Future Fundraising Now

Why your donor acquisition isn't going well

It's not just you. New donors are getting harder to find.

But not all fundraisers are suffering equally. Some are doing okay, because they're adjusting to the marketplace changes.

You may be able to buck the trend too, with help from a post at The Agitator: Acquisition: 16 Reasons Your Prospecting Is Running Out Of Gas.

Many of the things hurting acquisition are short-term and fixable -- though if you don't fix them, you're in trouble:

1. A short-term attention span problem -- presidential election, a global disaster.
2. A 'temporary' ebb in perceived urgency about your particular cause/need.
3. You're screwing up your targeting.
4. Your overall message has gotten stale.
5. You've slacked off on testing.
6. You've changed something that was working.
7. A competitor in your category is eating your lunch, using better tactics.
8. You've made other tactical blunders -- ineffective landing pages, poorly considered offers, poorly designed packages.
9. You've forgotten to talk to donors about RESULTS.
10. You're starving your prospecting program investment-wise.
11. You've disappointed/offended your donors in some specific, known way (think Komen Foundation).
12. Your celebrity supporter was discovered to be a cheat

The other four things? Deeper trouble. Not so fixable.

Research that will lead your fundraising astray

Damn, I Wish I Thought of That! reveals The worst market research in the world:

Your own opinion.

Too many fundraising campaigns are based on what some fundraiser (or her boss) thought would just be super-cool and ultra-persuasive.

It never works.

We aren't our donors. We're freakishly unlike them. Probably the only thing we share is we believe in the same cause. But even then, what you think that cause is about is probably not much like your donors' view of it.

The next-worst type of market research is focus groups and surveys, which tell you what people think, or worse yet, what they're willing to say out loud -- not what they actually do.

The only market research that leads you to more useful knowledge is actual donor behavior. You can take that to the bank.

The two ingredients of stories that motivate giving

Here's a video about story-telling that every fundraisers should see:

Or watch it here on YouTube.

In short, it describes a study that found the most impactful stories have two key elements:

1. Distress, produces cortisol, which helps us focus attention on the story.
2. Empathy, which produces oxytocin, which promotes a sense of connection.

And when these things are present, hearers of the story are much more likely to give.

Do your stories have both distress and empathy in them?

The real Giving Tuesday is on a Monday this year

Today is #GivingTuesday™ (I think you're required to spell it with the hashtag and the trademark).

The idea for this holiday is pretty straightforward: There's a day for shopping like crazy (Black Friday), and a day for shopping online like crazy (Cyber Monday). Why not a day for giving?

I'm all for anything that encourages people to give. But there's a problem with Giving Tuesday: It's not real. It was made up by marketers. It's an attempt to create something that isn't there.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday weren't cooked up by marketers. Both of those days are named for actions lots of real people were already doing. Marketers do their best to connect with those behaviors.

Trying to concoct a new behavior-based "Day" out of thin air is a tall order. You could spend billions promoting it and not any meaningful difference.

I wish the creators of Giving Tuesday had spent some time thinking about actual donor behavior, because they would have realized there's already a "Giving Tuesday." It's on a Monday this year. It's December 31.

Online giving spikes on December 31. It's the largest giving day of the year for most fundraisers online.

Why try to force donors into an artificial behavior, when you could simply observe what they already do and encourage more of them to do more of it? That's how you can really get traction. And revenue.

Yoda fundraising for Luke Skywalker donors

Here's a wonderful TEDx talk by Nancy Duarte. It's about giving presentations, but you'll see how it applies to fundraising too:

Or watch it here on YouTube.

Early on, she makes a point that's so very important for presenters: You are not Luke Skywalker. You are Yoda.

That is, you aren't the hero in the room. The people you're talking to are the heroes. You're the little wise-man who equips the hero to be a hero.

It's exactly the same in fundraising. You may feel like you (or your organization) is the hero, doing all the great stuff you do, and recruiting sidekicks for your mission.

In successful fundraising, you recognize that each of your donors is Luke, seeking his way to save the world (galaxy). You are there to help him find his way by placing excellent fundraising offers before him.

If you think that way, your fundraising will always be better.

Thanks to the Claxon Marketing blog for the tip.

Stupid storm ad ignores the humanity

The Ad Council is a juicy source of some real Stupid Nonprofit Ad action.

That's too bad, because they've done some great work in the past. But apparently the forces of clever abstractionism are so strong in the ad industry all you're going to get when agencies donate their time is self-indulgent, high-production conceptual abstractions.

