Future Fundraising Now

Way worse than "BOO" -- things you really don't want to hear in fundraising

Halloween is a time when we seek that thrill of fear -- the tiny fingers on the back of the neck. In real life, it's not so much fun.

Here are some scary things you might hear:

"Let's stop bugging the major donors with our mail."

There's a belief out there that major donors are "more sophisticated" than others, and that they hate direct mail. So let's just quit sending them that hateful mail. It's probably making them not give.

Your job with a major donor is to build a true relationship. Not to make decisions for them. Truth is, the large majority of major donors start out as direct mail donors. They became major because that junky, annoying direct mail worked. Don't stop "bugging" them with direct mail unless you specifically know it bugs them!

"It's time we went all digital with our fundraising"

Communicating digitally is a lot cheaper than getting paper into people's hands. It's also less error-prone. You've no doubt also experienced a dramatic increase in online giving recently, while the costs of printing and postage rise. But if those things lead you to abandon traditional channels like direct mail, digital channels will shrivel. It's the quick way to wipe out years of progress stewarding your donors.

"Let's take a break from getting new donors"

When times are hard, it's hard to keep spending money on acquisition. It's an area where most of us lose money even in good times. When response drops, good luck. Thing is, when you cut acquisition, you slash the future. You guarantee that the hard times will last. If you stop acquisition for long enough, you can send your organization into a death-spiral.

"Let's hire branding experts"

Brand experts are the marauding, brain-eating zombies of the fundraising world. If they show up at your door, slam it. If they get in, run away. They are going to devour your fundraising program with their grand abstractions and faddish design. After the branding experts have come and gone, many organizations are stuck with a drop of up to 50% in fundraising revenue.

The right and wrong way to measure fundraising efficiency

They say you get more of what you measure.

So what should you be measuring in your fundraising program?

You should be watching response, average gift, cost per piece, total cost, gross revenue, and net revenue. Of these, net revenue is the most important. It's the main goal of raising funds.

Then there's the number that measures the efficiency of your fundraising. There are two ways of expressing that:

1. Return on investment (ROI)
(Revenue divided by cost)

2. Cost to raise a dollar (CPDR)
(Cost divided by revenue)

These two numbers measure the same thing -- efficiency. But there's a vast difference in their impact on your program.

When you watch ROI, a higher number is better. When you watch CPDR, a lower number is better. The way to accomplish either is exactly the same: either lower your cost or improve your return (or both!).

Here's the important difference:

• ROI encourages you to do better work. To invest. To spend more to make more.
  
• CPDR encourages you to cut costs. To be cautious.
  

That's why you should prefer ROI. Any fool can cut costs to squeeze a few pennies onto the bottom line. It takes smarts to do better work that changes the game and raises a lot more money.

What do you want to spend your time and efforts doing?

3 weird fundraising approaches that shouldn't work -- but do

I have some weird information for you.

Three fundraising topics that seem like they shouldn't work.

But they do.

All three seem to violate the spirit of donor-focused fundraising. They aren't really about the donor and her life and values.

But they work. Quite well, in most cases.

When I first encountered all three of these things, I said, No way!

Boy was I wrong. Check them out:

1. Fiscal Year End. It doesn't seem like a promising fundraising topic: Why should the donor care about your fiscal year? Especially when it's not the same as the calendar year, which is the nearest thing to a fiscal year for most people. Your donation will help us end the fiscal year in a strong position, making it possible to keep helping people in the coming year. I've seen it work more times than I can count.
   
2. Funding Shortfall. Your fiscal year end appeal will do even better if you face a funding shortfall: We are $90,000 behind where we should be as this fiscal year comes to an end. Your donation today will make sure we don't have to turn away anyone who comes to us for help. Shortfall appeals really work any time, even apart from fiscal year end. Donors are eager to help when they know they are really needed. A warning, though: If you use this message frequently, it will lose its power. Only say you have a shortfall emergency when you really do!
   
3. Annual Fund. This is the weirdest of the three. But labelling almost any fundraising campaign you do Annual Fund works. I know of organizations that do three or more "annual funds" every year. It clearly means something to a lot of donors. Don't turn up your nose at the humble, yet powerful, Annual Fund.
   

Fundraising is strange. That's the best explanation I have for these.

9 things that will strengthen fundraising subject lines

Success in email fundraising depends heavily on subject lines. The best copy, best offer, best landing page all get you nowhere if people don't open your emails.

Here are some things you can do to make subject lines stronger, from the Soapbox Engage Blog, at 9 Ways to Improve Your Nonprofit Email Subject Lines:

1. Send emails from an actual human, not a generic address. Have it come from a real person, not something like info@organization.org.
   
