cascade Land Conservancy/Forterra were listening to me (they aren't), here's what I'd tell them: It's not too late to escape the disaster. You can go back. Hardly anyone knows you've changed your name, so embarrassment and cost of switching back will be low. A lot lower than the revenue crash that awaits if you stay this silly course.

And for those considering a name change: Think twice before you do it. It will probably not go well, no matter what the pro-bono experts tell you.