Oct142024

6 Strategies to Convey Your Most Emotional Fundraising Appeal Story

2020-10-11 14.40.58People are wired for stories.

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. And here is why:

(1). The story must be relevant to the donor – which will depend on what is top of mind for them (hint: pay attention to the news).

(2). The need to give the story a happy ending must feel urgent (hint: pay attention to the news).

Whatever your mission, relevancy and urgency are the key to emotional appeals.

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Sep302024
Happy donors

5 Strategies to Get and Keep More Donors for Your Nonprofit

Happy donorsPeople are unpredictable sometimes. They’re also predictable.

If you see someone yawn, you’re likely to yawn too.

If I tell you seats are limited, you’re likely to purchase a ticket now rather than later.

What if you knew getting people to donate to your nonprofit could be a predictable consequence of something you did?

It turns out you can encourage people to act in desirable ways, simply by applying a few lessons learned from neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics. The truth is scientists have learned quite a lot over the past few decades. It’s up to us to put that learning to good use!

Alas, as Daniel Pink, author of To Sell Is Human, has noted: “There’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.” This applies to social sector businesses too!

That’s right. Pink explains the most successful for-profit businesses use what science knows to “convert leads to customers.”  The secret to more sales is knowing what the customer wants. Your non-profit might convert prospects into donors, and donors into repeat donors, using the very same principle.

The secret to closing more gifts is knowing what the donor wants.

Today I’d like to consider five specific strategies that will help you ethically take advantage of some of the psychology underlying human behavior. Once you understand these principles, you can begin to strategically apply them to your integrated development (marketing and fundraising) strategy. If you’re nervous about this, you can test what you did before against a new strategy informed by science. Break your mailing list randomly in half, send an “A” and a “B” version of your appeal, and see which performs best.

Ready for 5 science-informed strategies?

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