Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Tag: advertising

  • Should you do a year-end fundraising appeal?

    Yes, and here’s why.

    It’s one of the easiest appeals to create. And it can be one of the biggest revenue producers of the year. About 30 percent of most nonprofits’ revenue comes in between Giving Tuesday and December 31. At year end, donors are looking for a place to give. That place could be and should be your nonprofit.

    The messaging for the appeal is usually pretty straightforward, emphasizing the Dec. 31 deadline  and how your donor’s gift will help your nonprofit end the year strong and begin the New Year strong.

    The design of the appeal should be equally simple and straightforward. No need to go overboard on photos and graphics. In most cases, simple is best for year end.

    And don’t forget email. A lot of online giving happens in the last three or four days of the year. Your emails can and should be showing up in your donors’ inboxes, so that they can support the good work your nonprofit is doing.

    For more on year end fundraising, see Best Practices for Year-End Fundraising (nonprofitpro.com)

  • One sure way to make your fundraising better

    The single best thing you can do to improve your fundraising?

    Come to terms with a hard truth: You are not your donors.

    They’re probably older than you, for one thing, which means they have a completely different frame of reference, and for another thing, they have a completely different perspective about your organization, because they’re on the outside, not “in the bubble” like you are.

    These differences in perspective between you and your donors can cause problems when you’re creating your fundraising appeals.

    For example, these differences will influence the photos you use in your direct mail and email appeals, the kinds of stories you tell in your appeals, and how you write and structure your appeals.

    And all three of these will have a huge impact on how much money you’ll raise. There’s more to this. Get the whole story here: https://tinyurl.com/ewntb8h9

  • When disaster fundraising works and when it doesn’t

    If you haven’t already, you’ll probably soon receive a barrage of emails appealing to you for donations to help the victims of the horrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria. This is of course a worthy cause. The need is overwhelming. And the rest of the world should do everything possible to help.

    Which makes this email subject line so puzzling. Here it is:

    “How we’re saving lives in Turkey right now.”

    Huh.

    Then in the email itself, there’s this headline:

    “How we’re saving lives in Turkey right now.”

    Double huh.

    Imagine you’re a potential donor. What’s your reaction to that line? Mine is that it looks like they’re got everything covered. Time to move onto the next email in the inbox.

    With that subject line and headline, I’m left completely out of this as a potential donor. And that’s too bad.

    Because the quake zone is total devastation. Tens of thousands killed. Survivors left without shelter, food, sanitation. The risk of cholera and other diseases. It’s destruction on a mass scale.

    However much this nonprofit has done, it’s a drop in the bucket. There’s sooooo much more to do. They need my donation. And I want to give it. But they’re not making it easy. They’re not engaging me. In fact, they’re suggesting that I’m not needed.

    The text of the email begins by referencing the death and destruction. But in the second paragraph, it reiterates the work that the charity is doing. Again, giving the impression that they’ve got this covered and don’t need my gift.

    This is followed by a bulleted list. But it’s not a list of what needs to be done. It’s a list of what they’re already doing. Further on in the email, it says that their teams do whatever it takes.

    Granted, there is a donate button with the words “Rush your gift.” But still, the messaging has an inside-our-four-walls, organizational framing, not a donor-centric one. There’s a lot of “we,” “us,” and “look at what we’re doing,” instead of “you” and “here’s how you can help.”

    Of course this email will probably raise a lot of money. That’s the thing with disaster fundraising. It often does well even if it’s done badly, because donors are generous people who do want to help. Still, donors want to be involved. They want to feel like their support is needed. So instead of making it about what the nonprofit is already doing, it should be more about how much you, the donor, is urgently needed now to save lives. Messaging along those lines can raise even more revenue. Which would save even more lives.

  • Two ways to begin a fundraising appeal – from Jerry Huntsinger

    In Jerry Huntsinger’s “86 Tutorials in Creating Fundraising Letters and Packages,” he makes a point about how to begin a fundraising appeal.

