Nearly everyone I know in the nonprofit fundraising industry is smart and/or well-educated. That's why we have such a hard time with a fundamental truth: Hokey fundraising is effective.
By "hokey" I mean: simplistic, loud, goofy, old-fashioned, and unstylish. It's a word that lumps together a handful of undesirable traits that happen to work well.
It's so frustrating! We're smart people. We can create beautiful and intellectually stimulating messages that look so good in our portfolios. But they just don't work as well as the hokey ones!
Direct-response fundraising (direct response anything, including digital) is tough that way. We have to create messages that we don't really like. That we're not really proud to show off. The kind of stuff we used to sneer at before we knew about things like response rates and net revenue.
There's only one thing to do: Get over it. Fundraising is not about you, your taste, or your reputation; it's about connecting with donors on their terms.
My advice: Learn to love hokey. It has a certain beauty, greatly enhanced by the fact that it brings in more revenue for your cause.
