Fundraising Copywriter George Crankovic

Tag: fundraising

  • Afraid of missing out? You’re not alone

    Social proof is a powerful motivator in fundraising. We might, for example, localize an appeal with the donor’s city name to imply that others in the neighborhood are giving, or we might add “Many donors give this amount” on a reply device. This is standard wisdom-of-the-crowd social proof.

    But there’s another form of social proof that we can evoke, and that’s the fear of missing out.

    This fear is hardwired into us. Nobody wants to be the odd man out if everyone else seems to be doing something or if everyone else is snapping up some new gadget. It’s a natural feeling. The reaction is natural too — “I want to do what everybody else is doing.” Social proof.

    So here are three possible ways to evoke the fear of missing out in fundraising.

    Use deadlines. Fear of missing out makes the deadline a natural motivator. It’s one reason that year-end appeals tend to do well. The December 31 deadline is built right in. But if you look, you’ll probably find deadlines for many of your appeals, simply because most projects have a defined beginning and end. If not, try to create a deadline that’s believable, and — this is important — explain why the deadline exists.

    Funny thing about deadlines, though. People tend to put off taking action until the last minute when they’re faced with a deadline. So don’t allow too much time for a response. You might even consider including an inducement for early action.

    Demonstrate scarcity. “Supplies are limited.” It’s classic “fear of missing out.” In fundraising, the supply could be the money in a matching grant. When it’s used up, the matching grant is over. The supply could be a quantity of medicine that’s available to be shipped to poor countries. Donors need to give now in order to have their gift cover the cost of shipping. The supply could be the number of backpacks with school supplies that a charity has on hand to give to children. Donors have give now before the opportunity runs out. Look for ways to make the point, “When it’s gone, it’s gone!”

    Show the result of inaction. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in telling donors how much good they can do that we forget to represent the other side of the coin — what happens when the donor doesn’t give. So describe the dystopia that results when your donor doesn’t give — the lack, the pain, the suffering, the ever-growing need. The message your donors will receive is, “You’ll miss out on doing good and making a difference,” and it’ll help them decide to give.

     

     

  • What you need to know about GiveDirectly

    Attention executive directors! Are you stressing about overhead costs? Staying up nights wondering how to prove the impact of your programs? Tying yourself into knots over infrastructure?

    Worry no more! Now you can forget infrastructure, forget staff, forget people in the field. In fact, forget programs and services. Because now you can help people just by giving them money.

    That’s right, you just raise the money and then hand it over to the people who need it. Suddenly the headaches of running an organization are gone. Just give away money!

    Okay, enough sarcasm. You’ve probably heard about Giving Directly, the charity that gives money to people in need. It’s been a media darling lately.

    And it is a good idea … as far as it goes.

    GiveDirectly is something akin to Kiva, the microfinance charity. Kiva works because donors like thinking that they can change the world — or at least one person’s world — for a $25 gift that provides, say, a couple of chickens to a poor family. This is simple, direct, help-the-poor-help-themselves charity work. All good.

    GiveDirectly is an even more stripped-down version. They give money to people in need and let them decide how to use it. There’s no infrastructure and virtually no staff. There aren’t even any programs. This is simpler and more direct than microfinance, with the added appeal of trusting people to know best what they themselves need.

    But hold on a minute.

    Let’s say money starts going to individuals in a Kenyan village. One buys a cow. One a motorbike taxi. Another a roof for his hut. And so on. Now what? Who’s seeing the big picture? Who’s doing the planning? Who’s creating the path to sustainable economic development? Who’s seeing that charity and government are working together to create the rising tide to lift all boats?

    Giving someone the money to buy something that helps them personally may be part of the solution, but it’s not the whole solution. You can’t build a burgeoning economy and social instutions on one-cow dairy farms.

    Some in the media are suggesting that GiveDirectly is a radical new model that will change how charities operate. Radical? Yes. Interesting? Sure. Worthwhile? Absolutely. A total game-changer? Uh-uh.

  • Another cross-channel strategy to (maybe) add to the list

    A lot of donor activity these days is cross-channel. A typical cross-channel matchup is direct mail and website. Another is direct mail and email. Now we can add one more to the list — TV and twitter.

    Well, maybe. This is very new — actually still in beta — and as you’ll see, it ideally does involve a third channel as well. Twitter is testing a service that brings TV viewers and Twitter users together in an interactive way. This is no small thing, since about 32 million people in the U.S. tweet about the programs they watch. The potential is there.

