Future Fundraising Now

Donors: Always listen, but don't always obey

Successful fundraisers pay a lot of attention to donors. They find ways to have conversations with them. They invite comments and questions. They are obsessive about watching donor behavior. And they act on what they learn from donors.

It's called donor love or relationship fundraising.

And it works. You raise a ton more revenue by doing it this way.

But this approach can go wrong for fundraisers who are not well-grounded in their mission and purpose.

Here's a made-up example of what could happen (and sometimes does) if donors "lead" your organization:

Let's say your organization raises funds to fight a chronic disease. You are it disease by providing services for people who have it and funding research into treatments and a hoped-for cure.

Suppose you did some research and found you could raise more money with a save-the-pandas offer.

Should you do that?

After all, saving the pandas is a good thing, and your donors want to do it, and shouldn't you be maximizing revenue?

Of course not.

Your mission is not to raise maximum funds. Or make donors happy. And certainly not to save pandas. Your mission is to fight the disease.

So let's pose another.

Suppose a rumor springs up that panda spleens cure the disease. Scientists, including your own experts, agree that it is not remotely true. Panda spleens don't hurt anyone (other than pandas), but they don't have any positive impact on the disease. Nevertheless, it is widely believed. Many of your donors are telling you they want to donate to supply panda spleens.

Do you go for the revenue?

Still, no.

Your mission is to fight the disease. Not to feed the fantasies of people who don't understand the disease. Raising funds for panda spleens would be a betrayal of your mission, even though you have donors who believe it would be the right thing to do.

So let's make it harder.

Say one of your top donors is a panda-spleen follower. He says he'll donate $50 million to build a panda spleen lab. That donation would not only cover the lab, but also cover all your operating expenses for the next few years. The donation would transform your organization, helping you go to whole new places to pursue your mission. The only downside would be the useless panda spleen lab.

That's gotta be tempting...

But you know the answer: You mustn't do it.

It's unethical.

Organizations sometimes make the wrong choice. They talk themselves into the upside while minimizing the downside. They manage to make it a gray area. No doubt there are times when it is an actual gray area.

As important as your donors are, you are not an empty vessel, waiting to be shaped by them. You exist to accomplish your mission, and you need donors to join you.

Your duty toward donors is to lead them, to help them make the best kind of difference. Even if they don't understand it.

So genuinely connect with donors. Love them. Care about them. Listen to them.

And serve them by serving your mission.

The joy of boring fundraising

Almost every fundraiser I know is motivated by high ideals: Saving the world! Helping those in need! Promoting love, justice, beauty, goodness.

In our hearts and minds, we soar like eagles.

But our daily work is filled with little things. Repetitive things. Boring things.

Get used to it.

Great fundraising touches our highest ideals. But it's 90% small stuff.

Like direct mail. It works best when you focus on the details. When you check a few dozen boxes on a must-do list, avoid production errors, and scrupulously obey postal regulations.

Yawn.

But that's how the amazing stuff we live for comes to life.

The most miserable and frustrated fundraisers I know are on a life-long quest to create fundraising they personally feel great about.

The most fulfilled and delighted fundraisers I know are focused on getting things right and connecting with donors ... and now and then they remind themselves of the miraculous transformations they and their donors are making together.

We aren't in fundraising to entertain ourselves. We're here to help great things happen. Which is maybe the best and deepest kind of entertainment around.

3 ways to keep your donors on board

What you do after a donor gives may be even more important than what you do to motivate the gift in the first place.

Here are 3 Donor Acknowledgement Ideas & Implementation Tips from Get Fully Funded:

1. Practice Donor Stewardship. Don't just thank them. Connect with them. Tell them about the difference they make possible. Don't go silent on them for extended periods.
2. Personalize your donor communication. Call them by their names (and find out how they prefer to be addressed). Ask for amounts that are near amounts they've given before. Talk to them about things they show they care about. Use the data you have to be relevant to them.
3. Thank your donors publicly. Put donors' names on recognition walls or other visible places. List them on your website. Mention them in social media. Main thing: get their permission first, as some donors prefer to be anonymous.