2. Email subject line length matters. Shorter subject lines generally work better.
   
3. Add time-specific details to add urgency. "One day left..." or "Last chance..."
   
4. Personalize your email subject lines for the best results. "Joan, one day left..."
   
5. Write intriguing email subject lines to spark curiosity. As with direct mail, curiosity is powerful!
   
6. Don't give away all the details in the subject line. If your subject line tells them the whole story, they're less likely to open it.
   
7. Say thank you in your email subject lines.
   
8. Send emails at a strategic time and day. There's no single day or time that magically works for everyone. If there were, it would stop working almost as soon as word got out when it was! Test and experiment what works for you.
   
9. Track your email performances. Learn from your own experience. It's the best way to succeed.
   

How to raise a lot more money by thinking small

You probably remember the photo of the body of a little Syrian boy, washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015. It's a hard photo to look at; he looks like he's sleeping, in that sprawling, completely relaxed way that toddlers sleep. But he's not asleep.

This photo galvanized (sort of) humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis. The fact that it's an astoundingly huge crisis didn't move people. It took a photo of one child -- for whom help was too late.

And it's always that way. The facts that prove a crisis is a problem that urgently needs response never stir response. The picture does.

Because that's how our brains work.

A recent column in the New York Times, To Make the World Better, Think Small (disclosure: the author is my brother), makes this same point about talking to would-be donors:

Think small. In the fund-raising business, there's an old axiom that "one is greater than one million." This isn't bad math; it is a reminder that when it comes to people in need, one million is a statistic, while one is a human story.

Every charity worth its salt knows that people are more likely to give in response to a child who has lost her parents than to the news of thousands of victims of a tragedy.

Except too many charities aren't worth their salt. They don't help donors "think small" by presenting solvable, human-sized problems. Instead, they keep uselessly battering donors with the massive size and seeming intractability of the problems we face. And many organizations directly involved with the Syria refugee crisis refused to show the iconic think-small photo.

And so even more people died and went un-helped. And too many would-be donors stayed stuck in the sad illusion that they can't do anything to make the world a better place -- because charities refuse to think small.

If you want to raise funds, you have to enter the psychological world of your donors. You have to think small -- which is the ultimate form of thinking big!

(This post first appeared on January 9, 2017.)

The most important paragraph in your fundraising appeal

Yesterday, I showed you a great post from Clairification: Top 10 Fundraising Appeal Writing Tips. In the midst of that post, almost as an aside, was this challenge: Always, always, always include a P.S.; it’s copywriting malpractice not to do so.

It's malpractice all right. And it's very common. You might think there's no need for a P.S. If you think of something you should have said, you'll put it in your next draft, not tacked on in a P.S. Right?

Wrong.

Eye-tracking studies show that a large percentage of letter readers read the P.S. first.

And a good chunk of those read nothing else!

Leaving off a P.S. is the equivalent of sending a couple of sheets of blank paper. No message received!

And, under the assumption that it will be the only passage many donors read, you should include the call to action. Including, possibly:

• The urgency/deadline.
  
• A reminder of what's at stake.
  
• Specific instruction about giving.
  

It's a good practice to write the P.S. first. If you have it polished and clear, you are in a great position for writing the rest of the letter!

10 ways to make your direct mail stronger

Worried about your latest direct mail appeal?

That's okay. You may find some inspiration here from this post at Clairification: Top 10 Fundraising Appeal Writing Tips.

Here are the tips:

1. Begin with drama and get right to the point. Don't "warm up" the way we do in conversation.
   
2. Lead with easy to read, understandable copy and design. Ease of reading is one of the main things that gets and keeps reader engaged. Use readable and larger-than-you-think fonts. Black type against white. Short paragraphs. Wide margins. Plenty of underlining, bold, italic, and other things that break up the gray.
   
3. Use a conversational tone; understand donors are asking questions right off the bat. Don't lecture. Talk. Answer their questions.
   
4. Ask directly two to three times. One ask buried near the end of your letter is pretty much the same as not asking at all. My rule ask ask once or twice per page.
   
5. Avoid jargon like the plague. If you're not sure whether a word is jargon or not, it is. Get a reality check about your writing from non-experts. You'd be surprised how often one can unknowingly use insider or professional jargon, leaving donors out in the cold.
   
6. Talk about outcomes, not processes. Donors aren't giving to fund your processes. They give to make things happen. Your processes are important. But not to your donors.
   
7. Give a compelling reason to give today. If there's no reason to give right now, there's essentially no reason to give at all.
   
8. Flatter the donor; assume the best. Your donors care and are generous. They might not care in the right way, and they might not be as generous as they should be ... but you don't know that about them. Attribute the best and highest motives and virtues to your donors.
   
