Future Fundraising Now

What Wordle can teach us about fundraising

Do you play Wordle?

Good news: This simple, compelling game has something to teach us about fundraising:

Wordle may look like a guessing game, but it's actually a knowledge-gathering challenge. You win by paying attention to the fact and applying logic.

It's the same with fundraising.

If you treat Wordle as if it's "Guess the 5-Letter Word" and you try words you have a feeling it could be, you will virtually never win: There are far too many 5-letter words, and no matter how smart you are, you have no insight into what words the computer is likely to pick. It'll get boring fast.

(I have a colleague who claims she once won at Wordle on the guess guess, but she has been unable to supply documentary evidence.)

In Wordle, it's best to start with a word that has commonly occurring letters. That increases your chance of getting some correct letters. It also helps eliminate letters that you can not use in subsequent guesses. (My starting word is SOARE. That's a little-used word for a young hawk.)

In fundraising, it's similar. A body of proven techniques that are more likely to work than random guesses or hunches you might have. Things like specific calls to action, storytelling, longer messages, connecting with the donor's values and identity.

The next step is even more important in both Wordle and fundraising. Whether you did well or not, you now know some things that work and some other things that don't work. If you pay attention, you'll arrive at success pretty quickly.

If you keep guessing based on your hunches instead of the knowledge in front of you, things will not go well.

If you avoid words you dislike (MOIST?) you may force yourself to lose at Wordle. You have to apply logic to have a chance at winning. Same with fundraising; what works is quite possibly something that rubs you the wrong way. In fact, things that annoy you have a slightly better chance of working than not; that's just something veterans have noticed through the decades.

Wordle will eventually fade and stop filling our feeds with people's scores. (Hooray!)

Fundraising will keep going.

So keep learning!

Here's to ending the year on the right note

They worked so hard. Everyone was at their best, well-practiced and in sync. Everyone had gone well, really well, and now the big finish was upon them. Everyone was soaring...

And then, one tiny thing went ever-so-slightly wrong:

(Or view hear on YouTube.)

Here's my wish that this doesn't happen to your organization as 2021 comes to a close.

And, if it does, I hope you recover as well as this group did!

Happy New Year!

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.

Fundraising laws concerning the late-pandemic era

Brooks' Fundraising Law Concerning Post-Pandemic Blame Shifting:

Organizations that cancelled fundraising during the pandemic because they believed it would anger donors are the organizations most likely to believe that donors will not respond to fundraising now because there is no crisis to spur them on.

More Laws of Fundraising

The hidden fundraising laws about donor fatigue

You've heard about "donor fatigue." It's a theoretical state where donors tire of hearing about some specific topic -- sometimes philanthropy in general -- and they become unresponsive.

There's a pair of Brooks' Laws that help clarify the realities of "donor fatigue":

Donor Fatigue Law #1: A Priori

Anyone who cites "donor fatigue" as a reason not to try to raise funds really means "I'm fatigued."

We get tired of deploying similar messages repeatedly. It really is fatiguing, and many of us seek ways to relieve the strain.

Cancelling fundraising because of donor fatigue has the obvious advantage of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lack of funds raised because you didn't try to raise funds "proves" the assertion that donors are unresponsive.

Donor responsiveness to anything can rise or fall. Repeating a relevant message is not one of the factors that causes that. Even though it gets really boring.

The other time "donor fatigue" is often cited is after a project has done poorly, which leads us to ...

Donor Fatigue Law #2: Ex Post Facto Law

Anyone who cites "donor fatigue" as a reason a fundraising project failed really means "I'm incompetent."

This is another way for fundraisers to save face and turn lemons into lemonade.

"The campaign failed not because we did a poor job, but because of donor fatigue." Unprovable, but believable. A brilliant career booster for the ineffective fundraiser.

More Laws of Fundraising

Stupid ads tell donors not to give

I have arthritis. It sucks. But it could be a lot worse.

Not too long ago, someone who had my type of arthritis for as long as I've had it would not be able to type, walk, play a musical instrument, or many other activities. Thanks to treatment, I can do those things.

I'm deeply grateful to the researchers and medical professionals who make a reasonable life possible for me and many others -- and to the nonprofits that have been supporting that work for so many years. Organizations like Arthritis Society of Canada.

So it pains me (in a distinctly non-arthritic way) to see Stupid visited on a good organization like this. It seems to be an outdoor display ad campaign -- Warning, Will Robinson! Danger! Outdoor display ads have not been effective at fundraising for a long time -- and here's one of them:

There are several other similar ads, urging us not to donate to arthritis, but to "give Cristy a pain-free future" or "Brian the ability to play with his son."

It's a strikingly common go-to approach for Brand Experts working on nonprofits to make the message what we don't do or, in this case, what you shouldn't do.

Why do they go there so often? Have they seen it work? Ever? Anywhere in advertising, marketing, or anywhere else?

What's interesting about this is that it's actually good advice -- for arthritis fundraisers. We should always remember that people donate to help people. But it's a silly thing to say to people you're hoping will make donations.

If you want to read the oddball, bloviating reasoning behind the campaign, you can find it here: Arthritis Society 'turns away' would-be donors in new campaign. Their main point is this:

This campaign shifts people's focus from an abstract idea like 'arthritis' to the tangible impact they can have on the lives of real Canadians ... who face this relentless, devastating disease every day.

Except that it doesn't do that. It stays resolutely abstract. The nearest thing they have to a concrete idea in the ad is the word arthritis. Showing photos of people that don't tell a story about arthritis makes an interesting point. But it's not a call to action.

