The easy secret to stronger fundraising

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07 November 2016

The easy secret to stronger fundraising

Here's an easy way to improve results of your fundraising emails: Ask donors to do only one thing.

As the Emma Blog put it at How Choice Paradox is killing your email click rates, Emails with a single call to action (rather than several) can increase sales a whopping 1617%.

The choice paradox is this: While people like to have choices, choices can lead to indecision, which leads to the choice of none.

What that can mean in fundraising is when you ask donors to support the annual fund ... and give look into planned giving ... and register for the walk ... and support the capital campaign ...

They are more likely to give up entirely on all of them. And you lose.

The advantage of email is you can turn all those choices into one message each. In direct mail, that's probably not affordable. You have to choose the ones that are really worth spending your money on, and drop the rest from your lineup.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 07 November 2016 at 07:23 | Permalink

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The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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I'm a Fundraisingologist at Moceanic, the company that can help you transform the way you do fundraising through one-on-one coaching or membership in The Fundraisingology Lab. Find out what we can do for you and with you!

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