Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Category: fundraising

  • Year-end fundraising: easy way to get the messaging right

    It’s true – now’s the time to start thinking about year-end fundraising. The end of the year is a crucial time for nonprofits, because most of the gifts that nonprofits receive come in during December. We’ve all seen that stats about how important year end is.

    So, sure, you want to do a year end appeal. That’s a given. But what do you say to donors to get them to respond?

    Luckily, the messaging for this appeal is pretty simple and straightforward. Basically, you want to emphasize:

    1. The urgency of the December 31 deadline.
    2. Tax deductibility. Even though most donors don’t itemize, tax deductibility is still a potential donor benefit, and should be part of your year-end appeal. You can even say on the reply form: Any gift that is postmarked before midnight on December 31 could be fully deductible on your taxes.
    3. Sustain the nonprofit’s programs and services.
    4. Help the nonprofit end the year strong.
    5. Help the nonprofit begin the New Year in a better position to pursue its mission.
    6. Do one more act of compassion before the year comes to a close.

    The year-end appeal is essentially these message points.

    You can include a story about someone who was helped, accomplishments that the donor helped make possible, or other donor-focused elements if you’d like, but often this isn’t necessary.

    In most cases, keeping the appeal simple and direct, focusing on the deadline, is the most effective copy platform.

     

     

  • Fundraising: the 2 key “abilities”

    Donor retention keeps falling, while donor skepticism keeps rising. So, it’s more important now than ever to connect with donors in a personal way if you expect to engage and keep them. But how?

    There are two key “abilities” that are vital for effective fundraising. They’re credibility and likeability. It’s essential to convey both to donors if you expect them to join with you in your mission. See more in my article in Nonprofit Pro.

    • Building credibility takes financial transparency, testimonials, and the like. But it’s more than that. There are specific things you can do to gain donors’ trust or win it back if you’ve lost it. See more here.
    • Establishing likeability is a lot about tone and presentation, including a conversational copy voice. But again, it goes deeper than this. Likeability is more than the way an appeal is written. It’s a strategy that embraces donors on a personal level of shared values. More about that here.

    It’s all but guaranteed that failing to convey credibility and likeability in appeals and content marketing will hurt your fundraising efforts – which will drain revenue. For some nonprofits, the result is some belt-tightening, but for others, it could be a question of survival.

     

  • The 3 kinds of deadlines for fundraising appeals

    You see deadlines all the time in fundraising appeals. But are they helping or hurting response? It depends. There are roughly three kinds of fundraising deadlines:

    1. Real deadlines, like year end, fiscal year end, Christmas, and others.
    2. Reasonable deadlines, like those for fund drives, matching grants, and things like National Doctors’ Day and Giving Tuesday.
    3. Arbitrary deadlines. These are just made up and slapped onto an appeal. They can be trouble.

    See more about this in my guest post at Future Fundraising Now. Some deadlines will almost immediately set off donors’ BS alarms, possibly causing them to toss the appeal. There are better ways to heighten the urgency in fundraising. See more here.

  • Is social media fundraising worth it?

    With all the controversy about Facebook and selling user data and undermining user trust, it’s a good time to think about how and why we’re using social media for fundraising.

    It might not seem like it at first, but there’s a lesson for nonprofits and fundraisers in Sport Rider magazine. This popular motorcycling magazine went out of business a little while ago, even though they had 2.4 million Facebook followers — 2.4 million!

    Looking at 2.4 million followers, anyone could be forgiven for thinking, “Our readers love us! What could possibly go wrong?”

    But as vintage-motorcycle esthete Paul d’Orleans soberly observed, “A ‘like’ isn’t a dollar.” So true. In the cold light of day, those social-media vanity metrics aren’t really worth much.

    How many charities and fundraisers will learn this same, hard lesson about social media?

    How many ‘likes’ does your nonprofit get? How many followers do you have? Thousands? Millions? Chances are, all that means very little.

    Shareable content – that’s the key to social media, we’re told. Think about how much time and effort you’re spending to come up with clever videos, catchy photos, and other shareable content for social media all in order to chase likes and followers. What is it really achieving?

    Sure, the social media proponents say that Facebook and Instagram and the like are supporting and bolstering email response rates. And that may be true. After all, we know that email helps drive up direct mail response rates, so, yes, there may be some cross-channel benefit. But the problem is that when you use Facebook and other social media, they’re the ones in control of the platform, not you.

