Future Fundraising Now

5 ways to keep your readers paying attention

The hard part of fundraising is being interesting enough to keep readers involved. If you can get attention -- and keep it -- your chance of getting a donation skyrockets.

Here are some attention tips from Clairification, at Top 5 Nonprofit Attention-Grabbers:

1. Stop writing about “us and our stuff.” Your donors really don’t care about that. They just want to know if they can make the world a better place by giving to you. All your content about your org is a waste of their time -- or worse, a warning not to give.
   
2. Hit return more often. Long paragraphs are basically a warning sign that says: “Don’t bother to read. To dense, complex, and uninteresting. My personal rule is the longest allowable paragraph is six lines. And those should be rare. Most paragraphs should be one to four lines long. (This means you need to think differently about paragraphs than your English teacher taught you.)
   
3. Don’t stop at the subject line. Subject lines are the most important element of email effectiveness. But not the only one. There’s the sender and preview pane. There’s the way the email is designed. There’s the number and type of links.
   
4. Make it a metaphor. Simple, apt metaphors can make even complex ideas understandable and easy. And don’t shy away from “cliche” metaphors (like “She knew it like the back of her hand” they’re overused because people understand them).
   
5. Steal a tip from The New York Times. The tip: the average length of a quote in The Times is 7 words. Long quotations keep readers away.
   

8 fundraising errors you can avoid

There are a lot of ways fundraising messages to wrong and fail to move donors to action.

Here are 8 common ways things go sideways, from the For Impact Blog at 8 Common Messaging Challenges:

1. Engagement starts at the wrong altitude. Donors give to make specific good things happen. We don’t win their action by telling them about our overall strategy for saving the world. You get stuck trying to teach them about your strategies before you can get around to talking about action. You lose them long before you get there!
   
2. No simplicity. If you can’t keep your message simple, you will not get many donors to pay attention.
   
3. No engagement. You aren’t putting your work in the context of their lives and values.
   
4. No funding rationale. You tell them you need money (and often how much you need), but you don’t connect the need or the solution to the donor.
   
5. No WOW. If you want action, you have to have a message that’s one of the top two or three cool things they see today.
   
6. Story is not awesome. Many fundraising stories are just dull, over-complex, burdened with details, and too long. Or not long enough.
   
7. Framing is about the INCOME. Not the IMPACT. When you make it all about money, you are easy to ignore. Make it about their opportunity to make the world a better place, you become fascinating.
   
8. All CAUSE, no CASE. That is, you’re talking only about the problem, not the solution.
   

Are you Yoda or Batman to your donors? [PODCAST]

There are two fundamentally different approaches fundraisers can take to their donors: One stays in the background and empowers the donor to be the hero. The other stands in front and tells the donor to be a good side-kick — keeping the hero label for themselves.

One of these raises a lot more money than the other. Do you know which? And do you know which of them you are?

From the archives of the now-defunct podcast Fundraising Is Beautiful. This episode first aired on February 10, 2016. Listen here:

(If you don't see the audio player below, click here to listen.)

7 things you need for a successful year

Nice post from the Veritus Group Blog: 7 Wishes for Non-Profit Leaders in 2023:

1. Less Fear. Fear wrecks fundraising fast. You might be afraid donors will be offended if you ask. You may feel you have to hold tight to limited resources and avoid investing in the future. You may avoid trying something new because it might fail. Fear always does more damage than the things you’re afraid of.
   
2. More Risks. Breaking away from fear is great. Embracing risk is even better. Guess what: Everything you do has an element of risk. Success is never guaranteed. One of the most recklessly risky things you can do is hunker down and never take risks. That virtually guarantees failure.
   
3. Value Management. No matter how much vision you have, if your organization is well managed, you will do everything better. Good management is how you deploy your people by valuing them, training them, aligning them with organizational goals and with each other. There’s no substitute for good management.
   
4. Align Development Team Structure with the Donor Pipeline. The secret to success in fundraising is a good donor pipeline. That means you have an upward path for every donor to reach their capacity and connection with you. The main donor paths to higher value are monthly giving, upgraded giving (to mid-value or major status), and bequest giving. Not all donors will take those paths, but longterm success comes from fostering those journeys for as many as possible. That requires a structure that makes it possible!
   
5. Continue and Expand Your DEI Work. Make it a priority. We are hobbled and less effective until we transform ourselves.
   
6. Take Care of Your People and Yourself. Burnout is killing too many nonprofits. Make sure everyone takes time off, and has room to think, grow, and take it easy now and then.
   
7. Celebrate More. Fundraising is hard. Harder now than it has been in awhile. Celebrating is more important than ever. Recognize the things that go well!
   

4 steps to fundraising that moves donors to action

Here’s a helpful framework for any fundraising project you might tackle, from the NextAfter Blog, at Bust Through Writer’s Block and Craft More Engaging Appeals with P.A.S.O.