    He makes his point with an example. It’s an appeal for a cancer charity. It begins:

    “Children shouldn’t have to face the devastation of cancer and death. But they do. Each year, hundreds of children…”

    It’s the standard, institutional, boilerplate blah, blah, blah. Jerry notes that where the letter actually begins is in the fifth paragraph, with this:

    “Lance was diagnosed with leukemia two days before Christmas. He was 2 years old. ‘Lance was so sick that they flew us to Twin Cities for immediate treatment,’ his mother said. ‘His platelets were so low that his teeth bled through the night.’”

    BAM – there you are, right in the middle of the drama. Nothing institutional about that. Nothing blah, blah, blah about that. Especially that detail about the boy’s teeth bleeding – that detail gets you.

    Sure, starting an appeal with a story is a tried-and-true approach. But here’s the point. The first opening – “Children’s shouldn’t have to face …” – is basic expository prose. It’s simply explaining something. It’s simply conveying a generalization about children and cancer. It’s not trying to involve you. (It’s something you’d get from ChatGPT if you asked it to write an appeal about childhood cancer.)

    The second opening – “Lance was diagnosed …” – is meant specifically to involve you. It’s telling you that this letter is about a human drama playing out right before your eyes. It’s one human being talking to another.

    As Jerry says, the second opening will raise more money.

  • Tell a better story for fundraising

    Is this the way to make the story in your fundraising appeal more memorable and more impactful?

    Tell it in the present tense.

    Most of the time, stories are in the past tense. This happened, then that happened, then this happened. But there’s research to suggest that stories in the present tense pack a lot of punch and leave an impression on the listener. And that’s because researchers found neural coupling between the storyteller and the listener in a story that’s told in the present tense.

    Granted, this research involved verbal communication, so it may not be directly applicable to written words. But still, it is interesting.

    The researchers wired up the brains of the storyteller and the listener. And when the story was told in the present tense, similar parts of both brains were lighting up. This could mean that the storyteller and the listener are more in sync.

    Partially this could be because a story in the present tense is more likely to be judged by the brain receiving it as an emotionally charged event. Which means that the person hearing the story gets a shot of the brain chemical dopamine. Which makes the whole experience for the listener more impactful and more memorable.

    That’s the theory, anyway, and when you think about it, it does make sense. A story seems more immediate in the present tense. Which means that you’re listener is going to be more, well, present and more likely to stay with you for the whole story and what follows. Like the call to action.

    Naturally, nothing has been conclusively proven in this research. Communication is far too complex for almost anything to be conclusively proven. But it is something that could be worth trying and testing.

  • Positioning for your nonprofit

    Donors want to know that they’re making a difference with their gifts. That’s always been the case, and it’s even more true now with the current recession going on.

    So that’s why it’s important to take a look at your donor communications with a healthy dose of skepticism, as Pamela Barden suggests in her blog post.

    Here are the four questions she recommends that fundraisers should ask themselves as a kind of self-test, a check to see if we’re on the right track:

    • So what? You should be clear about why your organization exists, the impact it’s having, and the outcomes it’s producing. By asking So what? you keep the focus on what matters to your donor.
    • Who’s doing it better? You need to know what other similar nonprofits are doing and what they’re saying about what they do. It’s important to know how your organization is different.
    • What’s our unique selling proposition? You’ve probably heard this marketing term before, but it still applies. It’s all about conveying a specific benefit to your donor that she can’t get anywhere else.
    • What’s the best story to show this specialness? This is where you connect emotionally with donors and do it in a way that shows how what your organization does matters – and deserves your donor’s support.

    Great questions, all. But really, when you think about it, these questions are aiming at basically one thing – positioning. The positioning of your nonprofit. And that basically comes down to the one thing or couple of things that make your nonprofit different from the others.

    So, it’ll be helpful to think about the answers to these four questions, and use them to come up with a positioning statement for your nonprofit.

