Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Category: fundraising

  • This phony best practice for subject lines has to go

    You’re creating an e-appeal, and suddenly you’re staring up at the north face of the 70,000-ft mountain you must climb. You have to write the subject line.

    It has to stand out in the inbox, intrigue your donors, motivate them to act, and move them to click, but despite everything the subject line has to do, most self-appointed experts are unmovable on one thing: it has to be short, short, short.

    “Keep it under three words,” they say. “Under two? Even better!”

    But according to a study in which 12 billion — yes, billion — subject lines were analyzed, there’s no correlation between subject line length and open rates. Short subject line of, say, 12 characters, didn’t command people to click, but then again, longer subject lines of 150 characters didn’t repel people either. Subject-line length just didn’t matter.

    So, how about this — let’s stop creating rules that are irrelevant to actual practice and restricting ourselves and hamstringing our appeals in the process.

    We’re communicating with donors. So depending on a myriad of factors — everything from the offer to the nonprofit itself to donor psychology — there are times when a short subject line like “hey,” from the famous Obama email campaign, will work like gangbusters. And there are times when a long subject line like, “Fight killer diseases with your gift multiplying 50 times,” will get clicks like crazy. There is no empirically researched and optimized length for subject lines.

    And that’s good. We should embrace the ambiguity and enjoy the process of connecting at a human level with donors. Because otherwise, fundraising would be all science and no art. And that would be no fun.

  • 3 social proof techniques that signal donors to give more

    It can be tricky to upgrade donors, but the truth is that most donors would probably give more if they’re asked with social proof.

    According to research, if donor’s think their gifts are lower than those of others, they’ll tend to give more. There’s a conformity effect at work.

    In addition, donors want to feel that they’re giving their fair share. So if they think they might be doing less than that, then social proof can influence their gift amount.

    What’s more, donors assume that a charity asking for and getting larger donations is a higher-quality organization, much like a bigger price tag on a TV says “better.”

    With this donor psychology in mind, how can we build support with social proof? In one study, researchers told donors calling into a public radio station fund drive that the previous donor had just given a gift of a certain amount, and then researchers asked the caller for his or her gift.

    When the amount of the previous gift mentioned was at or above the average gift, donors tended to give more. And when that amount was among the highest donations received, donors tended to give still more. Social proof was at work.

    We can use this learning and adapt it for the copy in our appeals. Here are three easy things to try.

    1. In the body copy, you can include a simple line like, “Many of our supporters are giving $XX3,” right before the ask. Of course the $XX3 amount would be one of the higher amounts in the string relevant to that donor – a gift upgrade. As in the public radio fundraiser, this simple line of copy can provide the social proof that signals what the appropriate gift amount is.
    2. To reinforce this approach, you can add a circle around that same dollar value in the gift string on the response device, with wording like, “many donors give this amount.” This technique alone often increases average gift, but when combined with the line of copy described above, it can be even more effective.
    3. Since social proof tends to work best when the right action to take is unclear, you can try increasing the number of gift handles. Instead of the usual three or four, the gift string can be increased to eight or ten gift handles, presenting donors with a broader array of choices, while of course highlighting the preferred amount .

    These three techniques are subtle and simple ways to incorporate social proof. They’re easy to do and just might produce a bump in average gift. Why not test it in your next appeal?

     

     

  • How to Use Verbal Images in Fundraising Copy

    When it comes to engaging your donors, you can’t just tell. You have to show. And you do it with verbal images. See my article in Fundraising Success magazine: 7 Ways to Use Verbal Images to Pull Donors into Your Appeal. http://www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com/article/7-ways-use-verbal-images-pull-donors-into-your-fundraising-appeal/1

    A verbal image is a succinct, sharply focused word picture that readers will immediately get. It’s concise, clear, and concrete, letting donors see exactly how their support will make a difference.

    You can use verbal images to:

    1. Present the need.
    2. Convey the leverage in your offer.
    3. Show donor involvement.
    4. Put the donor’s gift into action.
    5. Highlight your donor’s impact.
    6. Convey your nonprofit’s work.
    7. Show donors how and why to give.

