Future Fundraising Now

How to inspire repeat gifts from your donors

It's hard to get someone to make a donation. It's even harder -- and more important -- to get them to give two gifts.

It's all in the follow-up. Get Fully Funded has some help, at 4 Keys to Keeping Happy Donors and Repeat Gifts:

1. They want to be thanked and appreciated.
   
2. They want to feel good about their giving experience.
   
3. They want to know how you used their money.
   
4. They want to trust your nonprofit.
   

If you satisfy these needs for your donors, you will see retention rates go up.

A lot of people -- a painfully high portion of them -- think your organization and fundraising are a scam.

That's because there really are scams out there. But worse, a lot of perfectly good organizations act exactly like scammers. They don't thank their donors. Or they thank so sloppily that it's almost worse than not at all. And they don't even try to show donors that their giving makes a difference.

Any organization that fails to thank and report back to donors deserves the terrible retention they get as a result.

But it's worse than that: They're giving fundraising in general a bad name. Training people to think there's a lot more scams than there really are. They're helping build a huge barrier to giving that hurts everyone.

If you respect your donors, yourself, your cause, and the whole enterprise of charitable giving -- you'll treat your donors right.

Fundraising and the overrated demographic

A lot of marketers see Millennial customers as a sort of gold rush. Last year, they reportedly spent 500% more on advertising targeted at Millennials than all other age groups combined.

Do I detect some herd mentality?

Millennials are better customers for certain things than others: Outdoor gear. Music. Electronics.

But big picture? Not so much, as noted by Engage:Boomers, at Have We Overrated The Millennial Consumer?

Rather than being left behind by the onslaught of technology, middle aged and even senior consumers are adapting quite well to e-commerce, and marketers need not be so hasty to overlook them. Baby boomers and Gen X have more money than millennials and there are more of them in the general marketplace than millennials. While it's worth the long term investment to try converting millennials to your brand, their parents are waiting at check-out ready to make the purchase...

This is even more dramatically true for fundraising. Anyone can give charitable gifts, and people of all ages do. But when it comes to ongoing and large-scale giving ... it's an older person's game. Millennials score low on:

• Dollars given to charity per capita.
  
• Percentage of income given to charity.
  
• Repeat giving to any charity -- that is, retention.
  

The money -- especially the money that comes from ongoing relational giving -- is coming from older people. That means:

• Silent Generation donors (those born 1925-1945) are still very much with us, though they are no longer a majority of donors.
  
• Boomers are more than replacing Silents. They are the majority of our donor audience now, and will be until around 2033.
  
• Gen X is about to join the party. If you raise a lot online, they're already important to you.
  
• Millennials start being a force in charitable giving in the 2030s.
  

Wishful thinking will not change these fundamental demographic numbers. If you really want to maximize your fundraising, you'll concentrate on older people. That's Silent Generation, Boomers, and soon, Gen X.

Subject-line lessons from the Presidential campaign

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

Ever since the Obama campaign's famous one-word subject line -- "Hey" -- from 2012, it's practically a tradition for fundraisers to learn from political emails.

Take the email strategy from Hillary Clinton's campaign. Like all campaigns, they test and use a variety of email subject lines, and according to an NPR report, Why Political Fundraising Emails Work, there are a handful of subject-line themes that are working well for Team Hillary.

When you're trolling for a subject line for your email, it might be helpful to see how you can adapt these themes:

• Reaction to events. One of Hillary's subject lines was "What did you think of last night's debate?" Another was "So. Mad. Can't. Type." This was one of the best-performing themes for Hillary. For non-political fundraising, we can try to adapt it where possible, with lines like "What about that letter I sent you?" Or, "Worried about Zika?" Or, "Can't believe this matching grant."
  
• Invitations. Hillary's subject line was "Dinner with Bill?" For other fundraising, we might say "Running in our 10k?" Or "Seen this video from the Ecuador earthquake?"
  
• Merchandise. Hillary's subject line was "Shop the new holiday collection." For other fundraising, we'd probably refer to a gift catalog, like: "Shop this Save-a-Life Catalog." Or, "WOW - two goats - $10."
  
• General campaign messages. Hillary's subject line was "You shouldn't miss this." For other fundraising, it could be something like "I hope you get this in time." Or, "What if you don't see this?"
  
• Calls to action. Hillary's subject line was "Go vote!" For other fundraising, it might be "Save lives!" Or "Fight cancer!"
  
• Event announcements. Hillary's subject line was "See Hillary in Orlando." For other fundraising, it could be "See this little boy in Africa, he's starving." Or, "See what this volunteer's doing in Nepal."
  

The main thing, according to the experts in political emails, is for the subject as well as the entire email to strike a tone that's casual, like a human interaction. Good advice for all fundraising.

The world's ugliest color: good or bad for fundraising?

Here, apparently, is the most repulsive color in the world:

According to a recent post at Creative Market -- Research has Determined The Ugliest Color in the World...

This color, along with many others, was shown to more than 1,000 smokers to determine which hue turned them off the most. [T]he info was passed on to the Australian government, where they will now include the color -- along with standard safety warnings -- on every package of cigarettes sold. And this idea is gaining some traction, with other countries across the world adopting similar methods.

What does this mean for us fundraisers?

Probably nothing at all.

Although color can really only be considered beautiful or ugly by its context, we do know that colors have emotional impact. Many fundraisers also know from experience that hot and warm colors seem to increase donor response.

So the idea that there's a color that would repel people and discourage them from buying what's a package of that color seems possible.

The problem with this color is how they arrived at it. Apparently they asked people what colors they dislike. There's almost no chance at all that the color people say they hate has any correlation to their buying behavior. Or giving. People can easily and glibly tell you which colors they like or dislike. They have very little access to how those colors might influence their behavior.

That type of research -- just asking people their opinion about a color, font, design, or anything else -- tells you nothing useful.

It's possible -- likely, in fact -- that the colors people say they hate are the very colors that motivate their behavior.

If you want to know how people are going to respond to your fundraising, the only way to find out is to actually try it in real life.

Frankly, the fact that this color got a strong reaction in the show-them-and-ask-them research makes me think it might be a good color to use in fundraising!

If you're interested in the world's ugliest color, here are the details:

• Pantone: 448C
  
• Name: Opaque Couché
  
• RGB: 74 65 42
  
• HEX/HTML: 4A412A
  
• CMYK: 33 43 80 82
  

Thanks to Arts Hacker for the tip.