Future Fundraising Now

Off-target links lead donors away from giving

One of the most common errors in nonprofit e-appeals is this: indiscriminate links. Lots of them. Each one a tempting little rabbit-trail that can lead would-be donors away from action, never to return and complete their gift.

The Emma Blog has some good pointers for helping your e-appeals keep donors on task: Clicks are only half the battle

Be choosy about your links. When a recipient clicks a link in your email, they're essentially leaving your email's message behind -- and they may not return to read more. So make sure you're delivering them elsewhere for good reason. Rather than directing to pages of your site, consider creating custom landing pages that speak uniquely to your email audience. Remember, they know more about you than someone who finds you through a search engine. That means you can deliver them to a deeper place in your sales funnel.

Just because you have a template that has all the standard navigation links doesn't mean you should use it.

If someone is actually reading your email (remember, most of your emails don't even get opened), they've taken a step toward action. Every distraction you put in their field of vision increases the chance that they'll continue that action all the way to completion.

You also should not have navigation links on your giving pages for the same reason.

The secret to smart fundraising, online or off, is focus.

How to make nonprofit videos that people share

Wouldn't you love to create a video for your cause that everyone would pass around and talk about? That's the usually unfulfilled promise of the web.

One reason it so seldom actually works out the way we'd like is the videos we create just aren't "contagious." Nobody shares them because they lack that shareable quality.

ListenIn Pictures blog has Top Ten Tips for Creating Contagious Content:

1. It's Not About how Good the Idea is, It's About how Shareable it is.
2. Identify Yourself Authoritatively.
3. Self Reference is Not Contagious. (...don't talk about what you do, talk about why you exist and why they should join your movement.)
4. Positivity Works.
5. Know How People Share.
6. Banal Information is Not Transmissible.
7. Do Something Unexpected/Have a Twist.
8. Make it Timely.
9. Aim for Combined Relevance. (Tap into other things your target audiences loves or cares about)
10. Uncomplicated Language is Contagious.

These are good tips not only for videos, but any communication you'd like people to care about.

The one overriding tip that covers all of these? Don't make it about you. Make it about them.

What fundraisers should give up for Lent

We are now in the season of Lent, a seven-week period before Easter during which many Christians practice abstention from various things as a spiritual exercise. Most faiths have similar practices.

Funny thing about Lent is that whatever your spiritual goals, you also make discoveries about the things you abstain from. Things like:

• You don't need them as much as you thought.
• Sometimes life is notably better without them.

That's why I think nonprofits should consider giving up a couple things for Lent. Just to see what life is like without them.

Specifically, I recommend giving up these two things:

Bragging

A lot of nonprofits adapt the commercial marketing practice of building their message around the superiority of their brand and their product. They beat their chests. They focus on themselves. They brag.

Bragging isn't good fundraising. Donors don't give because of your many excellent qualities -- though they demand that you have those qualities. Donors give because of their own excellent qualities. That's what fundraising should be about: reminding donors who they are, and why your cause fits their portfolio for changing the world.

When you stop bragging about yourself, you're free to forge the bond between you and the donor. That's when fundraising takes off.

Educating donors

If your donors knew more about you and your cause, they'd give more. It doesn't follow that the way to increased giving is to bludgeon donors with facts and educate them into "getting it."

Giving is not a rational act. It's relational. When you try to educate donors into giving, you are at cross-purposes with this important fact. Instead, build a relationship. Some donors will seek "education" about your cause as the relationship deepens. Others won't. But both kinds of donors will give more because of the relationship -- because you respect them and are aligned with them. Not because you filled their heads with more and better facts.

It's not too late to start your organizational Lenten abstention. You'll see meaningful improvements if you give it a try.

How to avoid the two killer mistakes of fundraising

Nonprofits have to navigate their way between the Scylla and Charybdis of fundraising: The two errors in thinking that can sink your fundraising effectiveness.

1: Hating everything that's been done before

You'd rather do anything than direct mail fundraising. It's just so old hat, so tired. Email, which in marketing terms has yet to come in to its own, and is growing at explosive rates -- to you, it's dead already. Even Facebook is a tired old steam locomotive.

If you think this way, you miss the big opportunities. Because the big ones are the older ones. You're also an easy mark for con-artist consultants who prey on your particular attitude by offering half-baked, exciting-sounding schemes.