    Take a look at the entire article at http://www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com/article/7-ways-use-verbal-images-pull-donors-into-your-fundraising-appeal/1.

  • What you need to know about GiveDirectly

    Attention executive directors! Are you stressing about overhead costs? Staying up nights wondering how to prove the impact of your programs? Tying yourself into knots over infrastructure?

    Worry no more! Now you can forget infrastructure, forget staff, forget people in the field. In fact, forget programs and services. Because now you can help people just by giving them money.

    That’s right, you just raise the money and then hand it over to the people who need it. Suddenly the headaches of running an organization are gone. Just give away money!

    Okay, enough sarcasm. You’ve probably heard about Giving Directly, the charity that gives money to people in need. It’s been a media darling lately.

    And it is a good idea … as far as it goes.

    GiveDirectly is something akin to Kiva, the microfinance charity. Kiva works because donors like thinking that they can change the world — or at least one person’s world — for a $25 gift that provides, say, a couple of chickens to a poor family. This is simple, direct, help-the-poor-help-themselves charity work. All good.

    GiveDirectly is an even more stripped-down version. They give money to people in need and let them decide how to use it. There’s no infrastructure and virtually no staff. There aren’t even any programs. This is simpler and more direct than microfinance, with the added appeal of trusting people to know best what they themselves need.

    But hold on a minute.

    Let’s say money starts going to individuals in a Kenyan village. One buys a cow. One a motorbike taxi. Another a roof for his hut. And so on. Now what? Who’s seeing the big picture? Who’s doing the planning? Who’s creating the path to sustainable economic development? Who’s seeing that charity and government are working together to create the rising tide to lift all boats?

    Giving someone the money to buy something that helps them personally may be part of the solution, but it’s not the whole solution. You can’t build a burgeoning economy and social instutions on one-cow dairy farms.

    Some in the media are suggesting that GiveDirectly is a radical new model that will change how charities operate. Radical? Yes. Interesting? Sure. Worthwhile? Absolutely. A total game-changer? Uh-uh.

  • Another cross-channel strategy to (maybe) add to the list

    A lot of donor activity these days is cross-channel. A typical cross-channel matchup is direct mail and website. Another is direct mail and email. Now we can add one more to the list — TV and twitter.

    Well, maybe. This is very new — actually still in beta — and as you’ll see, it ideally does involve a third channel as well. Twitter is testing a service that brings TV viewers and Twitter users together in an interactive way. This is no small thing, since about 32 million people in the U.S. tweet about the programs they watch. The potential is there.

    This service lets advertisers send targeted tweets to people watching the programs in which the ad has appeared. Of course this blending of TV advertising and Twitter is ideal for packaged goods — products like chewing gum and shampoo. You can just see American Idol viewers being thrilled to receive a tweet with an offer for Dentyne after watching the commercial about kissable breath.

    But it could work for fundraising too. Let’s say you’re an animal-welfare charity, and you’re running a fundraising spot on TV. With Twitter’s TV ad targeting, you can send tweets to people on Twitter as they watch the program in which your TV spot runs. The tweet reminds viewers about the ad they just saw, reinforces the need to save animals, and offers a link that takes viewers to your website to give.

    Or let’s say you’re a disaster-relief charity. When a major disaster occurs, the news coverage is usually wall-to-wall. You could send tweets about your relief and recovery work (with a link to your donation page) to people on Twitter who are viewing that coverage.

    This is a way to reach out to potential donors with a second medium that they’re already using as they watch TV, and it makes your TV spot suddenly interactive.

    Granted, Twitter isn’t the donor-relationship hotspot that Facebook is right now. But that will likely change as Twitter continues to evolve. Depending on your cause, your offer, and your audience, this Twitter-TV connection might be something to keep an eye on.

     

  • One of the real lessons from Obama fundraising

    By now the fundraising tips to be gleaned from Obama’s 2012 fundraising strategy have been picked over by just about everyone.

    You know — the casual tone in emails, unconventional subject lines like “hey” and “wow,” the low-dollar asks, the testing, and more. That’s all very interesting. But it’s not the good stuff. This is.

    The Obama fundraising team in 2012 segmented their files based on their donors’ interests. They amassed mountains of data from every conceivable source – donors’ zip codes, surveys, event attendance, Facebook, responses given to canvassers, and more. Even better, this data, after it was compiled and analyzed, was made available in one place for the fundraising team. Even better still, the whole endeavor was imperceptible to the donor. So when a donor interested in, say, climate change got an email about green technologies, she simply thought Obama was singing her song. Not a bad way to engage donors, and it obviously worked.

    This was done through a complex data and analytics methodology, of course — something that would be beyond the reach of many nonprofits.

    But let’s blue-sky just for a moment about what it would be like.

    Instead of using tactics to reach Millennials, Baby Boomers, or whatever the next generational cohort is … and instead of approaching donors based on a numerical score indicating when they gave last and how much, we could go a lot deeper. We could engage donors on their own terms on the basis of what moves them personally and what they’re passionate about.

    Let’s say we have a donor, Sally, who decides to attend a walk-a-thon for heart disease.

    Does it really matter whether she’s 20, 30, or 60 years old? Why should her generational label determine how we communicate with her in subsequent appeals? And really, how important is it to know that she gave $10 five weeks ago?

    Wouldn’t it be far more useful to know that Sally took part in this event because her husband has heart disease and she wants to know about research and treatment for arteriosclerosis?

    When Sally starts getting appeals talking about breakthroughs in unclogging arteries  — an interest that goes right to her core — would she see them as an intrusion? Or would those appeals seem intensely relevant, immediate, and significant? You know the answer. When we can directly address donors’ personal interests and values, that’ll be a song they listen to.

  • Profiting from nonprofits?

    You might think that tough-minded, profit-motivated, practical business people wouldn’t have much to learn from a bunch of granola-crunchers working in nonprofits. You’d be wrong. The nonprofit sector is a huge enterprise. Think of The Salvation Army. Think of the Red Cross. They’re multinational organizations with billion-dollar budgets. You don’t get there by being ineffectual.

    So what can we learn from them? Here are three examples.

    1. Find and use stories. Ask just about anyone working in a nonprofit and just about any fundraiser, and they’ll tell you it’s critical to have a collection of stories describing what the nonprofit does. If it’s the APSCA, they have stories about abused animals that have been rescued. If it’s World Relief, they have stories about feeding people in Africa who are starving. Nonprofits are constantly on the lookout for compelling stories that illustrate what they do.

    Why the emphasis on stories? Because nonprofits know that statistics don’t engage people. Facts don’t engage people. Even celebrity endorsements often don’t engage people. But stories do.

    Stories create an immediate emotional bond with donors and encourage them to open their wallets. That’s because a specific story about one person being helped is something that donors can relate to. They can’t relate to 100,000 people suffering from malnutrition – that doesn’t connect. But a story about a person who’s starving to death – that will.

    Think about your product and your customers. Is there a story about how your product solved a tough problem or improved a customer’s life in some way? There has to be. All you have to do is find it, and a good place to start looking is your sales people, since they talk to customers all the time.

    Once you have your story – or better yet, several stories – think about how you can use it … how you can incorporate it into brochures and other marcom materials, press releases, sales presentation, even your 30-second elevator speech.

    2. Rediscover the passion. People in nonprofits look at their jobs differently from people in private-sector businesses. They have a goal – a big goal. Not to get a raise or to increase profits over last quarter (although nonprofit people like raises, and they’re always trying to generate more revenue through fundraising). Their goal is to make the world a better place. And no, that’s not just cockeyed idealism. It’s a way to get their staff focused and fired up.

    A charity like World Relief, for example, is dedicated to protecting vulnerable people around the world who are suffering in poverty and hunger. Everyone on staff – from the administrative assistants to the fundraising staff to the Executive Director – knows that each individual job is contributing to that larger goal. They know what they’re doing and why. And that inspires passion.

    Think about how you can link what your company does to a larger goal and so give people something to be passionate about beyond their next paycheck. It’s not as farfetched as it might seem. Apple doesn’t just make computers. They help people become more creative – a noble goal. Your company has a larger goal too. To find it, just think about all the ways your product or service makes people’s lives better. Not just product features – think big. Go for the big benefit. In fact, go for the biggest.

