Future Fundraising Now

Rumors of the death of direct mail fundraising have been greatly exaggerated

When someone tells you "direct mail is dead," they're giving you some valuable information: They're telling you they don't have a clue.

Direct mail isn't dead. It isn't dying. It isn't even sick, as the Civil Society Fundraising Blog says at Direct mail isn't dying -- but it is changing.

The main change is that direct mail now works with other channels. Donors glide easily between different channels, doing what works for them:

The physical impact of a piece of addressed mail, if it is relevant and compelling, can be even greater in a world where mail is becoming a rarer and more specialised channel. But it won't work in isolation, it will need to sit as part of a series of supporting messages across a range of media. A donor might see a mail piece and respond online. Or see a TV ad and respond by mail. Or follow a route where they see messages on several different channels before responding on another.

Build your different channels so they work together, and you'll skate through these changes with little difficulty.

"Because we need it" is not a fundraising strategy

The average gift of new donors was too low.

We were asking for $15, $25, $35, $50, and $100. We were getting on average $18. At that average, it was taking too long for the fundraising program to start producing net revenue.

The development director had a brilliant idea: Ask for more. He told us to change our array of ask amounts to $30, $50, $75, $100, and $150.

What happened? Two things:

1. Response fell off the table. Not surprising. When you raise the bar, fewer people jump over it. Sometimes, that's okay -- you lose volume, but gain enough in value that it's worth the lower numbers. Two $75 donors are worth more than five $25 donors. Sadly for us, something else happened...
2. Average gift dropped to $16. That's right, by asking more, you can actually push down average gift.

The error the development director made was thinking donors will change behavior because we need them to.

It doesn't work that way. What we need is irrelevant.

If you double the "price" of your offer, you may end up destroying your value proposition to donors.

In this case, donors found the offer to be "worth" $18 (on average). When we said, "Now it's $30," many donors just walked away. Of those who responded, a lot chopped our $30 ask in half.

If you want donors to give more, you have to offer them more.

It's up to us to figure out the more that donors will pay more for.

Increasing the average gift of first-time donors is a great thing to do. It can have long-term positive impact on your entire fundraising program. But you can't get there just by wanting donors to give higher amounts.

The high cost of jargon in fundraising

Jargon can kick your butt.

Here's evidence from Michael Rosen Says: One Word is Costing Your Fundraising Effort a Fortune.

What's the word?

"Bequest."

That's right. In a survey, 23% of respondents were "interested now" in "making a gift to charity in my will." Only 12% were "interested now" in "making a bequest gift to charity."

Why? Because "bequest" is what we call it. Not what they call it. It's our internal jargon, so often used that many of us have no inkling that it's not the word normal people use.

Jargon is harmless, even good, when you and your donors use it. It can signal that you're both in the same group.

But don't assume that because a word is useful to you that it's meaningful to them. A good fundraising writer does a jargon reality check, thinking carefully about words -- and choosing the most common word almost every time.

If you like to motivate people to take action, like donate or leave you in their will, use their language, not yours.

Boomers: the young donors you should be worried about

Once again, a self-appointed millennial tells us how we're doing everything wrong, this time using the valuable space of The Agitator: 'Millennial' Rants.

Don't pay too much attention to any self-appointed spokesperson (of any age) who wants to tell you everything you're doing wrong and thus failing to reach his generation.

The typical spokesperson message goes like this: Everything about fundraising is wrong, and it needs to be changed. If stop being wrong about everything, millennials will suddenly become great donors. It wont' matter that in doing so we lose the current generation of faithful elderly donors -- because you'll replace your corny old people with cool young people.

The Millennial Rant is empty.

If you're spending a lot of time worried about how you're going to get millennial donors, you're wasting your time.

It's true, most fundraisers aren't doing what it takes to attract millennials. And that's okay, because people in their 20s and 30s are just not very good prospects. Hard (expensive) to get on board, even harder to keep there.

Don't worry: they'll start showing up in a few decades.

Until then, what we should be sweating is how to get Boomers to give. The Boomer era of fundraising has started, and we don't have them figured out yet.

Rather than getting all wrapped up in What the Millennials Want, I'd allocate my mindshare per generation like this:

• 40% Silent Generation (born before 1946). They are still our stars, the engine of philanthropy. It is far from time to walk away from them!
• 50% Boomers (born 1946-1964) They are already here, and we haven't fully figured out how to connect with them.
• 8% Gen X (born 1965-1980) With the leading edge of the generation turning 50 next year, they are going to start showing up soon.
• 2% Millennials (born 1981-2000). By the time they start becoming meaningful donors, technology and media usage won't be at all like it is now. Almost anything you learn about millennials today is going to be out of date by the time it starts to matter.

Donors are nutty! This might help explain why

by guest blogger George Crankovic, Senior Writer at TrueSense Marketing.