Here's the takeaway: You motivate people to donate by showing them how their values align with your cause and giving them action to take that makes the world better in a way they care about. If you're giving people a mind puzzle that they have to figure out, you are not raising funds

That's navel-gazing. And stupid nonprofit advertising.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

Tricks and treats for online fundraisers

Online fundraising is a lot like Halloween: Part fun, part scary. It has plenty of tricks and plenty of treats to keep you on your toes.

Online fundraising "tricks"

• It's a "cold" medium. The way people read email is different from traditional media. It's fast, action-oriented, impatient. Not good for emotion and compassion -- the basic ingredients of charitable giving. That explains the response/conversion rates -- numbers that would sink the entire endeavor if it weren't for the low cost.
• The donors who really want you can (maybe) find you. The fanatics who really should be on your list can now Google you. They still might not find you, but you can improve your chances with good SEO.
• The donors are younger. (This is also treat; see below.) Younger donors have low retention rates. That shows up in the comparatively poor retention of online donors.
• It's crowded. If you thought the mailbox was bad, with its dozens of competitors every day -- think about the inbox: Someone who's a habitual online donor probably gets a hundred or more emails per day from nonprofits that have something to say.
• It's cheap -- so cheap, you can afford to be stupid. And being stupid is expensive, no matter how little it costs in the first place.

Online fundraising "treats"

• The donors are younger. Younger donors give higher average gifts, and if you can keep them, they'll stay around longer. The trick: define your target younger audience as those between 45 and 65.
  
• Average gifts are high.
• It's two-way. Donors can actually interact with you. That's a foundation for a meaningful relationship.
• It's multimedia. Do you have a cause that's hard to capture with words? Online, you can show pictures, videos, live cams -- whatever it is that makes the case.
• It's cheap. No spiraling postage, paper, printing costs. That makes a lot of things possible. It also lowers the risk of innovation.

(This post first appeared on October 31, 2013.)

Fundraising Laws concerning co-workers

Maybe you remember the Boss Corollary to Brooks' First Law of Fundraising Effectiveness:

The more your boss hates the fundraising, the better it will do.

That inverse relationship between fundraising effectiveness and boss-love also applies to colleagues are not the boss. Which leads to these corollaries to the First Law:

Corollary #1

There is no fundraising project so brilliant that it can't be completely destroyed by an accountant.

Corollary #2

Or by a lawyer.

Predator Awareness Side Note to Corollaries #1 and #2

While you sleep or eat, the accountants and/or lawyers are actively hunting for successful fundraising projects to destroy.

Corollary #3

If your program people like your fundraising, it will fail.

Corollary #4

The most successful fundraising campaign you create will cause an emergency meeting of the board about what they should do to keep it from ever happening again.

The truth is, successful fundraising is so squarely aimed at donors that it is virtually guaranteed to miss people who are not donors, especially insiders. But also non-insiders who are not donors. Which brings up Corollary #5 (which is also a corollary to the Fifth Law of Fundraising:

The most devastating and articulate complaints from the public about your fundraising will come from people who have never donated, and never would donate no matter what you do.

Fundraising that works is for and about donors.

More Laws of Fundraising

This poster will guide you to successful fundraising

If you are of a certain age and took piano lessons as a kid, you might remember a book called Music Play for Every Day. It was first published in 1928, but was still in use in my childhood, some decades (ahem) later. (And you can still buy it used on Amazon!)

And if you ever saw this book, the most memorable part was an illustration titled THE ROAD TO THE CLASSICS. You can see it here.

I don't know if it helped many young piano students to reach the Temple of the Classics, but it sure was memorable. Especially the must-avoid "Swamp of Jazz" that was one of the obstacles to avoid.

I think we can use something like this, our own ROAD TO SUCCESSFUL FUNDRAISING.

Download. Print. Learn.

And find your way to the Temple of Successful Fundraising.

Laws of Fundraising regarding donor complaints

Donor complaints rule the lives of many fundraisers, a fact that is captured by the 5th Law of Fundraising:

Donor complaints are a stronger force than anything described in physics or quantum mechanics.

But that's not all. Here's the 1st Addendum to the 5th Law:

Imagined donor complaints are an even stronger force than that.

You have probably seen this force at work: Three donors calling to complain about something in your fundraising will outweigh the hundreds or thousands of donors who responded to that same thing. Angry comments about a particular photo, or a shade of red, or the decorations on a sheet of mailing labels can send some fundraisers into a tizzy of self-recrimination and a lifetime ban against those things, even if they were proven to be effective.

But even more powerful: When someone says, We can't do that; donors will complain! It doesn't matter if anyone might complain or not. The possibility can cause sweeping and often destructive decisions about fundraising.

This is captured by the Einsteinian Quantification of the 5th Law:

D > LTVc²

That is, the Damage caused by a donor's complaint is greater than that donor's projected lifetime value, times the speed of light, squared. (Many fundraising scientists think the Einsteinian Quantification is too optimistic.)

One of the notable feature of the 5th Law is which donors complain. They are frequently not your best donors. As described by the 1st Corollary to the 5th Law:

The likelihood that a donor will complain is inversely proportional to the donor's monetary value.

In other words, complaints most often come from low-dollar donors, deeply lapsed donors, and even non-donors.

Likewise, what donors complain about is not random. The 2nd Corollary to the 5th Law states:

The number and intensity of donor complaints is directly proportional to the effectiveness of the fundraising campaign they are about.

That is, donors rarely complain about minor and unimportant fundraising initiative. They go after the large and important ones.

Here are two additional useful corollaries to the 5th Law about the complaining donors themselves:

If there's a donor who hates everything about your fundraising and constantly complains about it ... that person is your board president's best friend.

If you make a really terrible errors in fundraising -- especially in direct mail -- it will most likely affect cranky donors who are already annoyed with you.

More Laws of Fundraising here.