What to do if your fundraising is boring

Excerpted from my book, The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving.

How many nonprofits have boring missions?

To judge by any random sampling of fundraising you might look at, it seems about half of them have soul-crushingly dull missions.

I know that’s not correct.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a boring nonprofit mission. Not all of them stir my soul, and a few of them couldn’t keep me awake with a box full of party noisemakers.

But that tells you more about me than it does about them. Even those I can’t stomach have missions that are exciting and relevant -- for somebody.

So where does all that boring fundraising come from?

It’s that way because its creators are communicating with themselves, not their donors. They’re failing to reach outside their own perception and connect with what their donors know and care about. And that’s about as interesting as listening to that weird guy on the bus muttering to himself.

Here’s a quick look at the difference between boring, self-centered fundraising and being interesting and relevant to donors:

The Boring Way	The Interesting Way
Numbers: We were founded in 1952 with just two staff. Since then, we've grown to 64 FTEs who serve more than 1,200 beneficiaries during any given week.	Stories: The night before we met John, he tried to drink himself to death.
Processes: Our three-step counseling system heals our clients physically, psychologically, and spiritually.	Outcomes: John spent years as a hopeless alcoholic, a drain on our community. Now he's free from drink, a good dad, a taxpayer, somebody you'd be glad to call a friend or neighbor.
Philosophy: We believe ...	Action: You can accomplish ...
First person: I, We	Second person: You (the donor)

To be interesting to others, you have to see from their perspective.

Not everyone has causes like sick children, abandoned puppies, or natural disasters with lots of innocent victims. But let me tell you a disturbing secret: I’ve worked with organizations with wonderful causes like those -- and many of them were hellbent on removing those things from their fundraising -- because it was so important for them to talk to themselves, about their processes and philosophies.

If your mission is boring, it’s your own fault.

The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand is available at:

• Amazon
• Amazon UK
• Direct from the publisher
• Kindle ebook

The generation of donors you should be watching closely

To read a lot of the fundraising blogs, you might get the idea that there are two groups you need to even think about: Boomers and Millennials.

Thinking this way just might scuttle your growth in the next few years, because there's a whole other generation in between those two, and they are starting to matter a lot to serious fundraisers.

Generation X. People born from 1965 to 1983.

As the GroupThinkers blog notes, Gen X is ready to be the next great giving generation.

The leading edge of the generation is now in their mid-50s. Just entering the Donor Years. That's the first reason to pay attention to them.

A second reason: There are a lot of them. 79 million. (Compared to the 65 million Baby Boomers).

And yet they are often stereotyped as unlikely to be good donors:

Viewed as slackers, cynical and complicated. The first latchkey generation. The middle child. Classically overlooked.

The stereotypes reveal nothing.

Marketing to generations is not likely to pan out well. Market to people. And if you're fundraising, that means mainly older people who care about making the world a better place.

Generation X people are now pouring into the donor demographic. You'll start encountering them on your list. Watch them!

The best and worst word in fundraising

There's a single word that can be one of the worst or one of the best words to use in fundraising.

The word?

WE

Here's how to make it the worst:

When we means "those of us in the organization" or "the committee that wrote this message."

When used that way, it's exclusionary. It sets up the sense that we are an organization, not a person. That we are bigger and more important than you, a mere individual.

That's not good for fundraising. People don't give because you are big and important and awesome. They give because you give them an opportunity to put their values to work. They don't give to your organization; they give through it.

When you use we in a way that excludes them, you miss the whole point.

Here's how you can make we one of the best words in fundraising:

When we means "you and me -- the writer and the reader."

That's inclusive. It shows the donor that we're in it together, a partnership, that she's needed. That meaning of we us good fundraising.

(This post first appeared on December 14, 2016.)

How to focus your nonprofit newsletter

What is your newsletter about?

Almost all nonprofit newsletters are about the wrong thing: They're about the organization that produces the newsletter.

That might seem to be right.

But if you want your newsletter to foster your relationships with donors, raise funds, and overall increase donor retention, making it about your organization is exactly wrong. A complete waste of your time and money.