9. Make the donor feel the appeal is about them. Put some action in front of them -- something they can do to make the world a better place. In their personal story, they are not a minor bit player in the story of your organization. To them, you're the bit player in the adventure of their life.
   
10. Tell the donor specifically what it costs to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Fundraising is always about problems and donor-sized solutions. Keep to that simple formula.
    

Should we do Giving Tuesday this year?

A development director and I were talking about her end-of-year fundraising.

When we got to Giving Tuesday, right in the thick of everything else, she sighed heavily. "Giving Tuesday was a big washout for us last year. And the Year before. I wish we didn't have to do it."

"Then don't do it," I said.

She was silent. "Really?" she said, at last. "Is that allowed? It seems like something we should be part of as members of the nonprofit community."

There's no should about it. Giving Tuesday may or may not be right for you.

It's a big fundraising deal for some organizations. They should keep on doing it. They should look for ways to make it even better. More emails? More social media? More noise in general?

At the same time, Giving Tuesday is a nothing-burger for other organizations. They should stop spending time on it completely.

Your decision to be part of the day should be based solely on its effectiveness as a fundraising tool for you.

If you've never done it and you don't know if it'll work, I recommend you find out. Dip your toe in the Giving Tuesday water with a small campaign. See if your donors leap up and grab the ring, or just ignore it.

If it works, it works. It doesn't have to be a blockbuster; just better than the alternative, which is either some other campaign around the same time, or saving your energy for the last week of the year, which is a big deal for nearly everyone -- regardless of their Giving Tuesday success.

You don't owe Giving Tuesday anything. Like anything else, it's a tool that might work for you, might not. Giving Tuesday will do just fine -- with you or without you.

16 things your donors wish you'd do

What do you donors want? Here's a list from Marketsmart, at 16 simple things your best donors want:

1. They want you to do the important work they can’t or won’t do.
   
2. They want you to give them the credit and praise for your achievements. They want to be the hero in the story, not you.
   
3. They want you to remind them how great they are frequently.
   
4. They want you to take an interest in them and their story.
   
5. They want service and respect when they reach out to you.
   
6. They want empathy.
   
7. They want you to tell them what you did with their money.
   
8. They want you to be transparent about how you accomplished your objectives.
   
9. They want you to be fair, honest and trustworthy.
   
10. They want opportunities to give you feedback with two-way communications.
    
11. They want you to provide value to both them and the people (or objectives) their donations support.
    
12. They want you to deliver real results, make an impact, or foster change.
    
13. They want you to offer them opportunities to engage and immerse themselves in your mission so they can feel more involved.
    
14. They want those engagement opportunities to be convenient for them.
    
15. They want to be able to invite their friends and family to participate.
    
16. They want you to make it easy!
    

Simple, and not so simple.

Take a look at the last few fundraising messages that have landed in your mailbox, inbox, or social media feeds.

How many are trying to give you these things?

Not many, I'll guess. That's the bad news.

The good news is that if you meet even a handful of these donor needs, you'll stand head-and-shoulders above most of your donors' causes.

When you make donating a rewarding experience, you get more donations from more donors. It's that simple.

The unfair truth about disaster fundraising

Civil Society Fundraising Blog reports on a UK study that found something that won't surprise experienced fundraisers: Victim blaming: why donors care less about wars than earthquakes.

That's right: When it comes to humanitarian disasters, donors are much more likely to give when the disaster is natural than when it's manmade.

Earthquakes, typhoons -- those open the hearts and wallets of huge numbers of donors (and nondonors). Almost any conflict-driven humanitarian crisis -- equally horrific in terms of human suffering ... not so much.

Many donors are cynical about helping victims of war and conflict.

The study was with UK donors. I have some experience on both sides of the Atlantic, and I'd say the effect is even more pronounced in the US.

It's not fair. It's not right. Donors should know better.

We can complain all we want about it, but it's the reality. When a humanitarian crisis is manmade, you're going to struggle to raise funds for it.

So when you need to raise money for a manmade crisis, here's what you can do:

• Lower your expectations. You are not going to raise the kind of support you may be used to seeing during natural disasters. You'll raise something -- just not as much.

• Focus your messaging on the non-combat aspects of the crisis. Tell stories about children. Avoid focusing on scenes of combat. In most of these situations, hunger, disease, and exposure strike a lot more people than bullets and bombs. Zoom in on that and help reawaken donor compassion.

• Don't whine in public. You'll be thinking, Nobody's listening to us! It's not fair! Don't make that your fundraising message. It doesn't work. Whining makes you look like a whiner. That kills your brand.
  

(This post first appeared on July 20, 2016.)