There’s a lot of potential legacy giving out there in the universe. Per Giving USA, giving by bequest was an estimated $41.19 billion in 2020, and grew 10.3% from 2019 (an increase of 9.0%, adjusted for inflation). What are you doing to assure some of it will flow to your cause? First you have to identify…
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For this year’s appeal, are you shooting from the hip?
Going from your gut?
Simply repeating what was done last year?
That may or may not be a good idea. It’s a little risky to take a stab in the dark. Or throw spaghetti against the wall.
It might stick, and draw your donors in, but…
What if there was a more scientific approach?
There is!
In my last article I shared five strategies informed by neuroscience, psychology and behavioral science research to help you be more strategic with your messaging to donors.
Today I’d like to add five more. Don’t worry you’re being manipulative. There are ethical ways to apply these principles. In fact, using them likely will help bring donors more joy, meaning and purpose than if you just threw pasta at them!
Ready for some ideas that might not be intuitive?
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People 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 donating 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.
Scientists have learned a lot over the past few decades. It’s up to us to put that learning to good use.
As Daniel Pink, author of To Sell Is Human, has noted: “There’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.”
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 the science-informed strategies?
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You’ve still got time to sprinkle a little magic into your year-end fundraising!
Consider each of these seven words a magic potion unto themselves.
The more of these words you use, the more powerful a spell your appeal will cast.
Each of these packs a bigger persuasive punch than you might imagine.
Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
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I know you’re working on calendar year-end fundraising right now.
And if you’re not, start immediately!
Per Mobile Cause:
Before it’s too late, I want to share with you four almost magic strategies that have worked well for me for decades!
Yes, there are ways to tweak these strategies to conform to the current zeitgeist and recognize we live in a digitally revolutionized world. This can be super helpful, and I highly recommend you pay attention to the ways fundraising and nonprofit marketing are evolving. It means new skills are needed, more money must be invested to yield your most positive returns, and you’re no longer going to be able to rest on your laurels.
That being said, I don’t want you to get so caught up in bells and whistles you neglect the fundamentals. Nor do I want you to throw up your hands in despair, culminating in a decision that you just can’t compete or do a better job because… (fill in the blank).
No excuses!
The magic strategies below have worked for me, and countless nonprofits, over generations. They’ll work for you too.
Truly, I promise if you do these things you’ll raise more money this year.
Ready to get started?
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Fundraising is too often seen, at best, as a ‘necessary evil.’
When viewed this way, folks – staff and volunteers alike – understandably prefer not to touch it with a 10-foot pole. Who wants to place themselves on the side of ‘evil?’
Yipes stripes!
But that’s not what fundraising is at all.
The tagline for my business, Clairification, is “philanthropy, not fundraising.” I often talk to folks about how the word philanthropy comes from the Greek and translates into “love of humankind.” Nothing evil about that!
In fact, if you ask folks to throw out the first word that comes to mind when you say ‘fundraising,’ and then ask them to do the same when you say ‘philanthropy,’ you’ll see it breaks down pretty neatly between good and evil.
If you’re coming at fundraising from the perspective of ‘necessary evil’ or ‘no pain, no gain,’ you’re never going to be effective. Especially when it comes to asking individuals, one-to-one, for passionate gifts.
As long as you hate it, donors will be able to tell you hate it. I call this wallowing in the pain. Never a good approach. Distaste for asking begets distaste for giving. It’s done grudgingly, not passionately.
When donors can sense you’d rather be doing anything else than asking them for a gift, guess what happens? They follow your lead! In other words, they feel they’d rather be doing anything else than making a gift.
But there’s more to reframing fundraising so it’s seen as a really, truly good thing.
I like to reframe it thusly:
If you’re fortunate enough to be a successful nonprofit, this means you’re helping solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
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The Unfair Exchange Bernadette Jiwa, The Story of Telling.
That will be eight dollars,’ the woman, who is carefully weighing and wrapping two serves of freshly made fettuccine for us to take home, says.