Like this one, done to encourage donations post Super Storm Sandy:

(Or watch it here on YouTube.)

Get it? Money can turn into anything. So give money!

Give us a break.

Let's remember the central fact about fundraising: People give to touch people. If you want to unlock their philanthropy, you need to show them who needs help. During times of disaster, this becomes very easy to do, because the news media are putting those images and stories everywhere donors look.

People do not give because they're impressed by your cleverness and production prowess.

This is the Ad Council, which apparently acts in a vacuum. But these same ad agency geniuses would love to do similar work for you. Just say no!

Thanks to Osocio for the tip.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

How to hide the stuff your fundraising shouldn't include in the first place

It's a sad fact of life that sometimes you have no choice but to include pointless content in your fundraising because Somebody in your organization thinks it's important and they're a Somebody you can't ignore.

In a perfect world, you could enlighten the Somebody by telling them you need to see things through donors' eyes and this piece of content amounts to a big fat waste of ink when you look at it that way. And they'd say, "Oh, I get it. Never mind. Use your fundraising to raise funds. I don't need my personal agenda promoted at the possible expense of revenue."

Yeah, right.

Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog has some help for the real-world version of that conversation, the one where the Somebody look at you the way a cat looks at a carrot and makes you do it anyway: Dress Up That Dog: Making the Boring Stuff Interesting.

I urge you to read Kivi's post, because there are ways to make many types of insider material and other Pointless Content at least have something to do with your donors.

I can also let you in on a deep and dark consultants' secret for dealing with Somebody's Pointless Content in a direct mail appeal:

Hide it in the Dead Zone of the letter.

The Dead Zone is the middle of the last page of the letter. I believe you could put just about anything there, no matter how dumb or ill-conceived and it would do no harm.

Take a look:

(Please note that the Dead Zone is not the entire last page of the letter. The P.S. is one of the most live zones of the whole piece.)

In an ideal world, you'd never be forced to put material in fundraising that doesn't pull its weight, that doesn't thrill donors into giving.

Until then, you can always hide it!

Stop Trying to Teach Goldfish to Juggle

Here's my Fundraising Ninja column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, Stop Trying to Teach Goldfish to Juggle.

Teaser: "When you ask donors to give, you aren't barging into their world with an unwelcome proposition, like those guys who run up to your car at intersections, start washing your windows and expect payment. When you ask, you become part of the donor's world -- a place where love, empathy and self-empowerment combine with generosity to make the world and the donor better.

I can't think of any other relationship in the wider marketing world where the 'buyer' and the 'seller' are so perfectly aligned or where so much good accrues to both sides. "

How not to tell stories in fundraising

Here's a good post at Frogloop for fundraisers who want to tell stories well: How to Win the Story Wars.

Main takeaway: the Five Deadly Sins of storytelling...

1. Gimmickry: Relying on cheap tricks and humor that elicit laughs but undermine your brand.
2. Puffery: Ordering audiences to act using the impersonal marketing voice of God.
3. Authority: Spouting facts and expert opinions then stepping back and waiting for applause.
4. Vanity: Talking about your own fabulousness as if you are the hero of your own brand story.
5. Insincerity: Pandering to audiences by trying to speak their language instead of defining your own.

How many of those sound familiar?

How donors are different from you

The other day, my daughter (a college student) sent a short thank-you note to my godmother (a lady in her 70s).

Within minutes of receiving it, my godmother called me. She gushed and gushed at the wonder of it. She told me, among other things, that it "brought sunshine into my home." (She talks that way.)

She had considerably more to say about the note than the note itself said.

When I get a note from somebody, I look at it, think to myself, Well, isn't that nice, and move on to other things. Not that big a deal. I imagine you're like me.

Which got me thinking about the differences between older people (which I'll define as people over 70) and us (which I'll define as people comfortably under 70).

• They have more time on their hands than we do. They take time to savor small pleasures that we often rush past in our urgency to get everything done.
• They deeply value relational connections, even distant ones that we tend to hurry past.
• They really love getting stuff in the mail. For us, the mailbox is mainly a depressing wasteland of bills, bad-deal credit offers, and irrelevant catalogs. They still get real stuff from real people.

Most of our donors are these older people. That's why direct-mail fundraising hasn't just faded away like some people have thought it would.

It also tells us a few things we should know about getting fundraising to work that we might not figure out if we only look within our younger selves:

• Make it personal
• Connect with the donor
• Remember that you're cultivating a relationship, not making a business transaction.

Most important: Always have a mental picture of a specific older woman in mind when you create fundraising materials.