    As fundraising expert John Hayden explains, an over-reliance on social media is risky, and as an online strategy, instead of putting too much emphasis on social media, it’s smarter to focus more on email, which you can control and which actually produces fundraising results.

    For the fundraisers chasing vanity metrics like the number of followers, likes, impressions, and even more vague measures like awareness, it’s probably time to take a hard look at social media and then at actual donations.

     

  • Donor retention keeps falling – what to do about it

    Donor retention was down again last year. It’s part of a steady downward trend that’s been going on for the past decade. What’s going on? There are four possible reasons for donors’ increasing lack of loyalty:

    1. Completing the story in fundraising appeals – which leaves the donor out.
    2. Using safe, euphemistic language that doesn’t inspire anybody.
    3. Pairing a dire headline with a smiling face, sending mixed signals to donors.
    4. Sending out boring thank you letters.

    See more about each of each of these problems – and their solutions – in my guest post for Guidestar blog.

    Each of these can be addressed in the communications that donors receive. When retention drops, charities are forced to spend more on acquisition. And because it costs much more to acquire a donor than to retain one, charities end up spending more and more just to keep a sustainable donor base. It’s unfortunate, because donors want to give and will give if the opportunity is presented to them in the right way. See more here.

  • 5 ways to build rapport with donors

    If we want to engage donors, it’s important to reach out to them on their terms and in ways that avoid being seen as too pushy or too salesy.

    So, we want to build a friendly rapport with donors and show them that we’re on the same wavelength as they are. You can see more about it here, but there are five easy ways to do this:

    • Use logic, specifically the if-then statement to establish common ground.
    • Acknowledge your donor’s commitment, especially with donors who’ve given before.
    • Create a situation that your donor can identify with.
    • Make a confession that will create a bond with donors
    • Add a photo, so that donors can put a face with the signature on the appeal.

    Not surprisingly, donors don’t like to feel like someone’s twisting their arm in order to get them to give a gift. It’s not necessary to do that or even effective for fundraising. We can create a rapport with them instead. See more about this here.

     

  • When “Donor as Hero” is wrong for fundraising

    Lots of charities are telling their donors, “You’re a hero!” It’s become the go-to theme for fundraising of all kinds in a variety of sectors. But simply telling donors that they’re heroes falls way short of the goals of donor-centric fundraising. In fact, there are four main pitfalls to this approach:

    • It’s overused. When hero references are everywhere, they don’t mean much anymore.
    • It’s vague. Just stamping “Hero Campaign” on an appeal doesn’t really say anything that connects with donors.
    • It lacks believability. Telling donors they’re heroes isn’t a believable donor benefit.
    • It’s a metaphor not intended to be used literally. Donor-as-hero is often misinterpreted to mean that all you do is tell donors “You’re a hero!” and that makes the fundraising donor centric.

    See more about this here. Good direct response fundraising means developing a powerful offer, along with solid donor benefits and realistic reasons to give, not simply adding a label that says, “You’re a hero!”  Click here for more.

     

  • How too much collaboration ruins fundraising appeals

    There’s this idea that people seem to accept without even thinking about it. It’s the idea that all work is teamwork … that nothing can happen without the involvement of anyone and everyone … that any kind of collaboration is always inherently good.

    You see this all the time in environments where people do creative work like marketing and fundraising. Everyone from the proofreader to the receptionist to the account staff to a board member’s brother-in-law has a hand in the creative, making changes that are often based on little more than personal opinion.

    There are comments like, “I don’t like this” or “Can we change this to something else?” or “Why is this in here?” And invariably, there’s this one: “Change that – the client won’t approve it.” Then someone goes ahead and incorporates the changes, often without regard to the tone, presentation, or strategy goals of the appeal. Hey, we’re a collaborative team, right? So, all input is implemented without question.

    This might seem like collaboration since we’re involving everyone and being very egalitarian, but it isn’t collaboration. It’s creative by committee. It’s group think. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.

    This isn’t to say that collaboration is bad. Not at all. Collaboration is vital. But ideally it’s limited to those individuals familiar with the strategy of the appeal, the target audience, the concept, the offer, and so on. This group discusses the appeal and the strategy, and reviews it based on strategy — not personal opinion, ego, or office politics. That’s collaboration.

    Creative by committee is something else entirely, and it’s deadly for fundraising. Because if we’re creating fundraising that a committee can approve, that doesn’t ruffle any feathers, that everyone can okay, then there’s a good chance it’s bland and boring. And that’s not going to excite donors.

     

  • When donor centrism is at odds with your donors

    Donor centrism means putting the donor at the center of the organization’s fundraising and, in fact, everything the organization does. It means, as fundraising expert Simone Joyaux says, building trust — trust that donors play a critical role in the charity’s success, trust that the charity does worthwhile things with donations, and trust that the charity operates efficiently.

    It’s the ideal that charities aspire to, or should.

    But what happens when the work your organization is committed to doing is suddenly at odds with what your donors want? This is what that the ACLU has grappled with after the events in Charlottesville, Va., in August.

    You’ll recall that white supremacist groups marched in Charlottesville and were countered by anti-fascist protestors.

    What’s less widely known is that city officials tried to revoke the permit to protest removal of the Gen. Robert E. Lee statue. The city wanted to move the protest out of the downtown location to an open area about a mile away for easier crowd control. The city was sued by the ACLU, and the judge ruled against the city. The protest took place in downtown Charlottesville as originally planned.

    The ACLU was of course acting in accordance with its mission to defend the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. But donors were outraged. A board member even resigned over it.

    Further complicating the problem, the ACLU is one of the many charities that benefitted from the so-called Trump bump – a big increase in donations after the election of Donald Trump. The donors who gave probably did so as a form of protest against the kind of nationalism that the ACLU appeared to defend.

    So where does that leave the ACLU? Have they broken trust with their donors? And does that mean they’re not donor centric?

    For that matter, should any charity ever act in ways that differ from its donors’ wishes? Or does a charity have the obligation to pursue its mission and act on its ideals regardless of the consequences? And if so, should the charity expect its donors to come along with them and continue to give, or should the charity assume that some donors will fall away in cases like this, and just chalk it up to attrition?

    These questions go to the core of what it means to be donor centric. Usually, when we talk about donor centrism, it centers around using “you” in fundraising copy, thanking donors properly, getting donor data right to avoid embarrassing mistakes, reporting back to donors about outcomes, and so on.

    These are critical, no doubt about it. But as the episode with the ACLU shows, donor centrism goes straight to the charity’s core and its mission.

    In situations like this, the charity has to determine its next steps wisely.

    One thing’s for certain, though. An issue like the ACLU faces is not one to address in your fundraising, because that puts you in the position of explaining and educating.

    That’s not a good position to be in because, first, it pulls you away from your main goal of generating funds. Second, it’s a low-involvement strategy, because donors don’t want to be educated by the charities they support. The response to this kind of approach will likely be dismal. And third, it gets donors to think, and fundraising works best when we can get donors to feel something about the cause or the need.

    Some ways to counter bad press could include blog posts, Facebook posts, videos on YouTube, talking with reporters, and other PR strategies. Some of which the ACLU has done.

    But more to the point, in an act of donor centrism, the ACLU has recently changed its policy. According to PBS, the ACLU will no longer represent supremacist groups that demonstrate with guns. And that, no doubt, will go a long way toward re-establishing trust with donors.

  • The 10 Percent Solution in Fundraising. Or, Why Messaging Rules

    The standard in direct marketing, whether it’s fundraising or for-profit marketing, is that the mailing list will account for 60 percent of your success or failure … the offer accounts for 30 percent … and the creative? Just 10 percent.

    This is based on decades of marketing history, and it’s indisputable. But …

    Even though creative may be a measly 10 percent’s worth of the overall effort, that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. That doesn’t mean you focus all your time on the list and the offer and just wave your hand over the creative and consider it good enough.

    No, weak creative — and especially, weak messaging — will doom a fundraising campaign.

    Now, of course, if the list is bad, your mailing goes to all the wrong people. That’s not good. And if the offer is bad or, more likely, vague, then even if your appeal does go to the right people, they’ll be bored by it. But think of it this way.

    What if your list and offer and good, but the messaging is off strategy? Response will suffer, guaranteed.

    Example: consider Nike, the literal powerhouse in branding. You can bet that before they do anything, they research and research to make sure every step they take is the right one. Let’s say they’re developing a new campaign. They do tons of market research. They map out their media strategy. They pour millions and millions of dollars into ad buys.

    And then, with all that as the backdrop, they introduce their new slogan, Just Try It. Wouldn’t THAT land with a thud? And all because the messaging was just a little bit … off.

    Suddenly that 10 percent for creative doesn’t seem quite so insignificant. Truth is, you can have all the data, strategy, and analytics in the world, but if the messaging in your appeal is off — even by a little bit — then your whole fundraising campaign will be too.