BOO!
Tomorrow is Halloween, so I’ve got some really scary stuff for you!
Don’t get too spooked. There are also a few treats.
Eight delicious goodies, in fact.
In the form of “to-do’s.”
But first… the bad news.
No bones about it, you’re scaring folks away if you’re committing any of these boo-boos!
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We use them to understand our world.
But do the same stories work in any time? For any person? No.
You need to understand your SMIT story – ‘Single Most Important Thing’ – at this moment in time.
And that SMIT will change, depending on the environment in which you’re operating.
You need to know your audience. Today. The story you told last year may not work as well this year.
Relevancy and urgency are the key to emotional appeals.
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To be a donor-centered fundraising expert, you must:
(1) Know what donors love, and
(2) Offer these lovable things to them.
There are three things I’ve found donors love when it comes to making donations.
Got it?
It’s that simple; yet very few organizations successfully offer these things to their donors. Instead, they fail their supporters by doing one or more of the following (take a look at your current appeal and see if you may be guilty of any of these sins):
This is all wrong!
Today I’m here to tell you what works. I’ve not only found these four things to be true anecdotally, based on personal experience with a range of different charities, but there’s also research to back this up.
Ready to learn the four secrets that will dramatically ramp up your fundraising this year?
Let’s pretend you and your donor are not connecting meaningfully right now. You’re not sure why. Could it be they feel financially insecure… they’re worried for their kids… they’ve been let down by politicians… they’re just feeling cynical and/or hopeless? For whatever reason, things aren’t singing between you and them. They haven’t renewed. They haven’t upgraded. They haven’t responded to any of your outreach. They seem to have other priorities.
So, you decide to go to counseling to reinvigorate the relationship. The therapist makes a wise observation: Sometimes in life, one partner feels strong; the other less strong. In such times, the stronger partner has resources to support the weaker partner. Other times, neither partner feels they have coping resources. During these times, we have to depend more on ourselves, be patient, and accept that our partner is not currently in a strong position – even though we really need their support.
Are you being a support for your donor? Are you helping, not selling all the time? Are you being patient, yet persistently showing you care?
We’re in turbulent times.. Giving has surged overall during the pandemic, but there are fewer individual givers. Some industries, like education, are losing support. As are many smaller charities not involved in addressing hot-button topics. And prior to the pandemic studies showed giving to be sluggish. Donors are less loyal. Donors may be distracted by emergencies. Or so-called rage giving. Or simply uncertainty about what lies ahead. So they’re giving less consistently. As a result, donor centered fundraising has never been as important as it is now.
People are feeling a need to be nurtured. In other words: Ask not what your donors can do for you, but what you can do for your donors. Recognize they don’t serve you; you serve them. They don’t owe you; you owe them. Your job is to help them experience the joy of giving. It is through you they will achieve their most meaningful work.
Embrace the true meaning of philanthropy as love of humankind. Remember your donors are humankind; you must love them if you want to be a part of philanthropy. Otherwise, you’re just transacting business.
So… what can you do to embrace the love and thereby keep your donors close?
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There are lots of aspects to a donor’s identity; not all are equally important to them.
Well, duh, you may say.
But this matters more than you may know. Because if you don’t really understand the difference between identity and identification you may be wasting a lot of time heading in the wrong directions.
Let me explain further.
If you loosely segment donors by aspects of their identity that are relatively meaningless as far as they’re concerned, you won’t improve your fundraising results. You’ll certainly be busy doing all this segmentation – and you’ll be able to report back to your boss on all the great, ‘scientific’ work you did – but it will end up being a lot of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
Perhaps you’re an organization that develops personas or avatars for your constituents. This is something marketers do to know who they’re selling to, and what that person may value. Sell sweaters? It helps to know if you’re creating messaging for “Chilly Charlie” (who wants warm sweaters), “Stylin’ Stella” (who wants fashionable, trency sweaters), or “Frugal Freda” (who wants discount priced sweaters).
So too it helps when you write to ‘Suzy Soccer Mom’ vs. ‘Funky Grandpa.’ You assume they’re interested in different things, and they generally are. So you tailor your appeal differently to different target market segments.
But wait…
Ask yourself if the way you’re segmenting your donors is too generic. As helpful as it is to group prospective supporters by persona, it’s important not to go overboard with this strategy.
Why? Because it’s non-specific and based on the most obvious common denominator. If you don’t drill down a bit, you may miss the forest for the trees.
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“Philanthropic culture is a key driver of fundraising performance.”
— Adrian Sargent, Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy
Is a culture of philanthropy just something that’s ‘nice’ to have? Does it simply make people feel good? Or might it actually affect your bottom line – making it ‘necessary?’
I know I’ve worked with organizations who looked at the notion of developing a philanthropy culture a bit like doing staff morale building or sensitivity training. It certainly sounds good, and who can argue with reports from pioneering organizations like the Walter and Evelyn Haas Jr. Fund (see Underdeveloped, Beyond Fundraising: What Does it Mean to Build a Culture of Philanthropy, and Fundraising Bright Spots) and Sea Change Strategies (see Inside-Out Fundraising) that embracing a culture of philanthropy (COP) will bring all sorts of benefits, including recruitment and retention of talent, stronger development plans and infrastructure, a better understanding of the board role in fundraising and a shared understanding of the importance of fundraising across functional siloes.
“As a sector, we need to elevate the importance of fund development as a leadership issue, invest in a stronger talent pool, and strengthen the ability of nonprofits to develop the systems that enable fundraising success.”
— Jeanne Bell, CEO of CompassPoint, co-author of Underdeveloped
“Generally, a culture of philanthropy is one in which everyone—board, staff and CEO—has a part to play in raising resources for the organization. It’s about relationships, not just money. It’s as much about keeping donors as acquiring new ones and seeing them as having more than just money to bring to the table. And it’s a culture in which fund development is a valued and mission aligned component of everything the organization does.”
— Cynthia Gibson, author, Beyond Fundraising
“Without tackling internal issues head-on, we believe the prospects for major fundraising progress are limited. In most organizations, fundraising is limited more by organizational culture and structure than by lack of strategic or tactical know-how.”
— Alia McKee and Mark Rovner, Founders, Sea Change Strategies
Despite the impressive research that’s been done showing the value of a philanthropic culture, too many nonprofits have simply assumed they had one by virtue of merely existing within the social benefit sector. Or even if they understood achieving a true COP took work, they just never moved this from the back burner to the front.
“Many charities are so wrapped up in the process of doing – delivering, raising income, adapting to the panoply of changing circumstances that can radically alter day to day activity – that establishing a truly philanthropic culture might not be high on the list of priorities.”
— Adrian Sargent, Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy
“Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
— David Ogilvy, advertising legend
Your email subject line matters. A lot.
So this article is all about learning how to rock your online ‘envelope’ – which is really what determines if your email will get opened.
When you stop to think about this, it makes a lot of sense. Your email subject line has a function! And its form should follow that function.
People’s inboxes are increasingly cluttered, so you need to stand out. Big time! Really, you’ve probably got no more than two seconds to make an impression.
Do you think carefully about purpose when you create your email subject line? Do you even craft it at all, or do you delegate this essential function to someone else, perhaps an assistant or someone in your marketing or digital communications department? Someone who perhaps doesn’t really understand the email’s primary purpose as well as do you?
If you’re like most nonprofit fundraisers and marketers, you likely spend a lot of time crafting the perfect email body copy, selecting images and figuring out just the right design that will entice someone to respond to your call to action. Then, at the last minute, you’re ready to send it and hastily come up with a subject line.
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People are wired for stories