    A positioning statement, not a mission statement. They’re vastly different. A mission statement is more aspirational, more pie-in-the-sky. Mission statements for most nonprofits are generally pretty vague and not all that useful for fundraising.

    A positioning statement, on the other hand, is useful for fundraising, because it captures what your organization does and what it does that’s different.

    There’s a lot of information out there on positioning statements, and there are lots of templates to use in creating one.  A basic template, though, for a positioning statement is this:  For <target audience>, <organization> is a <type of nonprofit> that <differentiator>.

    Let’s look at an example. Say the nonprofit is a homeless shelter that’s open all day, every day and allows people who are homeless to stay as long as they need to in order to get their lives back on track, achieving the goal of permanent housing.

    So for this nonprofit, we might have a positioning statement like:

    For donors who want to help people who are homeless, Hope Shelter is the social services nonprofit that provides the short-term or long-term stability a homeless person needs to overcome their challenges, secure permanent housing, and return to society.

    This is one out of many possibilities, of course. There isn’t necessarily one right answer when it comes to a positioning statement, and it may change over time as your nonprofit changes. But like any positioning statement, it can be a helpful measure to see whether your fundraising communications are on-strategy.

    But there’s an even simpler way. There have been tons of books, articles, webinars, and more on the topic of positioning and branding. The more you read about it, the more dizzyingly complex it becomes. But there’s a far simpler – and many would say – better way to approach it.

    The branding and positioning for most of the world’s biggest brands can often be reduced to one adjective or at least one word.

    Volvos are safe. Porsches are fast. Apple computers are intuitive. Nike is aspirational. You get the idea. One word that signals a difference, a direction. Sure, it’s simple, but in marketing and fundraising, simple is powerful. And it’s easy to keep in mind when you’re creating appeals.

    So what’s the word for your nonprofit? In the example for the shelter above, the word might be “stability.”

    Stability in the sense that the shelter is an oasis in the chaos and uncertainty of living out on the street … that the shelter is always open, 24/7, to help someone who’s homeless … that someone who’s homeless can stay as long as needed to turn their life around … that the ultimate goal is for the person to find permanent housing … that addressing homelessness creates a stronger, better community for everyone, including the donor, and so on.

    Once you have a clear positioning for your nonprofit, you can check your donor communications against it, and that means, instead of seat-of-the-pants, you’re operating from a strategy – a much better way to go.

     

     

     

  • Make your fundraising appeal stronger with the right teaser

    An appeal from a religious nonprofit has this teaser on the outside envelope:

    “It is necessary to be strong, in order to become great; that is our duty. Life is a struggle which we cannot avoid. We must triumph!”

    It’s a quote from Padre Pio, and while it’s certainly inspirational, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as a teaser for a direct mail appeal.

    The reverse side of the envelope has another quote from Padre Pio that’s also about struggle and strength in adversity.

    The envelope has a four-color illustration of Padre Pio, along with some graphic elements. Obviously, some attention went into this. Which makes the teaser even more puzzling.

    The outside envelope of a direct mail appeal is prime real estate. There should be lots of thought about what to say on that envelope and what to show, because that’s what determines whether your appeal gets opened or gets tossed in the trash. And getting the envelope opened is the number one, overarching goal.

    The problem is that there’s a dizzying array of options when it comes to teasers. Including not having a teaser at all and simply mailing a plain envelope.

    But the main point is that the teaser has to tease – it has to make the donor want to see what’s inside.

    Sure, a quotation might do that, but usually you have to put a little more into it.

    Basically there are three kinds of teasers: the offer teaser, the benefit teaser, and the curiosity teaser. You can see more about that here.

    So instead of a quotation on this outside envelope, we might think about a benefit teaser or a curiosity teaser and come up with something like:

    • Let Padre Pio inspire you with new strength in these troubling time – inside
    • Why does Padre Pio say, “Do not fear adversities”?
    • See Padre Pio’s prayer for you in these tough times – inside
    • Unsure? Frightened? Pray with Padre Pio now. See how, inside
    • Pray THIS prayer (inside) with Padre Pio for strength in these trying times.
    • Why we need Padre Pio now more than ever in these uncertain times

    These are just a few possibilities for a teaser that could motivate donors to look inside. Another way to go would be an offer teaser.

