Future Fundraising Now

Improve your memorial giving program with these 8 tips

When someone you love dies, making a donation to a cause that was important to them can be a meaningful and comforting act. That’s why donors do it.

If you’re the health fundraising sector, you already know this, because it’s very common there.

If you haven’t come across memorial giving, it’s worth looking into. It’s a real motivation for some donors some of the time.

Here’s some help from the Boomerang Blog, at 8 Tips for Managing Your Nonprofit’s Memorial Donations:

1. Involve the honoree’s family. Try to find a close immediate survivor of the person people are remembering with donation. Let them know others are giving. This person may or may not be a donor, but you should treat them like one.
   
2. Allow donors to send a note to the honoree’s family. Find ways to let memorial donors be as personal as possible.
   
3. Send thoughtful donor thank you notes. Their giving motivations may be different from other donors, but the gift is real, and heartfelt.
   
4. Communicate the impact of tribute donations. As with “normal” thank you messages, make clear the impact of their giving.
   
5. Keep memorial donation data organized. These aren’t typical donors. Make sure you know who they are. They aren’t “donors” in the normal sense -- yet. They are prospective donors, and should just be thrown in with the population of donors.
   
6. Share information about your memorial donation program. Make sure all your donors can learn about memorial giving.
   
7. Highlight other ways to give. Let potential donors know that giving money is just one way to honor a loved one. Volunteering and other forms of involvement can be meaningful too.
   
8. Facilitate peer-to-peer fundraising. Make it easy for people to recruit memorial donations.
   

4 game-changing hints for powerful fundraising

There are a handful of results-crushing approaches that happen constantly in fundraising. People use them so often because they seem right.

But they aren’t. They actively discourage donors from giving.

Here’s a myth-busting post from Clairification that can help you leave those unfortunate approaches behind: Before Sending a Fundraising Appeal Do This, Not That:

1. Talk to your donors, NOT at them. It’s easy to think that if you just inform your donors about your track record of success, your excellent methodologies, your talented staff, and your fiscal acumen, donors will be bowled over and they’ll give. That should work, but it doesn’t. Donors don’t give because you’re awesome. They give because they want to change the world. That means you have to approach them on their terms. Keep it simple, emotional, and make your point with stories, not facts.
   
2. Ask donors to change the world, NOT to help you change the world. In the donor’s world, you are a “middle man” in their mission to change the world. They aren’t giving to support your goals. They’re giving to meet their own goals. Your job is to show how their goals and yours align.
   
3. Show what the donor’s gift will accomplish in the future, NOT what others’ gifts (or even theirs) accomplished in the past. Donors give to make something happen. Not to pat you on the head for what you’ve already done. The time to tell donors about accomplishments is after they’ve given. Then they can share in the celebration of success.
   
4. Give a reason to give now, NOT whenever for whatever. In fundraising, “give some time” translates into “don’t bother to give.” Always have a reason to donate now. Even an arbitrary deadline is better than no urgency at all.
   

5 thank you letter fails

Thank you letters to donors are an important chance to build the relationship. The way you thank is just as important as they way you ask.

Here are some common thank you letter mistakes you can avoid, from the Get Fully Funded Blog, at 5 Things You Should Never Write in a Thank You Letter:

1. “Dear friend of xyz organization...” Thank your donor by name. When you strip them of their identity and reduce them to what they are in relation to your organization, you fail on a very human level.
   
2. “On behalf of the board and staff at xyz organization...”
   That’s stiff, overly formal, and a waste of words that signal “boring” to most readers. Just thank the donor.
   
3. “Your donation will help us meet our goals...” Donors are rarely interested in your goals. They give to make things happen. Thank them for that, and do it with a story.
   
4. “We have six programs spanning three counties...” Not important to donors. Tell them what their giving helped make possible on a human level.
   
5. “Don’t forget to get your tickets to our upcoming event...” Don’t change the subject. A thank you letter should be only a thank you letter.
   

An effective thank you letter is full of life, connection, and tells a story about what the donor became part of when they gave.

Are you dumbing down your fundraising?

It’s common for nonprofits to be frustrated that they have to “dumb down” how they talk about their work. Like any profession, we put a lot of effort, experience, and knowledge into doing the work we do.

And any time you have to explain all that to someone who hasn’t climbed that learning curve -- whether it’s your mother or your donors -- you clearly see how far their knowledge is from yours.

And if you’ve been involved in fundraising (or talking to mom) for more than a few minutes, you’ve probably noticed that dragging someone up your learning curve ranges from incredibly difficult to futile. Learning is hard work. Teaching is even harder.

The solution is to simplify. Make your complexity easy to understand.

Which can be frustrating. You feel like you’re leaving important things out. You feel like they aren’t getting the whole picture.

Which is why simplifying is often called dumbing down.

Big mistake.

The attitude behind calling clear communication “dumbing down” is arrogant, elitist, and leads to ineffective fundraising. And ineffective fundraising careers.

We aren’t alone in the “dumbing down” challenge. Scientists face it too. Probably more than we do.

Which is what this article in The Brilliant (a magazine for scientists) is about: Scientists, please stop saying ‘dumbing down’. It says the term “dumbing down” should be discouraged by scientists “to the point of extinction”:

The use of this term perpetuates an outdated view in the STEM sector that making complex information more accessible is inherently bad. With the pressing urgency of climate change, we need global engagement and the general public pushing our politicians for fast and lasting change.