2: Needing guaranteed success for everything you do

You can't do a thing unless there's an iron-clad performance pro forma and documented best practices. You're not so much a late adapter as a never adapter.

No innovation is possible if you insist on guarantees. Every successful thing ever done started as a risky, unproven idea. If you never innovate, you find yourself in an ever narrower hole, less and less able to keep growing.

Either extreme is bad. But there's something worse. Some organizations actually embrace both of these destructive tendencies at once. They hate to focus on the old stuff they're tired of, yet they're terrified of actual innovation.

So they end up chasing the latest fad: Red Cross raised millions via text messaging during the Haiti Quake; suddenly, hundreds of organizations were crying Get us some of that text-to-give! Same thing happened with the famous yellow wristbands; after that cultural phenomenon, literally hundreds of nonprofits tried to get on the bandwagon with other-colored wristbands of their own.

The smart path between these two attitudes is this:

• If lots of people are doing something, that's a good indication that it's been tested and refined and it works. If you aren't exploring it, you are probably making a costly mistake. If a fundraising approach has been around for a long time (like direct mail), that doesn't necessarily mean it's old and tired. More likely it means it's powerful.
• Don't be afraid of failure. Be aware of best practices and past experiences, but don't be afraid to try new things. Take risks in ways that limit your exposure in case you fail -- which you will, more often than not.

People don't trust your CEO any more

The Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual study of who's trusted, has some interesting findings about the credibility of the CEOs of companies as spokespeople:

• CEOs were trusted by 50% of respondents in 2011. That dropped to 38% in 2012. The biggest decline in history of the study.
• "A person like yourself" jumped from trusted by 43% last year to 65% this year.
• A "regular employee" was trusted by only 34% in 2011, but by 50% in 2012

What does this mean for fundraising? I doubt it's a huge, game-changing shift. But I'd look at having people other than your CEO or president be your main fundraising spokesperson.

I don't think nonprofit CEOs have done as much to squander their collective reputation as corporate CEOs have. But maybe some of the dirt has rubbed off on our leaders.

Thanks to Church of the Customer Blog for the tip.

Successful fundraising is about donors -- every time

Here's a great email subject-line test, reported at 101fundraising, that shows pretty dramatically how important it is to make your fundraising about donors, not about you: It's you, not me.

Subject line	Open rate	Clickthrough
From Haiti to Somalia, taking action together to save lives	31.4%	1.5%
Together, our swift response has made a difference in Haiti	35.1%	1.9%
You've had a life-saving impact	42.3%	2.3%

This isn't unique to email subject lines. You'll get results like this most of the time, in any media. Make it about donors, and you get more response.

The reason is very simple: They don't give because of who you are; they because of who they are.

Fundraising when times are tough

Check out the first few paragraphs of this fundraising appeal, written by Sean Triner for the Starlight Children's Foundation of Australia:

This is the most important letter I have ever written.

Starlight is facing an unprecedented financial crisis which is forcing me and my team to make decisions I never imagined we would face just twelve months ago. Decisions that will impact the lives of thousands of sick Australian children this year.

Even when I wrote to supporters at the end of March, I was not sure what action we would need to take to keep the essential core of Starlight's work going. I knew I might have to cut services, but things are tougher than I imagined.

Without your help, the cuts I will be forced to make will need to be even more drastic than they are already.

If you can't -- or are not allowed to -- write a letter like this, you aren't really in the fundraising profession.

The sad truth is, many -- maybe most -- organizations would never let this letter go out. They'd dislike the urgent tone. The open admission of trouble would give them the willies. For many, this would violate the dictates of the brand guidelines, which mandate a sunny, hopeful tone at all times.

And that's too bad, because donors flock to support organizations that come to them with messages like this. Because donors really care about the organizations they support. And they want to make a meaningful difference. They're thrilled and honored to be part of a rescue.

You should never say you're in an "unprecedented financial crisis" unless you really are. And that means (I hope) that letters like this are rare. But when times are hard (as they have been for many organizations the last few years), you owe it to your donors to be frank and realistic with them.

That's what real fundraisers do.

You can read more about the background of this letter at SOFII: How I wrote it -- the Starlight Children's Foundation emergency appeal, and even download the whole thing, which I urge you to do.