As my husband is about to hand her the cash, she takes another handful of the pasta from behind the glass and adds it to our package.
She doesn’t announce that she’s giving us twenty per cent extra for free.
She doesn’t even invite us to notice the gesture at all.
It’s enough for her that she knows she has added value.We think of value as a hard metric—the anticipated fair exchange of this for that.
But value can be a surprising, generous, unfair exchange.
Something that is given because we can, not because we must.
Ah… value.
Wow, wow, WOW!
This is what all fundraising, fundamentally, is about.
Yet one side of the exchange is a hard metric: The donor’s cold, hard cash.
While the other side of the exchange is something decidedly less tangible: Freely given gratitude from you and your organization.
Or at least that’s how it should work.
What does your donor love and loyalty plan look like?
Do you even have such a plan?
If the only reason you acknowledge donations is because you feel you ‘must,’ it’s likely your donors aren’t walking away from the encounter feeling much more than matter-of-fact. The transactional receipts many organizations send out are registered by the donors as “Ho, hum. Guess I’ll go file this with my tax receipts.”
This kind of exchange is fair, sure.
But it’s not generous.
WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE TO GIVE?
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People are more generous when they feel more connected.
Like members of your community. Or, if you will, your family.
This isn’t just an opinion;
In fact, it’s documented in a study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The study found people have three basic psychological needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy.
Today I want to examine relatedness and autonomy as they connect to success in fundraising.
Relatedness is particularly important for promoting pro-social behavior. Like philanthropy. The study found certain words — community, together, connected, and relationship — invoked feelings of relatedness.
Sharing feelings of relatedness also promotes pro-social behavior. This is why asking donors to share their own stories about why they volunteer, give or help in any other way is an effective fundraising strategy. Likewise, when you share with donors how you feel related to them this will make them feel good about how they’re affiliating with you.
Here are strategies to engender feelings of being part of a family or community:
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Most fear of fundraising boils down to two factors:
(1) fear of rejection, and
(2) fear of looking stupid due to insufficient knowledge/skills.
It turns out these fears are relatively easy to overcome. But it requires some serious reframing. A move away from begging and towards offering a gift of opportunity. The opportunity to feel joy, meaning and purpose.
The hard part is overcoming our deep-rooted psychological aversion to talking about money.
Most of us were raised to believe this is impolite. We’d rather talk about anything else.
In fact, many scholars argue money is the number one social taboo in America (see also Krueger, The Last Taboo). Even religion, sex and politics are better discussion topics as far as most of us are concerned. Where money is concerned, we tend to come from a place of “no.”
Here’s what I mean: Say the word “fundraising” and look at people’s faces. Their mouths will pucker up in a grimace. Their eyes will squinch closed as if in pain. Their brows will furrow. I recently tried this with a board of directors, asking them each to give me the first word they thought of when they thought of fundraising. Here are the (all) negatives:
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Probably not as much as you might think.
Yet people tell me all the time how much they’re afraid to ask wealthy people for major gifts. If you share those fears, it’s time for a little “Charity Clairity:”
Contrary to what your gut may be telling you, NOT asking is not making would-be donors feel good. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In this article, I’ll cover why you must stop short-changing your would-be major donors by not offering them opportunities to be the change they want to see in the world. Why you must stop robbing them of chances to feel good about themselves.
And we’ll explore how you can use six major donor triggers to make donors feel so good they’ll want to say “yes” to your solicitation.
Bottom line: When you don’t make donors feel good, they’ll go elsewhere.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is famously supposed to have told Ernest Hemingway that “the rich are different than you and I.” “Yes, Scott,” Hemingway supposedly retorted. “They have more money.”
It’s good to remember that major donors are, first and foremost, just people.
Many of them actually don’t even feel “wealthy” (just as often so-called seniors don’t feel “old.”) In fact, a survey of 4,000 investors by UBS found that 70% of people with investible assets of $1 million or more do NOT consider themselves “wealthy.”
What most donors share (no matter their net worth) is
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