Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Tag: business

  • Why your fundraising needs a strong offer

    In fundraising, a strong offer is a clear statement about what your donor will do and what she’ll receive in return.

    It’s the deal, the transaction, the quid pro quo. But it’s something more, too. Your offer is the emotional link between your donor and your nonprofit’s mission. It’s an expression of your donor’s aspirations about being a good person and the validation of those aspirations, all put into action through the work your nonprofit does.

    To be effective, your offer should do a number of things. It should present donors with a specific opportunity to do good. It should convey donor benefits, which can be tangible (like a premium) and intangible (like making a difference). It should tell your donor what to do and why. It should convey some sense of urgency, either implied or explicit (like a specific deadline to respond). And it should show your donor that she’s getting a good deal.

    You want to incorporate as many of these “shoulds” as you can when crafting your offer. That might seem like a tall order at first. But once you get into it, you see that the strongest offers are often the simplest, such as, “Your gift of $25 will save the life of a starving child in Africa,” “Your gift will double in impact to send lifesaving medicine into poverty zones in Tajikistan,” or “Just $1.75 will provide a Thanksgiving dinner for someone who’s homeless.”

    Granted, getting to this level of simplicity isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort. You naturally want your offer to be as donor-focused as possible. So take the time to think about the most enticing opportunity you can present to your donors that allows them to fulfill their need to be good people making a difference in the world.

  • 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.