One thing that can kill a fundraising appeal is trying to sound intelligent by using fifty-cent words.
That’s why, in this political season, it’s good to look at the two master communicators who are pitching their ideas — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. They both speak at lower grade levels. That’s important for us as fundraisers because:
Talk about email fundraising, and before long, you’re talking about testing subject lines. They’re important for your open rate, of course.
But the From line can make a big difference too. See my guest post at Future Fundraising now for more.
When you get an email, probably the first thing you do is to see who it’s from. If it’s somebody important to you, then you’ll open it regardless of what the subject line is.
The From line that many charities use is the organization name, but you can test:
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:
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:
Check out the whole article here.
Now’s the time to do more than ever to engage major donors, and here’s why.
The U.S. economy is minting new millionaires at a stunning pace. According to one study, the number of millionaire households shot up from 13.7 million to 16.3 million in just one year, from 2012 to 2013.
And yet, according to other research, the rich and super-rich have cut back on their giving. From 2006 to 2012 — encompassing the Great Recession and recovery — wealthy donors reduced their share of income going to charity.
So, right now, the rich are a vastly under-tapped source of funding.
But here’s the interesting part.
During that same period, the poor increased their giving. They gave a larger share of their income.
Yes, the poor gave more, and the rich gave less. And it’s is even more surprising since most poor and middle class folks were hammered by the recession.
The rich, on the other hand, actually did better during that time. What’s more, the number of people entering the privileged classes continues to increase as the income gap widens.
Which means, of course, that your major-donor prospects keep getting wealthier and the pool of these donors keeps getting bigger. It’s not hard to see that you probably need to pay a lot more attention to high-dollar donors.
One stumbling block is that the rich and poor give to difference causes. The poor give to churches and soup kitchens, but millionaires tend to give to the arts and universities.
But even if your nonprofit isn’t in one of those sectors, you can and should engage wealthy donors. And why not? Why shouldn’t your cause get some of this funding? At first, try something simple like versioning a mail appeal for bigger donors, and then move on to campaigns, including mail, email, events, and personal-contact touch points. Have your nonprofit put on its best suit, shine its shoes, comb its hair, and get in front of these donors. Make your case. The upside potential is huge.
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:
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.
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.
“Your nonprofit is siloed.” That’s something you never want to hear. If you do, then your organization’s departments all have their own agendas, lack a common vision, and fail to communicate with each other. Everyone is working at cross-purposes, trying to go in different directions at once, instead of one clear direction.
That’s why the new e-book — Everyone at a Nonprofit Is a Fundraiser — from Nonprofit Funderland is particularly relevant. It combines the experience and insight from the three principals of the organization — all veteran fundraisers — who’ve seen when nonprofits work well and when they don’t. That is, when nonprofits are centered around the donor and when they’re not.
One anecdote in the book sums it up. A donor visits a nonprofit for a meeting with the executive director only to be met by a rude receptionist who ignores him, continuing instead to talk on the phone with her friend. The donor, thoroughly insulted, has his meeting with the executive director. A short meeting, to announce that he’s ending his support. Generous, long-term support. Ouch. Lesson learned.
That’s the underlying spirit of the book — that a nonprofit centered around the donor, and therefore free of silos, is a better nonprofit. Better at fundraising and better at achieving its mission. In exploring this theme, the book delves into concepts of interest to fundraisers in organizations large and small. For example:
Everyone at a Nonprofit Is a Fundraiser covers a lot of ground. The only problem is that the content is so good you’ll find yourself asking drill-down questions about details that are outside the scope of the text. But that’s a minor concern. Because the lessons in the book are large and insightful. After reading it, you’ll come away with clear, specific ideas not only about how to do fundraising but also how to think like a fundraiser.
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.
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.
Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic 