Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Tag: copywriting

  • What political speeches can teach us about fundraising

    When they’re speechifying, politicians want their audiences to respond, and they love it when a line in a speech sets off thunderous applause. But they don’t leave this to chance. They use specific techniques to get a response, and getting people to respond is exactly what we want to do as fundraisers. See my guest post over at Future Fundraising Now for more on using these seven techniques in your fundraising:

    1. The contrast: contrast positive vs. negative.
    2. The list: Place (usually) three items in a series.
    3. The puzzle: Describe the problem, then the solution.
    4. The headline – punchline: Say you’re going to say something, then say it.
    5. The combination: Combine the previous techniques.
    6. The position: Establish a position, then take or refute it.
    7. The pursuit: Encourage response by reiterating.

     

  • How to use social proof in fundraising appeals

    Social proof is a powerful motivator in fundraising appeals. My article in Nonprofit Pro describes how to use it, and shares some ideas on making it work even harder for you.

    To leverage social proof, you can:

    1. Highlight a dollar amount in the gift string. This is often effective. But there’s an even better way to make this work.
    2. Use localization: add the name of the donor’s city to your appeal. But there’s a way to make this even more compelling for donors.
    3. Use testimonials from donors. But you can take this a step further, so that it works even better.
    4. Change the way you present donor benefits. Here’s how to slightly recast the impression that your fundraising copy is giving to bring more donors in.
    5. And whatever you do, be careful to avoid using negative social proof. See what it is and why it’s an easy trap to fall into.

    Check out the whole article here.

  • Are you a good fundraiser? Try this simple self-check.

    Your appeals get your donors involved and engaged in your nonprofit and mission, right?

    If you’re ready to find out, try this self-check.

    Call one of your donors out of the blue. You’ll be shocked. Because, odds are, your donor:

    • Doesn’t know what your nonprofit does beyond something hazy like helping people or fighting poverty. And doesn’t really care to know much more.
    • Doesn’t care what your mission statement says. Hasn’t read it, doesn’t plan to.
    • Doesn’t know what your programs are or any successes that you’ve had.
    • Doesn’t know she’s in your sustainer program and doesn’t know you have a sustainer program or even what that is. She only knows that she gives $10 a month when the reminder comes.
    • Doesn’t really want your appeals and newsletters. She usually just glances at that stuff and tosses it.
    • Doesn’t know that the appeal she just responded to featured a matching grant. Didn’t look at it that closely.

    Sure, we all realize that what donors say is usually different from how they respond. So just because one donor doesn’t know or care much about your nonprofit but still gives, that’s okay, right?

    Maybe. But what if large blocks of your donors feel this way? What if they’re giving out of habit or some philanthropic reflex and not because they love your nonprofit and value what you do? That’s scary. Because if they’re not loving you, they’re leaving you. Attrition will steamroller you.

    So what do you do? You do more. More donor engagement, more donor focus, more donor communication.

    Don’t release an appeal until it sings. Don’t send a newsletter until you can’t believe how good the stories are — with a protagonist, conflict, a plot, and a point. Don’t fear ‘bothering’ your donors. The more they hear from you, the more they’ll like it. Don’t just go through the motions with social media. Provide content that’s good enough to share. Don’t just have a website. Give donors videos, images, stories, infographics, and more.

    But mainly, don’t just communicate with donors. Hit the hot buttons of their values, motivations, and aspirations. Animate those feelings, and you’ll get right to the core of what drives your donors’ giving as well as their loyalty.

     

  • Is this the easiest, most direct way to motivate donors to give?

    It’s no secret that giving confers all kinds of benefits to donors. People who give are generally happier and even healthier than non-givers.

    But if that’s true, then how would donors react if we pointed out those benefits in an appeal? Will speaking directly to donors’ self-interest about the benefits of giving persuade them to give or maybe to give more?

    There’s not a lot of research to go on. But one study suggests that laying out the benefits of giving just might work.

    As a first step, researches explored whether a virtuous cycle exists between happiness and giving — that is, does giving cause the happiness that encourages donors to give?

    The subjects were asked to recall a time when they spent money on themselves or others, and report their happiness. Then each subject was offered the choice in future spending that would make them the happiest. Turns out, the people who felt happy by recalling a previous expenditure for someone else were more likely to donate in the future. So, the virtuous cycle does seem to exist.

    Next, researchers explored whether laying out the benefits of giving would motivate people to give. Researchers surveyed 1,000 readers of the New York Times who had read an article about the link between giving and happiness. Compared to other studies, the people in this group reported devoting as much as 40% of their spending on others — a higher than average rate — suggesting that these people gave more because they were aware of the benefits of giving.

    Yet, other research suggests that adding in motivators like happiness from giving will divert donors’ attention from the need and lessen their impulse to give.

    Still, promoting the benefits of giving is worth testing to see how your donors will react. If you’re bold, come right out and link greater happiness with a gift to your nonprofit. If you’re cautious, use subtle suggestions. And see whether or how much this added dimension moves your donors.

     

  • Donors Are Nutty! This Might Help Explain Why

    In a logical world, the bigger the problem is, the more donors would give to solve it.

    But people aren’t logical (it’s what makes us so much fun!).

    You’ve probably heard about the identifiable-victim effect. It tells us that donors will give more to help a single victim than to help many victims. This is the research where people were given a story about a starving girl in Africa, but when that same story was paired up with statistics about starvation, people gave less.

