How to Project Manage Your Nonprofit Story
Thank you to Jeff Brooks’ wonderful post in Future Fundraising Now and Tom Ahern of The Domain Formula for donor newsletters for some great hints on how to raise money with nonprofit newsletters. Confession: this is all them; I’m just sharing. It’s a great roadmap. And *SMIT (Single Most Important Thing I have to tell you) comes from Tom. One caveat: All maps are just guides. You must test this for yourself. SMIT. And you must keep testing. As it is said: Past performance is no guarantee of future results!
How to raise money with newsletters
Tom Ahern provides this lesson:
In the 1990s, a Seattle fundraising shop called the Domain Group took the donor newsletter and began testing to see if they could come up with something better. Domain eventually developed a formula that made a donor newsletter HIGHLY worth doing: some Domain clients began raking in more gifts through their newsletters than through their direct mail appeals.
How could a newsletter make more money than an appeal?
A newsletter isn’t an ask. Appeals make the ask.
Answer: A newsletter might well be more welcome than an appeal. It can bring joy. It can bring fun. It can flatter the reader shamelessly; in all sorts of ways (deeply recommended).Whereas a direct mail appeal almost always seems like “duty calling” … not to mention an intrusion, with the intention of relieving one’s wallet of its burdens. Tom learned these things from the Domain Formula:
- Page count: no more than 4 pages (in tests, adding more pages did not produce more revenue)
- Article length: short
- Write for skimmers (i.e., requires professional quality headlines)
- Send in a #10 envelope, not as a self-mailer
- Include a separate reply device
- Don’t get distracted: be fully donor-committed. Send only to your donors. You have to talk to a single target audience
- Make the voice personal (the word “you” dominates) rather than institutional; get intimate
- Focus on “accomplishment reporting” (tell donors how much they have changed the world through their gifts)
Jeff Brooks provides additional insights based on the test of time:
- Page count: newsletters of fewer than four pages have not done well. Cheaper, but the loss in revenue more than undercuts the production savings.
- Full color: When tested against two colors, four-color newsletters usually at least pay for themselves — though not always. (Back in the 90s, 4-color was not worthwhile; in fact, it often depressed response.) Full color seems to have the most positive impact for larger national organizations. It’s worth testing, but not an automatic winner for everyone.
- A reply device printed in the newsletter usually gives a meaningful boost to response. Organizations get very few of these printed reply devices back, but they seem to have the function of driving more people to the separate RD that’s in the envelope.
- Best teaser: “Newsletter enclosed.”
- Newsletters are not equally effective for all organizations. They work better for local orgs than national ones. They generally work better for religious orgs than non-religious.
Are you SMITten? What’s your SMIT when it comes to nonprofit newsletters? What is it that you want your readers to do/feel as a result of receiving your newsletter? Have you experimented at all with applying these tips to online newsletters? Do you think the same tips would apply? Please share!
3 Comments
Thanks for the insights. This is especially valuable because I am currently developing an online newsletter for an agency. Any additional thoughts or comments for using online channels? Are there best practice models available for online newsletters?
Online newsletters are a different animal. The only research of which I'm aware comes from Penelope Burk who has studied this across the U.S. and Canada. She found donors preferred news that was relevant to their particular interests (and argument for segmenting your list according to interest information you may have stored in your database; the company Papilia also has an online newsletter template that enables you to serve up different versions of your online newsletter to different constituency segments). The other thing Burk found was that folks would prefer to only receive 'news' when it was newsworthy. Content was more important than regularity. Of course, as with all studies, even if a majority of folks feel one way there can still be a substantial number who feel another way. So it's important to test for yourself. My SMIT on this is: Develop a content strategy. Know what you want to include in your enews, and stick to the plan. Collect and curate content that fits into your plan. Good luck!
Thought I'd add some insights from some of my readers:
(1)There's generally a normal division in a nonprofit donor base into two groups: the people who want to follow you live, and the people who just want periodic updates.Most donors are not trendy 20-somethings; they want some kind of formal regular update rather than (or at least in addition to) a series of Facebook posts that they have to follow day after day. One solution is a well-designed blog as a foundation for all communications; then use the newsletter as mostly a digest of the blog rather than a separate project. E-mail newsletters are often better in this respect than direct mail (video e-mail can add a valuable extra dimension; for example, a 30-second intro from the ED contextualizing the newsletter). Bottom line: a newsletter should imitate social media in the sense of putting the information people want where and how they want it–not trying to get them to read or do something that doesn't interest them. Don't make them read every blog post; simply allow them to click on 'read more' for the areas that are of most interest to them. (special thanks to Brian Brown of @narratoronline. Follow him on Twitter!).