Future Fundraising Now

What’s bad about AI writing is nothing new

Worried about what AI might do to your career or fundraising?

(My take: Don’t worry, it might be a useful tool for some, inexperienced fundraisers may misuse it, but that doesn’t really change anything.)

Then I saw this:

It’s on a piece of direct mail fundraising. The blurred-out part is the recipient’s real name.

Okay, pretty cool way to grab a reader’s attention, right? (I think it’s pretty spiffy, and I bet it helps increase response.)

But just look at the writing! Robotic, abstract, awkward. Not at all what a real person would say. (Also, it's not funny, but I can forgive that.)

It looks like it's AI-written, but I don't think it is, because I got it almost a year ago, before AI Fever swept the fundraising sector. And let’s admit it -- we’ve all seen writing just like that all our lives.

My point: You don’t have to be a robot to write like one. Plenty of human writers struggle to sound human, either because they lack the skill, or because there’s a committee making sure any humanity or naturalness is fully edited out before it gets published.

The scourge of stilted, poor, inhuman copy has been with us for a long time. Probably dating back to the markings-scratched-onto-clay-tablets days.

AI doesn’t change that. It just churns it out faster. Which may not be such a bad thing.

There’s always going to be room for skillful copywriters who are able to write good copy. Some of them will (maybe already are) using AI as a first-draft tool that it should be.

When fundraisers make up stories about their donors

When the pandemic started almost three years ago, a story swept through the nonprofit world. Something like this: Donors are scared, hunkered down, distracted; don’t try connecting with them because they’ll react negatively. You won’t raise money, and you’ll drive away donors!

That was not at all what happened. Donors responded to all kinds of causes with unprecedented generosity. For two years or more, we experienced record-breaking results with donors who fully understood the crisis we were all in together.

But not for the organizations who told the made-up stories about terrified and defensive donors. Some figured out their mistake quickly. Others took longer, and are still suffering a gigantic hole in revenue, and unrecoverable loss of donors.

It’s easy to make up stories that fit our own fears and beliefs, and thus ignore reality.

The Veritus Group Blog, at Are You Making Up Stories About How Your Donor Doesn’t Want to Hear from You?

You create a story in your head, that donors don’t like to be bothered. So, you might try once to reach out to them and then wait weeks or months to follow up. This will not work if you want to successfully cultivate a relationship with a donor. Most donors WANT to hear from you.

The scenario here is not specific to the pandemic. It’s about one-to-one major donor fundraising, where you succeed most by understand how much, in what way, and about what your specific list of doors want to communicate.

You can either make up a story where you shouldn’t connect much...

Or you can find out what works for them.

A few don’t want to be bugged. Others are very specific about the ways they can be “bugged.” But most are happy to connect in some way.

With a limited list of major donors, you can find out the right way, one donor at a time. With general donor fundraising, you have to make some assumptions.

And the best assumption to make is this: They want to hear from you, and they want to donate.

Not all of them. Not all of the time. Not about every topic you might have in mind.

But going silent because you have a feeling they don’t want you go bug them is just deciding for them that they won’t get involved.

And you make it so by staying silent.

Don’t make up stories. Learn the reality. That works a lot better!

7 ways to boost your fundraising career and your joy

Here are some great steps from Pamela Barden for improving your career path this year, at 2023: The Year to Start Loving Fundraising Again:

1. Commit to Staying Relevant. No matter what you do, the world moves on. So make it a point to keep new knowledge going in. This actually takes time and effort, but it’s a must!
   
2. Figure Out Who Is Your Target Audience. Spend some time getting to know how your audience is different from you. They are different, but it can be easy to lose sight of that and communicate with them in ways that don’t connect. It’s an act of discipline to know about them, and stay aware of them.
   
3. Don’t Discard the Old. Old tactics are as likely effective as not. In fact, they are somewhat more likely to work than brand new spiffy ideas. While keeping your eyes open to innovation, don’t forget the stuff that works.
   
4. Commit to Learning More. Every year (or more!) discover something you didn’t know before!
   
5. Try to Avoid Tactics That Don’t Work. Most of us get bad suggestions from board members and other leaders we can’t ignore. But do your best to push back and minimize the time suck.
   
6. Become More Efficient at Efforts That Don’t Raise Funds. At some point, you may be forced to do things you shouldn’t really do to raise funds. (Like a gala.) Find a way to move quickly past and spend as little time as you can on these things.
   
7. Talk to a Donor Daily. If your fundraising position is anything other than a major donor rep, you may not have much contact with donors. Find a way to talk with donors. They are the best reality check of all.
   

Top 5 blog posts of the month

Here are the 5 most-read Future Fundraising Now blog posts in the month of January:

1. Top fundraising blogs for 2023

2. Top 10 blog posts of 2022

3. Ben Franklin's amazing secret for successful fundraising

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

5. Is AI coming to get your fundraising job?
   

Why people don’t support nonprofit organizations

This might seem obvious, but so much fundraising just misses the point: people donate to nonprofits to help people.

They don’t donate to support nonprofits.

Fundraising that misses that point is not effective.

That’s the point at this MarketSmart blog post, What so many fundraising appeals miss: people want to help people, which connects the widespread use of “support us” fundraising to the donor attrition crisis that’s widespread in our industry:

If institutions are to stem donor attrition and win some donors back, they need to back away from the grandiose claims of corporate case and make more human appeals. They should not seek to raise money based on what they want or need unless they can tie it directly to who they could better serve.

You can raise some money by asking donors to give you money so you can do your mission.

But you’ll raise a lot more if you ask donors to give money to make great things happen. That’s the real reason people give away money.

If you need more revenue, more donors, more ability to do your work, you need to make sure you connect with would-be donors where their hearts are. And that is helping others.