So next time someone around you uses the expression “dumbing down”, challenge them to rethink their own biases and to engage with people who aren’t mirrors of themselves.

Like many scientists, we are in the business of changing the world. And we can’t do it alone. We need to bring others along so they can be part of the mission.

If you think of simplifying your work so non-experts as “dumbing down,” your attitude will infect your communication. Your frustration and sneering contempt for your “dumb” donors will prevent making a meaningful connection with allies you need. Because you’ll be missing the whole point of talking about your work outside your organization.

Talking to people who aren’t just like you requires an act of the intellect and the heart. To enter their world, to be relevant to them.

It takes a big heart. It takes an inclusive spirit. And it’s not easy to do.

It’s not “dumbing down” -- it’s “smarting up.”

What you should assume about complainers -- and donors

We all get complaints from donors. Sometimes those complaints sting, and we feel “caught out” by the complainers.

What makes complaints harmful -- or not -- depends on our interpretation of them, and our reaction.

The Betterm Fundraising blog has some helpful thinking about complaints, at The Harmful Big Assumption.

Here’s the assumption it’s so easy to make:

... if this person complained, there must be a lot of other donors who feel the same way but didn’t send anything in.

The root of “one complaint speaks for many” is fear.

Fear that we’re stumbling into errors, that donors are in a constant state of pique about our efforts to raise funds.

I was once told (with great confidence) that research found every complaint has behind it 200 more people who had the same issue but didn’t say anything.

In hindsight, I can see how bogus that claim is: surely the number must vary a lot by the type of complaint, the sector, the audience, and the number of people involved. It may have derived from some kind of customer service research, finally reaching me after a very long game of “telephone” that turned it into a terrifying piece of “data.”

But it was a powerful force that drove us to action. Actually, mostly to inaction.

The Better Fundraising post raises a liberating insight: If complainers speak for other non-complainers, shouldn’t we assume that donors speak for nondonors? That each person who goes to the trouble of giving represents people who felt moved by our message, who agreed with what we said ... but just didn’t get around to making the gift?

This should flip the script on the fear of complaints.

In my experience (and probably yours) the ratio of donors to complainers is typically hundreds or even thousands to one.

Decisions based on fear are almost always bad decisions.

7 ways you can out-write AI in your fundraising

Afraid AI writing is coming for your writing job?

You just need to make your real intelligence to work. Yours comes with heart, experience, and depth beyond anything the artificial kind can imitate.

Here’s a post from the On Message Blog on How to Out-Write ChatGPT. Here are 7 ways to leverage your advantage over artificial intelligence:

1. Draw from your experiences. ChatGPT is a fancy parrot. You are a human being with experiences and a shared life with other human beings. Reach into real life to make your writing real.
   
2. Talk to humans. Learn from the amazing and different ways real people talk.
   
3. Stretch your creativity. You have tools in your brain that ChatGPT can’t match. But you have to use them.
   
4. Show don’t tell. Use all five of your senses to describe things. ChatGPT doesn’t have any of them.
   
5. Expand your reading. ChatGPT has you beat on volume of reading. But it you need to read as much (and as widely) as possible.
   
6. Use ChatGPT as a tool. If you use it as a tool -- and not as a crutch, it can make you better. It can help you start first drafts and explore ideas. It’s just a start for real writing, but as grandma used to say, “Well begun is half done!”
   

I’ll add a #7 to this list of ways you can out-write ChatGPT:

7. You can tell true stories. AI can’t. Game, set, match.

If you aren’t leveraging these innate human advantages in your writing, you’re really just a slow and sloppy version of AI. You might as well hand the job over.

Do your “core values” make things better, or worse?

Does your organization need a list of “core values”?

Maybe, sas the Monday Morning Memo at Does Your Company Have Core Values?

But sometimes your published core values can do as much harm as good. The Memo notes that there are only three reasons to have a list of core values:

1. Inspire and reinforce “on-brand” behavior from employees.
   
2. Assist in the orientation and onboarding of new hires.
   
3. Inform investors, customers, [donors,] and other interested parties of what they can expect from you.
   

Notice that two of the three are for insiders, only one for outsiders.

But here’s the key point: If your core values list is just a bunch of abstract aspirational qualities, you’re heading for confusion:

When your core values include aspirational words that describe attributes rather than actions, your core values list will be interpreted differently by different readers...

Some common aspirational words for nonprofits include: transparency, integrity, respect, compassion -- you know, good things, but not clear description of real-world actions.

That leaves them wide open to interpretation -- and confusion.

Worse yet, they generally don’t engage, connect, or inspire.

It becomes a navel-gazing exercise.

Values matter a lot. Knowing and understanding them is critical for keeping insiders aligned. And donors want to be part of organizations that share their values.

But a list of abstractions won’t get you there.

Top 5 blog posts of the month

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

1. The hard part of fundraising: getting attention (the money is the easy part)

2. An easy way to stand out in your donor's mailbox

3. 2 things donors don’t care about -- and one they really do

4. What’s bad about AI writing is nothing new

5. When fundraisers make up stories about their donors