    The offer presented to donors in this appeal is to join in a special birthday mass for Padre Pio in gratitude for his guidance and intercession. When the donor gives, she can also include her own story about what Padre Pio means to her, along with her prayer intention.

    So, an offer teaser could be something like, “Special Birthday Mass for Padre Pio – join us and draw on his strength in these trying times. Prayer card enclosed.”

    This is of course just one possibility out of many.

    Point is, the teaser is one of the most important parts of a direct mail appeal. But for some reason, it’s often treated as an afterthought. Lots of times, only once the appeal letter is created does attention turn to the outside envelope and the teaser. In reality, it should be the other way around. It’s vital to entice donors on the outside envelope, and get them wanting to see what’s inside. That’s the first step in moving them to give.

  • Coronavirus fundraising – there’s a better way

    Judging from what’s showing up in mailboxes and email inboxes, it looks like a lot of nonprofits are struggling with the messaging around the coronavirus crisis. But honestly, they’re making it much harder than it has to be.

    Take this example from a prominent aid and relief charity. The first paragraph begins with the new president and CEO introducing himself and then acknowledging that he’s stepping into his new role at a challenging time. “We’re all facing the coronavirus pandemic,” he writes. Uh…no kidding.

    So, apparently, this is a new-CEO letter, plus a coronavirus fundraising appeal. Generally, it’s not a great idea to try and do two things with one letter. It’s best when the letter has one purpose and one point.

    The next paragraph talks about how COVID-19 threatens everyone, especially the elderly and people with health conditions. There’s no need to waste time saying this. People have gotten this information thousands of times by now.

    In the third paragraph, the letter writer explains that he’s often asked if it’s difficult to be a CEO at this challenging time, and then assures us that the organization adapts to challenging times because of their strong teams. This comes off as way too self-serving, but beside that, it’s not good fundraising, because it’s about the organization not the donor.

    The next paragraph congratulates the front line health workers for their commitment and the organization’s supporters for their commitment. This is an okay sentiment, of course, but it shouldn’t be here, four paragraphs in, before we’ve even come to an ask.

    Paragraph five explains that all hands are needed on deck in this crisis, and asks, “Can you help us?”  Not “Can you help shut down the coronavirus?” But “Can you help US?” This is organization centric, not donor centric.

    It’s not until the sixth paragraph that we get to the real point of the letter: a donation to provide personal protective equipment for health workers. Before we get to that, though, the letter explains that the organization has already shipped tons of PPE for health workers.

    Hang on a minute – so the organization has already shipped tons of PPE and now they’re asking for a donation to ship PPE? That’s a strange way to present an ask. Why would you tell a donor, right before the ask, that you’ve already done the very same thing you’re asking the donor to do? Sort of takes the edge off of the urgency, doesn’t it?

    There’s a far better way to structure this appeal, and it starts with the opening. Begin with the real and urgent need for PPE. This is something, given the wall-to-wall news coverage, that every donor will immediately get. Then show the donor how her gift fulfills that need, ideally with a specific and compelling offer. Something like: “Your gift of $XX sends XX pairs of gloves. Your gift of $XX sends XX masks.” And so on.

    It’s one of the basic best practices of disaster fundraising. In many disasters, the news coverage provides the background, which means that donors mainly need to know how they can help and what their help will do. If it takes five or six paragraphs of blab to get to this point, most donors will be long gone.

    There’s a basic framework for structuring disaster-fundraising appeals, and it doesn’t include talk about the commitment of your staff, your organization’s history, your organization’s flexibility, generalities about how much of a threat coronavirus is, and similar things. They’re just not relevant. They take the donor’s eye off the ball.