Those four letters stand for Problem-Agitation-Solution-Offer, and here’s how you put them to work:

1. Problem. Fundraising is all about problems donors can help solve. That means you need to start with a problem. It needs to be real, vivid, and understandable. Do that, and your fundraising is off to the races!
   
2. Agitation. Help donors really care about the problem. Show them how serious it is (but not how huge it is -- that does exactly opposite of what you want to do). Tell a story about someone impacted by the problem. Show the donor how the problem affects them. Speak to their hearts.
   
3. Solution. This is key. Make it clear donors are part of the solution to the problem. Show how their giving will make a tangible, meaningful difference that they can understand. (The most common cause of fundraising failure is that it’s about a solution but not a problem. The second biggest cause is that it’s about a problem with no solution.)
   
4. Outcome. Give the donor a clear picture of what will happen when they give. Not what has already happened, but the immediate future that they will help bring about. They need to believe that their solution to the problem is real. (And then, after they give, keep showing them evidence that they are helping make a meaningful difference.)
   

Amazon Smile CANCELLED (in other news, the sun will set in the west tonight)

Just got the email. You may have too.

Amazon Smile -- the program that allows Amazon shoppers to designate their “Favorite charity” to receive half a percent of what they spend on Amazon -- is about to end after ten years. The end is this coming February 20.

Most likely this is small and unimportant news to you. If it’s a big deal, my condolences. I wish you the best at finding a replacement revenue source.

And this is where I can’t stop myself saying, I told you so.

Because I (and many others) did.

It was inevitable that Amazon Smile would end. Amazon is a business. Everything they do needs to make business sense. It seems Amazon Smile made enough sense to last for a decade. Until it didn’t any more.

As their email put it:

... we learned that with so many eligible organizations — more than 1 million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.... Amazon can have a more significant and lasting impact if we invest in specific areas and focus our philanthropic efforts ...

I can just picture someone in some Seattle back-office sending out hundreds of thousands of checks for under $50.

So they stopped. Regardless of the impact their decision might have on their nonprofit partners.

It was their right -- their responsibility -- to do what made sense for their own goals.

The good news is that for most participants, the revenue lost will be unimportant.

But I think there’s a lesson for nonprofits to learn from this, and I blogged about it back in 2019, at Should you bother with Amazon Smile?

My point then (and now) was that fundraisers should take a careful look at “free money” deals like Amazon Smile.

Because they aren’t free.

In the best of situations, these schemes cost time to make them work at all -- opportunity cost. And often, though not in the case of Amazon Smile, they also cost actual money.

That .5% rebate meant when the donors who went to the trouble to designate you as their favorite spent $10,000 on Amazon, you’d get $50.

To make the revenue scale up to a meaningful number would take not just a large list of donors, but a meaningful effort to reach out to donors and get them to do what it took for you to get that .5%.

And while you were doing that, what other more dependable revenue-generating activities were you not doing?

As I noted back then, “I bet you'd get there faster standing on the sidewalk with a tin cup.”

So next time one of those generous “free money for nonprofits” deals comes your way, remember to count the cost of being involved. Including the time spent.

And remember, the whole thing can (and will) eventually disappear with nothing more than a polite email.

Whoops! 🎵 I almost edited out something because it was corny

I almost made a silly mistake.

I was giving someone direction on a fundraising letter, and came to a bulleted list. The bullets weren’t dots, but little musical notes: 🎵. (It was an arts organization).

I got a slight “ew” reaction to it, and was about to suggest a change to “normal” looking bullets.

Wait a second.

Where did that “ew” come from?

Well, those little notes struck me as “corny.” Needlessly cute. Not serious.

If you know me or read my writings on fundraising at all, you might a step or two ahead of me: I frequently defend “corny” in fundraising. One of my books (The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communication) I make a big deal about how fundraising messages should be plain, corny, and obvious.

So why did I almost remove some “corny” from a fundraising message?

Maybe it was too corny?

I hope that wasn’t it. Here’s me speaking at a conference, with my words projected giant-size behind me:

That’s right, you really can’t be too corny.

But you could be inappropriate.

Those cute little notes in a message about suffering, pain, and tragedy ... that would be wrong. It would undermine the message.

I was applying that “inappropriate” filter in the wrong place.

So here’s my “new” rule about such things:

Corny is good. It’s never a problem. Things that clash with the mood or message -- bad. Take a moment to ask yourself whether something is inappropriate or merely corny, because it can be hard to tell the difference. Revise what’s inappropriate. Leave what’s corny.

And keep in mind that your own sense of “taste” doesn’t really guide you to anything helpful in fundraising.