    3. Ramp up the dedication. People working in nonprofits are often highly dedicated in their work, and a large part of the reason is the big goal mentioned earlier. When people rally around a common purpose, they tend to find their own sense of personal dedication inside themselves. And if it’s a goal they personally believe in, they’ll work harder than they will for any other external reward, including more money.

    Consider a charity like The Salvation Army. The people working there make far less than they would in the private sector, yet they’re overwhelmingly committed to the organization. They love their work. And they love the organization and what it stands for. Because of it, they have a personal stake in what they do, and that’s something no pep talk, motivational speech, or HR initiative could ever accomplish.

    Think about your shared purpose and your big goal. Those are the keys to real dedication. As marketing guru Seth Godin has said again and again, people desperately want to do work that matters. It’s something that workers in nonprofits already know. Make your work matter too.

  • What makes people do what they do?

    They’re inscrutable. Insufferable. Illogical. And unpredictable. What makes people do what they do, react the way they do, buy the things they buy, or make the decisions they make?

    It’s maddening. Just ask anybody in marketing or fundraising, and you’ll hear war stories of counterintuitive results and just plain weird reactions on the part of the people we try to persuade.

    Luckily, there’s hope. As psychologists and cognitive scientists delve deeper into human behavior, we’re learning more. And much of this research is on the web — one example is the site by psychologist Susan Weinstein. It’s an ongoing list of “100 things you should know about people,” with each entry revealing a priceless plum about human behavior.

    One such insight is this — anecdotes persuade more than data. Despite everything that common sense might tell you, when it comes to whether people base their decisions on emotion or reason, it’s not even close. Decision-making is almost entirely emotion based. That’s why stories sell. They evoke empathy, which triggers emotional reactions, which motivate people to act. In fact, in most selling situations — and especially in fundraising — rational arguments will discourage response. Emotion sells because emotion is what informs people’s decisions, regardless of how much they may protest otherwise.

    Here’s another example. Groups are swayed by a dominant personality. Whenever people gather in a group, there’s a subtle jockeying for position that takes place until an unspoken org chart emerges. People subconsciously elect someone to be the leader of the group. And often that leadership role is granted to the person who speaks first.

    Think about the groups you’ve participated in — from your kid’s cub scout meetings, to strategy sessions, to serving on a jury. Isn’t it true that there’s always someone who takes the lead and influences others? And often, that someone isn’t the official, designated leader. Think about what that means for focus groups. Just one dominate personality can skew the results, often canceling the validity of the research and wasting thousands of dollars and countless hours of time.

    And yet another example. The more difficult something is to attain, the more people want it. This is all about exclusivity and scarcity. The nightclub that keeps people waiting to get in, the wildly expensive new restaurant, the hazing that college students go through to get into a fraternity, and on and on. Instead of turning people off, exclusivity and scarcity motivate us all the more. Until …

    Sometimes, the nightclub doesn’t seem to be all that exciting once you’re inside, or the fraternity not all that cool. Now here’s the interesting part. When that happens, instead of admitting they were wrong, most people fall back on their original assessment and convince themselves that the group or activity really is worthwhile after all. They reinforce their original decision.

    So, does that mean making products and services appear more exclusive or scarce will entice customers to want them more and cause them to persuade themselves that they’re good even if the actual performance is less than stellar? Trying to cloak a brand in exclusivity it doesn’t merit would probably be a risky strategy if you know the product is poor. But it does seem that people will overlook faults if a brand has cache. Jaguar remains a status brand despite a dismal record of service and reliability. And not so long ago, Harley Davidson motorcycles were almost falling apart on the road because quality had sunk so low, and their customers got the company logo tattooed on their arms.

    The website is www.whatmakesthemclick.net . Well worth a look.

  • Make your webinar sell — 3 traps to avoid

    It seems as if there are more webinars on offer than ever. Just about every topic in marketing and fundraising is covered, along with just about every other conceivable subject in business or commerce. There are even all-day “conference” webinars, complete with virtual coffee breaks. And perhaps not surprisingly, there are webinars on giving webinars.