Guess who gives to charity?

Who gives to charity? Here's a look at a recent study reported at Advice for Good. What the research says about who gives to charity

It's a more European take on the topic, but it's pretty much the same as what we experience in North America. Some important factors for charitable giving include:

• Religion: "...the more often someone attends religious services the more likely they are to donate to charity and donate larger amounts."
• Education: "higher education = higher charitable giving."
• Age: There's a "positive correlation between age and donation amount, with a leveling off or decreasing after a certain age."
• Socialization: "People who grow up in a religious household give more to charity; parental volunteering likely increases children's propensity to give; volunteering as teenagers increases giving as adults."

The important takeaway from this, or any other study of who gives, is this reminder: Your donors are not you. If you want to be persuasive to them, don't tangle yourself up in trying to be persuasive to yourself.

Here's the study: Who Gives? A Literature Review of Predictors of Charitable Giving (PDF).

How the message switcheroo crushes your fundraising

Here's a cautionary tale from Tom Ahern's Love Thy Donor newsletter: Following in the footsteps of your promise.

It's about a nonprofit that had an effective direct mail acquisition control that led with a powerful, uncompromising faith-based message. It brought in tons of donors.

Then something would go wrong: those donors would start getting the newsletter, produced by in-house experts on the organization's staff. It was nothing at all like the letter that brought them aboard. It told the story in jargon and with lot of data. It had lost its religious passion and spiritual focus.

That's a very expensive switcheroo. If you bring donors into the fold with the fervor of a missionary -- then start talking to them like a social worker, you are going to lose donors. Donor retention will tank, because donors will wonder who the heck is talking to them:

Newsletter editors: have samples of your organization's successful direct mail in front of you as you write. Look for key sales messages like "follow in the footsteps of your faith." Use the same kinds of messages in your newsletter headlines. Reaffirm the values that first brought your donors aboard.

This problem isn't unique to religious organizations. There are many fundraising programs that have high-powered, well-honed acquisition controls -- and barely-related subsequent communications.

It's not only revenue killer, it's fundamentally dishonest. If your high-powered acquisition control is fundamentally untrue, then you have no business using it to get donors. On the other hand, if that high-powered piece is accurate and true, you have no business wandering away from it later. Either way is a kind of big fat lie. You owe it to your donors (and yourself) to be truthful.

(This story is adapted from Ahern's forthcoming book about donor newsletters. Let me tell you, this book is going to be a must read among must-reads!)

Update: Link to Ahern's newsletter now works.

How skimping on your donors can make you lose your shirt

Great thought at Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That: How long are your shirt tails?

Good shirts have nice long tails. They stay tucked in that way. But a shirt company could save a lot of money by shortening the tails on its shirts by a few inches. After all, just a tiny bit off the bottom doesn't make that much different, does it?

But the most important data never shows up on a spreadsheet: Customers who bought the shirt, thought it seemed short/cheap, and never came back. Your "fabric cost" spreadsheet doesn't have a column for "customer retention costs." Which means you may be saving money on a cheap product, but losing more money in lost repeat sales.

A good company has better math: What is the most economical way to keep our customers happy?

When it comes to donor experience, are you like the good shirt company, or the bad one? Do you trim just a bit off the bottom in a way you're sure nobody notices -- but maybe makes their experience just a bit worse than it should be?

• Do you send your donors receipts promptly, or do you save a few bucks with some lousy process that makes it take weeks to thank your donors for their gifts?
• Do you go to the trouble to find and tell inspiring stories about what donors are accomplishing with their giving, or is your fundraising vague and statistical?
• Do you have a newsletter that's designed to make donors feel good about the great things they've made possible, or is your newsletter all about how great you are? (Or worse yet, do you fail to report back at all what's happening?)
• Are you figuring out really cool specific actions you can invite your donors to take, or are you only raising undesignated funds and saving all the good stuff for foundations and mega-donors?

Donors aren't likely to complain about these things. But like a slightly-too-short shirt-tail, they can just leave people feeling a bit under-served. Their connection to you and your cause is a little less delightful and rewarding. The chance that they'll lose interest or get lured away by something else just that much higher.

Don't be stupidly cheap. Your donors deserve better. And they'll reward you if you treat them right.