Why simple, old-fashioned-looking fundraising still works like crazy

Guest post by Steven Screen, co-founder of The Better Fundraising Company.

About 10 years ago I suggested to a client that we design a fundraising letter to look like a telegram.

"A telegram?!?"

They looked at me like I was crazy.

"Why in the world would we do that? No one has sent telegrams in 50 years!" A couple of the younger people in the room had to be told what a telegram was.

Thankfully our fundraising for this organization was going really well. So they were willing to hear me out. I said something like, "Look, I know it seems crazy to you and me. But we know that most of your core donors are older than those of us in this room. Those older donors will know what a telegram is, and remember that receiving a telegram meant that the message was important and urgent. Just that feeling should be enough to increase the number of people who open the envelope and read the letter."

The team agreed to try it.

I advised the organization to do something as crazy as making a letter look like a telegram because of something I've seen again and again in my career:

Simple, old-fashioned-looking fundraising usually does better than the great-looking modern stuff us fundraisers are attracted to.

This rests on a fundamental truth: the vast majority of donors in the united states are older than you are. The research I've seen pegs the average age at about 69. That means there are a LOT of donors who are older than that.

This means that your donors are going to be more likely to interact with, and emotionally resonate with, design that references their youth. In other words, design that looks "old fashioned" to you and me.

Plus, your donor received four fundraising letters yesterday that all looked the same. When was the last time she got something that looked like a telegram?

"Old-fashioned" design works so well for another couple reasons:

• It's more legible. The type was larger, the fonts had serifs. It was easier to read quickly. And legibility is directly related to fundraising results. (Sidenote: if you have a 25-year-old designer with fantastic eyes who loves their tiny, cool-looking sans-serif fonts and reverse text . . . good luck.)
  
• It's more scannable. It's generally easier to look at and know, within a second or two, what's going on. Or in the case of fundraising, what the organization is communicating to the donor. Because scanability is also directly related to fundraising results.
  

Please note that I'm talking almost exclusively about mass donor communications. If you have an application for a grant, it probably shouldn't look like a telegram. But you can apply this principle to almost any donor communication.

And that letter that we designed to look like a telegram? It worked great.

Because remember: donors are generous, compassionate, busy, over-solicited, probably older than you, and are attracted to different things than you.

The surest path to their heart is via design that they resonate with (and find easy to read). That may or may not be "modern." It may or may not be what you or your organization like. But it's why "old-fashioned" design still works so well.

(This post first appeared on January 18, 2018.)

Ben Franklin's amazing secret for successful fundraising

I know professionals in fundraising who have the feeling that fundraising and giving are a zero-sum game: We somehow get money away from people and we have to be careful that they don't notice we're getting richer at their expense.

You're always on tip-toes, afraid the donors will figure it out and bring the whole thing to a crashing end.

You need to take a listen to some wisdom from Benjamin Franklin, who said:

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than whom you yourself have obliged.

It's called the Ben Franklin Effect. When you help someone, you want to do it again. Because doing good feels good.

Maybe you've experienced it in life, when you asked someone for directions, and they took the whole afternoon off to give you a personal guided tour, including a great meal. That person is having a great time! They're probably getting more out of it than you are.

In the same way, donors love to give. They love the organizations that create outlets for their generosity. The more they give, the more they're likely to give. That's why the top indicator of likeliness to give is the recency of the previous gift.

That's the magic of asking and giving.. Everyone wins. The only losers (other than frauds) are those who don't take part.

As a fundraiser, you are a key part of the magic. Don't let an unrealistic pessimism lead you astray!

(This post first appeared on January 10, 2018.)

How jargon and abstraction might be keeping away donors

I recently came a cross this self-description of what a nonprofit does: "Community catalysts evolving global solutions locally."

Six words, every one of them an abstraction, and most of them jargon.

It communicates almost nothing. I can think of a couple of reasons they chose that way to describe their work:

1. They're hiding something. They're afraid if people knew what they really did, nobody would support them.
   
2. They don't know what they do. They're faking it, and hoping nobody notices.
   

But there's a third possible explanation that's less nefarious and more likely: They think this language is just fine! An elegant and inspiring way to describe their work.

I believe that's the reason because I've known enough nonprofit people who write that way and are proud of it.

Which in a way is worse than my two unlikely hypotheses: Because it shows us that their communication skills are broken. They are unaware that their jargon is impenetrable, that it comes across as evasive or just silly. They live in a bubble that only includes people who think and talk in the same stilted and abstract way they do.

This is just me, but I believe when people are that bad at communicating, there's a strong chance they're bad at other things too.

To be fair, not many donors are going to give their description as much thought I as do. For most, it will just wash part their consciousness and leave no impression at all. Which can't be good for getting supporters excited about their work!

Take a look at the things your organization says. Are you communicating, or just letting words pile up meaninglessly?