Future Fundraising Now

Podcast: Tom Ahern on Donor-Focused Newsletters that Raise Money

Here's an info-packed interview with the Superb Tom Ahern. We discuss how and why you can raise a lot of money with donor newsletters. Learn what's working and what's not, what most often goes wrong in donor newsletters, and what they heck is up with email newsletters? All from Tom's new book Making Money with Donor Newsletters. This podcast could change your fundraising forever!

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:

99% failure in direct mail fundraising?

When I first realized that being a fundraiser meant doing a lot more than writing fundraising copy, I started paying close attention to response data.

One day, I thought I'd uncovered a major oversight in the way we looked at direct-mail response rates.

As you know, with new donor direct-mail acquisition efforts, it's often a hurdle to get more than 1% response. Some organizations can't ever get that high, while others routinely top it. But 1% is pretty normal. (If you got 1% response to an email, you'd think a miracle had happened.)

But 1% success is a 99% failure rate, isn't it?

I told everyone who would listen.

This is a fundamentally screwed-up reality! We tolerate 99% failure!

My 99% comment was a good way to get attention, but it was pretty half-baked.

One percent is what happens when you're sending unsolicited postal mail to people who may or may not know who you are, and have not donated to you.

If you think about it, 1% is pretty amazing. You're writing to people out of the blue. They're probably getting a handful of other solicitations at the same time. Many of them look at your fundraising the way a first-grade teacher looks at a wad of gum -- and they don't trust you.

Cripes! It's amazing as many as 1% respond!

Also, there's evidence that direct-mail response is more of a process than an event. Studies show that most new donors who come on board via direct mail got mail from the organization five to six times before they responded.

That 99% non-response still bothers me. But I can't call it a failure.

Unrealistic expectations for donors could be expensive

Do you ever think of your donors this way?

Marketoonist

It's an easy error to make, believing donors are as much into us as we -- people being paid to spend all our time and our best thinking on the organization.

... even "brand loyalists" have complex lives completely separate from our brands. Brands can play important roles, but we should be careful not to overstate how much consumers give thought to our brands.

This leads to some expensive mistakes: complex programs that depend on a level of loyalty and connection that doesn't really exist.

Always do a reality check: Do our donors care as much as we think they do?

Smart fundraising lets donors direct their money where they want it

I don't like it, so my donors shouldn't like it either!

That's how I read this interesting post at 101fundraising: Why I Don't Donate To Charity:Water.

You see, Charity:Water offers donors what they call the "100% model": they guarantee that 100% of each donation goes "straight to the field." A different set of donors is covering the "overhead."

And that's wicked:

... the 100% Model is damaging to nearly every other charity because it gives the public unrealistic expectations. It implies that '100% to the field' is desirable, truthful and even possible. It's not.

First, it's entirely possible for the 100% model to be 100% truthful. It's only a matter of diligent accounting.

Donors (most of them, anyway) love not paying for overhead. Can you blame them? Who wouldn't rather their hard-earned cash go to feed hungry puppies rather than pay for postage on direct mail or the electricity bill at the head office?

Nonprofit insiders understand that "overhead" is no less important than the field.

But that is no reason at all to insist that we press donors into our mental mold so they think about it the way we do. First off, that's not possible. Second, we have no business wasting our resources trying.

Our job as fundraisers is to put powerful, exciting, motivating fundraising offers before donors and give them the opportunity to change the world on their terms. The 100% model can be a part of that.

If you can manage it, you should try it.

Most charities have the formula exactly backward: foundations, and other major funders get the joy of directing their funds specifically where they want their funds to go. These high-end donors, with whom we engage in complex and left-brained conversations about the work, get all the fun of sending their money where it feels good to send it.

General donors -- people with whom we only have brief contact through bulk-postage mail, mostly-ignored email, and other casual-contact media -- they have no choice but give unrestricted funds.

We should turn that around, and the 100% model is one way to do that.

We may not like the thinking, and that's our privilege as human beings with minds. But we have no call and little ability to make donors think our way.

Help people float stupidly above the ground?

Suppose you wanted to create a model Stupid Nonprofit Ad. Here's a checklist:

An abstract metaphor that avoids what the message is really about.
Little evidence that there's a problem donors can solve.
High production values.
No call to action.

You've pretty much created this corker of a TV spot for Oxfam GB.

Here it is:

Or watch it here on YouTube.

What draws fundraisers to abstraction? In this case, the reality is that the organization does specific activities designed to bring about specific changes. But the ad just says "Lift lives." That's a metaphor for helping people. And it's only a metaphor. Not the real thing.