    The typical explanation is that statistics blunted the emotional impact of the story.

    But what’s really at work, according to other research, is donors’ sense of perceived efficacy, the feeling about how much their gifts will do. In one test, the first group of donors got a photo and story of a poor child. The second group got photos and stories of two poor children, and were told they could give only to help one child or the other, not both. The second group — those who got two stories and photos — gave less. The same result happened when the second group got photos and stories of seven children in need.

    The conclusion? When donors get information about additional people needing help — whether it’s just one other person, seven others, or statistics about millions of people — that information discourages them from giving. Donors consider the people who won’t be helped, feel less good about giving, and conclude that their gifts won’t do as much good as they want — then don’t give. Of course, rationality says that helping even one person is better than helping none. But donors don’t see it that way, and no amount of logic is going to change that.

    What to do? Here are two approaches.

    1. Focus on the human drama, not the scope. It’s a natural reaction to want to make the problem seem big by citing statistics, referring to others in need, showing images of people in crisis, and so on. But that doesn’t work. It doesn’t even work in disaster fundraising, where the need is often shockingly large. Avoid the temptation – and it’s a strong one – to hype the size or breadth of the problem. Instead, focus on presenting the individual human drama as compellingly as possible in copy and images.
    2. Present the right offer. The offer you present to donors has to be calibrated to donors’ sense of proportion. If possible, be specific. Say $XX does a specific thing, and make sure that the specific thing is reasonable to your audience. You can’t expect a donor to solve world hunger. But you can expect a donor to help one hungry child when the gift will make a clear, defined difference. That he or she will gladly do.

  • Power to the pronoun

    Most of us think of pronouns like “I” and “we” as mere function words in copy. We use them to start a sentence or move it along to get to the good, meaty words that are marbled with meaning.

    But research shows that simple pronouns say a lot more than we think.

    For example, in both speaking and writing, higher-status people don’t use the personal pronoun “I” very much. This contradicts the stereotype of the captain of the boardroom constantly exclaiming “I, I, I” and “Me, me, me.” In fact, higher-status people use “I” far less, while lower-status people use “I” far more.

    This is the case, as the researchers theorized, because the lower-status people are focusing more on themselves. They say “I” more often because they’re more self-conscious and aware of how they’re seeming to the higher-status person.

    On the other hand, leaders and other higher-status people tend to use the plural pronoun “we” much more than their followers. That’s because leaders are more “other-focused.” Their attention isn’t on themselves but on the group, the goal, and the big-picture externalities.

    What does this mean for fundraising? The copy in an appeal can convey a whole range of emotion from outrage to benevolence to fear to hope. Along with that, we’re always aware when writing copy that our appeals are essentially a dialogue between writer and reader. And during that dialogue, the focus shifts from writer to reader and back again, as in any conversation.

    So, based on this research, using “I” in copy can be an effective way to put the donor in a position of higher status, to display more thoughtfulness or self-awareness on the part of the writer, or to show vulnerability, as when reacting to an instance of human suffering, for example. “I slumped in my chair when I learned Miriam had TB.”

    And, “we” can be used to show that the focus is outer-directed, to convey the need for teamwork, or to suggest that the writer is taking charge and demonstrating leadership — “We need to end poverty now!” One caution here. In marketing and fundraising copy, readers might assume that “we” is being used in the organizational sense — that the organization is the “we” that’s talking. It’s important to make it clear from the context that the “we” refers to writer and donor together, marching toward a goal.

    Admittedly, these are subtle points. But as anyone who’s ever sweated over the right verb or poured over test results knows, it’s the subtleties that can add up to big differences in response.

  • 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?

     

     

  • Trouble cultivating younger donors? This might be why

    For many of us, caring about others just isn’t that important.

    That’s one of the shocking findings of a new study conducted by a researcher at Harvard University. http://sites.gse.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/making-caring-common/files/executive_summary.pdf

    First, let’s take a look at the subject of the study, high-school kids. And then, we’ll look at another part of the research, the kids’ parents — the younger donors that most nonprofits are trying to cultivate.

    The study surveyed 10,000 middle and high school students. When asked what was most important to them — achieving at a high level, happiness, or caring for others – a full 80% said achieving at a high level or happiness, but only about 20% said caring for others.

    Naturally it’s distressing that kids place so little importance on helping others, but what’s probably happening is that the children are taking their cues from parents.

    While parents say it’s important to raise children who are caring, the kids themselves are reading the subtext. About 80% of children said that their parents are more concerned with achievement or happiness than with caring for others. The kids felt the same way about their teachers.

    The children were also three times more likely to agree than disagree with this statement: “My parents are prouder if I get good grades than if I’m a caring community member.”

    The message that adults are sending is loud and clear — put yourself and your success first.

    These parents and teachers are the younger donors that fundraisers are trying to engage and motivate. And while they may say that caring for others is important, it seems, according to this study at least, that they’re more concerned with their own success in life than the welfare of others.

    The takeaway for fundraising? The doing-good-is-its-own-reward theme doesn’t work for younger donors the way it did for previous generations, particularly the World War II generation. And because of that, if we want to reach younger donors, it’s more important than ever in our fundraising appeals and other donor communications to emphasize positive results, superior outcomes, and success stories. Charities have to show that they represent the success and achievement that younger donors are placing so much importance on and striving for themselves. It’s one way for nonprofits to be more relevant to younger donors, connect with them on their terms, and ultimately win their support.

  • 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.