    The proliferation is understandable. After all, not much beats a webinar for reaching prospects inexpensively. I’ve been on the receiving end of lots of them, and unfortunately they can often fall short of delivering specific, actionable, useful information. That includes paid webinars as well as free ones. If you’ve attended even some of these events on the webinar circuit, you know it’s true.

    What’s also true is that the presenters don’t want people coming away feeling shortchanged for having spent an hour in their busy day. Certainly the audience doesn’t what that either. So, to the folks out there who are putting webinars together, for the sake of all of us who will be watching and listening, please …

    · Don’t serve up some vague aphorisms about strategy, planning, and benchmarking, and think that it’s information people can use. If we come to a webinar on marketing or fundraising, we want specifics we can put to use right now, today – not the airy, hand-waving, 10,000-foot perspective. We get enough of that in meetings. Give us tips, techniques, how-tos. That’s what we’d expect in an in-person seminar. Why should a webinar be any different?

    · Don’t simply repeat what’s on the slide. It’s the curse of the deadly PowerPoint presentation transferred to our computer screens. If the slide is filled with copy and the webinar presenter is simply going to read what we can see for ourselves on our screens, what do we need a presenter for? No, the wording should be simple bullet-pointed phrases, in most cases. And those phrases should just be thought markers, to provide the presenter with a jumping off point for expanding on the ideas presented and offering more specifics and insight – maybe even an anecdote or a war story. That’s what we want.

    · Don’t speak softly or in a monotone. One of the advantages of a webinar is the same as that of attending an in-person conference – hearing someone speak confidently and enthusiastically about a topic. It’s frustrating for people in the audience to have the moderator interrupt the proceedings to say that people are emailing in with the comment that they can’t hear the presenter. It happens all the time. And it’s just as frustrating to sit through a monologue that’s monotone. Instead, we want the presenter’s enthusiasm to come through so we can get excited about the topic too.

    What do you think? How can webinars be more useful?

    Meantime … obviously not all webinars are poorly done. Many are engaging and useful. Webinars given by Seth Godin and Clay Shirky come to mind. The ones that I attended were so interesting that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who went back the next day to replay them. And neither of these guys hardly even used slides. They let their passion for their topic bring the event to life. And so it did.

  • How NOT to telemarket

    Lots of nonprofits telemarket to persuade donors to give. They can, because the do-not-call laws don’t apply to them. But even so, there’s a right way and a wrong way.

    I received a phone call a few days ago from a nonprofit I support. Without naming names, it’s a well-known civil liberties charity. The guy on the other end of the phone introduced himself politely and explained why he was calling. He went into his rap about what the charity does and why it needs donor support.

    I told him that I was in full support of the charity’s mission but that I preferred to be contacted only by mail. I was expressing a clear preference.

    The caller acknowledged my preference – which is good. But he didn’t honor it – which is very bad. He could have reassured me that future contact would be by mail, politely thanked me for my time, and hung up. Instead, he decided to see this situation as what’s euphemistically called a “service-recovery opportunity.”

    He launched into a lecture about how vital donor support is to keep the work of the charity going. This went on for some minutes. After which, he asked me to make a donation now over the phone and then sign on to become a sustaining member with monthly contributions from my credit card.

    I again reiterated my preference for contact by mail.

    Undaunted, he took a fall-back position. After another dissertation about the need for donors to pony up, he asked for a single donation now over the phone.

    Finally, getting frustrated, I told him that I supported charity’s mission but wanted to be contacted only by mail, and bid him a hasty goodbye. The lasting impression from having been worked over like that for a donations was, “can you believe that guy?”

    Not the impression any nonprofit would want to create. Telemarketing is a fundraising channel that’s supposed to complement other channels like direct mail and email. Telemarketing like this doesn’t compliment other channels – it harms them.

    When I’m contacted by that organization in the future, instead of thinking kindly about them, I’m going to hesitate. That hesitation – even if it’s only for a moment – is deadly for fundraisers. That hesitation could spell the difference between meeting a budget goal and falling short. It’s vital to eliminate it, because as fundraisers, that fleeting moment of decision – or indecision – is all that we get. We have to make the most of it.