The ad skips over the problem that donors can help solve by giving. Instead, we get glimpses of a solution, plus a fake outcome (people floating a foot off the ground).

Donors may not understand your programs, but they are not stupid. You don't have to say to them, What we're going to do is sort of like making people float above the ground -- the way you might with a young child who has no life experience to ground his comprehension.

Fundraising is about connecting donors with solvable (and real) problems. Empowering them to make the world specifically better. When you symbolize that change with an abstraction, you're just blowing smoke.

Thanks to Tobin Aldrich for the tip.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

Bad donors, or unethical fundraising?

The Lame, Evil Donors meme rolls on, this time in an op-ed in the Washington Post by Peter Singer, Heartwarming causes are nice, but let's give to charity with our heads.

Singer says donors make terrible choices when they donate to help sick kids through the Make-A-Wish Foundation rather than donating to a cause that saves lives. The $7,500 average cost of granting a wish (think the recent wonderful Batkid story), if spent on nutrition or disease prevention in the developing world, save a lot of lives.

Therefore, Singer reasons, a gift to Make-A-Wish is irrational and immoral.

Michael Rosen nicely (and quite fairly) skewers Singer's argument at Is it Ethical When an Ethicist Browbeats Prospective Donors?, calling it "coercive manipulation." Read it.

I don't trust myself to fully understand where my charitable giving really ought to go. I really don't trust Peter Singer or any other self-appointed Master of Morality to make those decisions for me. Or for the generous donors who fund all the great causes of the world.

The troubling thing about this is that Singer is just one voice in a puritan chorus that says something is wrong with donors. They are lame and evil, and they owe it to us to change.

Any fundraiser who follows that line of thinking is doomed to create ineffective fundraising. Because they'll miss the reasons people give.

Our duty as fundraisers is to use resources wisely to maximize donor connection and donations. If we do crummy, ineffective, brow-beating fundraising, trying to remake donors into weird imitations of ourselves -- that's malfeasance.

Fundraisers who do that will go broke in a satisfying cloud of self-righteousness, which is far more immoral than any "misguided" thinking donors might be committing.

If you believe your cause is more important than some other cause, your job is to make it more compelling than other causes. And you do that by entering the donor's world, and appealing to them on their grounds -- not by deciding there's something wrong with donors and insisting that they change to fit your needs.

Every donor has a duty to make the world a better place. And to do that to the best of their ability, following their heart and mind. We can help them by showing them what they can do through us.

Trying to dictate how they should think won't work. We have no business in that business.

Keep your donors on board with excellent thank-you letters

One of the main differences between good fundraisers and bad ones is the way they thank their donors.

The really bad ones neglect this important part of fundraising. They just rake in donations -- and generally have poor donor retention, meaning they're spending way too much for their fundraising revenue.

The okay fundraisers produce a thank-you letter. But they miss the importance of thanking well for keeping donors engaged.

Here's some help form Fired-Up Fundraising for getting the most our of your thank-you letters, at How to Craft a Killer Thank You Letter:

• Make it prompt.
• Make it personal.
• Opens on a friendly note.
• Have a warm, personal tone.
• Be a bit emotional. (Be a lot emotional, I say.)
• Send a real letter, not a pre-printed card.
• Thank smaller gifts warmly.
• Refer to the donor's past support if you possibly can.
• Use the donor's name in the salutation.
• Sign the letter personally and write a note at the bottom.
• Send more than one thank you letter.
• Send an additional thank you letter from a board member.
• Have a high-ranking person personally sign the letter.
• Send an extra thank you letter from a person helped by your organization.
• Reconfirm the purpose of the gift.
• Include a contact name and number.
• Invite the donor for a visit.

  Do these things and you'll see better donor retention, and a higher rate of donor upgrading.

Don't waste your money trying to pump up "awareness"

Some "marketing experts" would have you believe fundraising is a two-step process: First you must make prospective donors "aware" of your organization, then you can ask them to give.

Not really true, as Tobin Aldrich's blog points out at Fundraising Myths: No 2: You can't fundraise without awareness.

Two-step fundraising is a colossal waste of money. You basically double your cost and get nothing in return:

The first thing any non-profit should do is fundraise. When you fundraise you tell people about your cause, you make them care about it and they give you money as a result. And do you know what, you raise money and awareness too. It's amazing, isn't it?

That's right: awareness in an abstract, non-action way does almost nothing to move a person closer to giving. Asking sparks both awareness and giving. In one step.

For the small number of nonprofits that have extremely high awareness, that awareness is a real asset. For the rest of us, the cost of buying awareness is not worth it. Or necessary.

Effective fundraising is the best form of nonprofit branding. People who give to your cause are the ones who know you best.