In a logical world, the bigger the problem is, the more donors would give to solve it.

But people aren't logical. That's part of what makes us so much fun!

You've probably heard about the identifiable-victim effect. It tells us that donors will give more to help a single victim than to help many victims.

The typical explanation is that statistics blunted the emotional impact of the story.

What's really at work, according to recent research, is donors' feeling about how much their gifts will do.

In one test, the first group of donors got a photo and story of a poor child. The second group got photos and stories of two poor children and told they could give only to help one child or the other, not both.

Those who got two stories gave less.

The conclusion? When donors get information about more than one person needing help -- whether it's two, seven, or statistics about millions of people -- that information discourages them from giving. Donors consider the people who won't be helped, feel less good about giving, and conclude that their gifts won't matter. So they don't give.

What to do? Here are two approaches.

1. Focus on the human drama, not the scope. It's a natural reaction to want to make the problem seem big by citing statistics, referring to others in need, showing images of people in crisis, and so on. But that doesn't work. It doesn't even work in disaster fundraising.
2. Present the right offer. The offer you present has to be calibrated to donors' sense of proportion. If possible, be specific. Say $XX does a specific thing, and make sure that the specific thing is reasonable to your audience. You can't expect a donor to solve world hunger. But you can expect a donor to help one hungry child when the gift will make a clear, defined difference.

Podcast: Maximize your year-end fundraising

Re-posted by popular demand! The coming weeks are the probably the most important of the year for your fundraising. Here are practical tips for both direct mail and online fundraising that can make the most of the generosity your donors feel as the year comes to an end.

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:

More mail, more money

The Grizzard Blog shares one of those scary pieces of knowledge that live in the major donor world: Stop Mailing The Major Donors!

Actually, don't stop mailing the major donors.

The post reports on a test where five hundred $500+ donors were sent a list of the 12 direct mail appeals they were scheduled to receive in the coming year. They were given the chance to opt out of as many of those 12 as they liked. If they didn't respond, they'd get all 12.

37%, of those donors returned instructions. The highest number of appeals any of them selected was 3.

At the end of the year, they compared the group that received all 12 mailings to the group that had identified those mailings they wanted.

The result was interesting: The donors who received all 12 mailings gave 35% more than those who restricted their appeals.

This is a bit of a surprise to me. It's normal for a group getting less mail to give less. But usually, giving donors choice -- any kind of choice -- results in more giving. I'd have expected the positive impact of choice to outweigh the negative impact of less contact. Silly me.

There may have been something about the nature of this choice that pointed the donors in the wrong direction. If you think about it, those donors said no over and over again. Nine times or more. That sets a pattern.

But there's an important lesson here: Less mail, less giving. That's true in nearly every situation. Including major donors.

Never assume donors will give more or retain longer if they get less contact. It almost never works that way.

Ouch! The worst landing page ever

Want to see a truly bad landing page? Go to the LeadPages Blog post, See The Worst Landing Page Ever Created.

You'll want to see the examples, but here are ten things wrong with this worst landing page ever created:

1. Left-Aligned Opt-In Box
2. Videos/Images Not Loading
3. Ignoring Design Space Dimensions
4. Too Many Calls to Action
5. Too Much Information
6. Bad Copy
7. Distracting Design
8. "Taking Page" (pages that have an opt-in form in plain sight.
9. Bad Testimonials (boring or vague)
10. Slow Loading Time

If you're making these mistakes on your fundraising landing pages, it's costing you. Landing pages are among the most important elements of almost every fundraising program. Don't let them be bad!

How to build an effective response device

The most active ingredient in your direct mail piece is the response device. Here's an education in response devices from Clairification: How Your Nonprofit Appeal Response Device is Like Cheese. (It's like cheese because it "stands alone." Get it?)

1. Include a compelling photo that tells a story.
2. Put a heading on the reply card such as "Yes! I want to feed hungry children!"
3. Include a big check-off box next to your heading.
4. Include a succinct one-sentence summary of your case using active verbs.
5. Show the specific impact of gifts at different levels.
6. Pre-print the donor's name and address on the reply form.
7. Limit the amount of information you request from your donor.
8. Use paper stock that's easy to write on.
9. If there's an adhesive seal, make sure no important donor information gets lost when the envelope is opened.
10. Include a list of opportunities to designate gifts for particular programs.
11. Include a check off for the donor to indicate they'd like this gift to be in memory/in honor of a loved one.
12. Use 14-point font so everything is readable.
13. Tell the donor how the check should be made out.
14. Include your website donation page URL.
15. Include a postage paid business reply envelope (test this; results vary).
16. Address the return envelope to a specific person or specific campaign.

My advice? Always write the response device first, before you write anything else. That way, you know where everything else is going.