    What disaster fundraising does require is a compelling expression of the need, a clear case for the urgency of the donor’s gift, and a strong offer that details what the donor’s gift will do. All focused around one core idea. Because when the appeal has one purpose and one point, there’s a far greater chance that it’s going to break through, connect with donors, and raise more money.

  • How NOT to begin a fundraising appeal – and one way that almost always works

    A fundraising appeal from a social services nonprofit opens with this:

    “What would we do without you? How would we help local families like Michelle’s?”

    That’s the opening paragraph, the first thing that donors will see, and for some, the only thing they’ll see. Because if the opening isn’t right, then most donors won’t go any further. And that generally means no donation.

    What would WE do without you? How would WE help local families… That’s how this comes off to most donors. We, We, We. We’re the ones doing all the work, and all you do is give a few bucks every once in a while.

    This opening manages to create the appearance of donor centricity without really being donor centric at all. It seems at first like it’s empowering the donor but then it stops short. It takes aim at the target audience – the donor – then goes just wide of the target.

    Maybe the thinking behind this approach as an opening gambit is that it’s we, the organization, in partnership with you, the donor, working hand in hand to do good in the world. If that’s the case, a better approach might be something like this: “You and I are putting our hearts into this – together – to help local families like Michelle’s.” This way it’s more clear that donor and the person signing the letter are on equal footing in this arrangement.

    But still, there’s another approach to opening a fundraising appeal that brings fewer problems with it and almost always sets the appeal on the right track. And it has the added advantage of being simple and direct.

    It’s this: “I’m writing to you because …”  Most people in general and most donors in particular would appreciate receiving clear communication like this.

    No BS, no warming up to the subject, no initial throat clearing, no hollow flattery about how “we” couldn’t do anything without the particular donor reading the letter. Instead, just getting straight to the point about the need. As far as openings go, it’s about as tried and true as they come.

  • Coronavirus fundraising and what not to do

    Fundraising for the coronavirus emergency is, well, unusual so far.

    A soup kitchen sends an email with the subject line “A message from the president.” If you’re a donor scanning your email inbox, that could be just about anything.

    Then when you open it, there’s still no indication. The headline says “A message from the president.” So you read the first line: “I want to keep you informed about our response to the growing coronavirus threat and the impact it’s having across the country.”

    The following paragraphs talk about how the organization’s main priority is health and safety, working with local officials, taking the coronavirus threat seriously, taking necessary precautions, following CDC guidelines, and so on. The email goes on like this for five long paragraphs.

    Only at the very end does it mention that costs for extra cleaning supplies and other measures have caused a budget shortfall. And only at the very end is there an ask for support.

    In a similar vein, an email from an international aid and relief charity opens with an announcement that the WHO has officially declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic. It goes on to talk about how the organization is taking steps to protect its staff and clients, how it has launched preparedness efforts, and how they’re dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable. There’s a link to a webpage that lays out the organization’s plan. There’s no ask in this email. It’s all informational.

    Question is, Why is this emergency being treated differently from any other emergency that people and nonprofits would deal with … any other tornado, hurricane, flood, fire? Why the form-letter, corporate-sounding pronouncements from on high?

    There’s no need for a charity to issue a formal public statement about the coronavirus. Donors know all about it. The news coverage has been wall-to-wall for weeks now.

    The best practices for disaster fundraising are pretty well established. They could and should be put to use in this disaster too.

    The email from the soup kitchen could open with a subject line and a headline that talk about helping to protect people from coronavirus.

    It could go on to talk about how the homeless people, volunteers, and staff are facing serious risks, and how need for cleaning supplies, disinfectant, cleaning crews, and more is incredibly urgent.

    Then it could have a specific and direct ask to fund the supplies and other actions needed.

    That would be along the lines of a typical disaster fundraising appeal. Lots of charities will need additional funding in this coronavirus emergency just as aid and relief organizations need additional funding after a hurricane, and there are specific best practices for disaster fundraising that show how to secure that funding. We should use them.