I've seen internally focused newsletters that are all about the insider news, and some of them are very good. It makes sense for some very large and sprawling organizations to support staff knowledge and connection.

But for the other 99% of organizations, your newsletter is sent to donors with the intent of building the donor relationship.

If that's you, you need to be asking the question asked in the Better Fundraising Blog: Why are you writing about the organization?

The most effective newsletters are written to show donors what their gift accomplished. And the best way to do that is through stories about beneficiaries.

So stop talking about the organization and its programs. Start talking about the donor and telling her stories about lives that have been changed because of her kindness. Then she’ll think it was a great idea to give to the organization and be more likely to give again.

This can be a real challenge. It requires you to see through others' eyes -- what they know, what they understand, what they care about.

Which is difficult. But it's the same thing required of any healthy human relationship.

How I diagnose fundraising writing

It can be hard to critique someone else's writing in a way that's helpful to them, because we tend to start with our gut feeling about it. Telling someone, Yuck! I don't think this is going to work! really isn't helpful. Nor is saying, This is awesome! I love it!

Worse yet, gut feelings are not accurate. How you feel about some writing isn't important, even though that feeling may be strong. But it tells you almost nothing about the likely effectiveness of the writing.

So when I need to critique a piece of fundraising writing, I start with statistics and facts about it:

• First I check the readability, using Hemingway. It gives the reading grade level (which shouldn't be above 6th grade). It also marks complex sentence (which are hard to read), and counts adverbs (there should be few or none).
• Then I run the copy through the Latinometer, which shows the percentage of words are of Latin origin. Fewer = better. (This step is optional. When the readability statistics are very good, I generally don't bother to check the Latin quotient. In those cases, I already know it's good.)
• Next, I highlight instances of "I" (in all its forms, singular and plural, including me, my, mine, we, us, our, etc.") I count the organization's name as a form of I. Then, in a different color, I highlight the word "you" in all its forms. You should outnumber I. This helps show what the letter is about. If it's about your org, it's probably off target.
• Then I highlight jargon (words or phrases that are not meaningful to general audiences) and abstraction (terms that are vague and not concrete. There should be very little of either.
• Finally, I look for a solid, specific call to action. If it doesn't have one, it doesn't matter if everything else is done to perfection -- the letter won't work. I look for repeated expressions of the offer.

Once I've done all that, I draw my general conclusions. Armed with useful facts, I can keep my gut reaction at bay and say useful, specific things.

Try it. I think you'll like your outcomes!

(This post first appeared on November 16, 2016.)

What should you never put in a direct mail envelope

There's only room for one call to action in a fundraising direct mail envelope.

One thing you want your donor to do.

If you're sending your donors an appeal for funds, don't try to save on postage by slipping in something that is not about that appeal for funds.

Thinking about putting your newsletter in with the appeal? Don't. You'll get less response to the appeal or the newsletter.

Looking for planned giving leads? That's smart. But don't do it by putting a planned giving flyer in your appeal. That will cost you both in leads and in immediate revenue.

Hoping to get donors to come to an event, or volunteer, or write to City Hall? Great. Just don't double-up one of those calls to action with your fundraising call to action.

There's only room for one action in that envelope.

But there's lot of room for relevant, interesting things that point in the same direction. In fact, the more the merrier (up to a point).

Fundraising for ROI is a big mistake

Many fundraisers keep a laser-like focus on return on investment (ROI). The higher, the better.

That seems to make sense. But it can limit your success and scuttle future growth, as described by the Veritus Blog, at Don’t Be Obsessed with ROI:

There are far too many non-profit leaders who are obsessed with having a high return on investment – so they don’t take any risks, don’t support their staff, fail to properly invest in their major gift pipeline and ultimately don’t grow as an organization.

ROI is a handy little number that can help you understand what's going on with your fundraising. You can improve ROI at the expense of net revenue. If you focus on ROI, you will do exactly that.

ROI is not a goal; it's a useful under-the-hood indicator that can help you fine-tune your work.

But the goal is net revenue. That's what funds your mission.