    This service lets advertisers send targeted tweets to people watching the programs in which the ad has appeared. Of course this blending of TV advertising and Twitter is ideal for packaged goods — products like chewing gum and shampoo. You can just see American Idol viewers being thrilled to receive a tweet with an offer for Dentyne after watching the commercial about kissable breath.

    But it could work for fundraising too. Let’s say you’re an animal-welfare charity, and you’re running a fundraising spot on TV. With Twitter’s TV ad targeting, you can send tweets to people on Twitter as they watch the program in which your TV spot runs. The tweet reminds viewers about the ad they just saw, reinforces the need to save animals, and offers a link that takes viewers to your website to give.

    Or let’s say you’re a disaster-relief charity. When a major disaster occurs, the news coverage is usually wall-to-wall. You could send tweets about your relief and recovery work (with a link to your donation page) to people on Twitter who are viewing that coverage.

    This is a way to reach out to potential donors with a second medium that they’re already using as they watch TV, and it makes your TV spot suddenly interactive.

    Granted, Twitter isn’t the donor-relationship hotspot that Facebook is right now. But that will likely change as Twitter continues to evolve. Depending on your cause, your offer, and your audience, this Twitter-TV connection might be something to keep an eye on.

     

  • 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.

  • Profiting from nonprofits?

    You might think that tough-minded, profit-motivated, practical business people wouldn’t have much to learn from a bunch of granola-crunchers working in nonprofits. You’d be wrong. The nonprofit sector is a huge enterprise. Think of The Salvation Army. Think of the Red Cross. They’re multinational organizations with billion-dollar budgets. You don’t get there by being ineffectual.

    So what can we learn from them? Here are three examples.

    1. Find and use stories. Ask just about anyone working in a nonprofit and just about any fundraiser, and they’ll tell you it’s critical to have a collection of stories describing what the nonprofit does. If it’s the APSCA, they have stories about abused animals that have been rescued. If it’s World Relief, they have stories about feeding people in Africa who are starving. Nonprofits are constantly on the lookout for compelling stories that illustrate what they do.

    Why the emphasis on stories? Because nonprofits know that statistics don’t engage people. Facts don’t engage people. Even celebrity endorsements often don’t engage people. But stories do.

    Stories create an immediate emotional bond with donors and encourage them to open their wallets. That’s because a specific story about one person being helped is something that donors can relate to. They can’t relate to 100,000 people suffering from malnutrition – that doesn’t connect. But a story about a person who’s starving to death – that will.

    Think about your product and your customers. Is there a story about how your product solved a tough problem or improved a customer’s life in some way? There has to be. All you have to do is find it, and a good place to start looking is your sales people, since they talk to customers all the time.

    Once you have your story – or better yet, several stories – think about how you can use it … how you can incorporate it into brochures and other marcom materials, press releases, sales presentation, even your 30-second elevator speech.

    2. Rediscover the passion. People in nonprofits look at their jobs differently from people in private-sector businesses. They have a goal – a big goal. Not to get a raise or to increase profits over last quarter (although nonprofit people like raises, and they’re always trying to generate more revenue through fundraising). Their goal is to make the world a better place. And no, that’s not just cockeyed idealism. It’s a way to get their staff focused and fired up.

    A charity like World Relief, for example, is dedicated to protecting vulnerable people around the world who are suffering in poverty and hunger. Everyone on staff – from the administrative assistants to the fundraising staff to the Executive Director – knows that each individual job is contributing to that larger goal. They know what they’re doing and why. And that inspires passion.

    Think about how you can link what your company does to a larger goal and so give people something to be passionate about beyond their next paycheck. It’s not as farfetched as it might seem. Apple doesn’t just make computers. They help people become more creative – a noble goal. Your company has a larger goal too. To find it, just think about all the ways your product or service makes people’s lives better. Not just product features – think big. Go for the big benefit. In fact, go for the biggest.

    3. Ramp up the dedication. People working in nonprofits are often highly dedicated in their work, and a large part of the reason is the big goal mentioned earlier. When people rally around a common purpose, they tend to find their own sense of personal dedication inside themselves. And if it’s a goal they personally believe in, they’ll work harder than they will for any other external reward, including more money.

    Consider a charity like The Salvation Army. The people working there make far less than they would in the private sector, yet they’re overwhelmingly committed to the organization. They love their work. And they love the organization and what it stands for. Because of it, they have a personal stake in what they do, and that’s something no pep talk, motivational speech, or HR initiative could ever accomplish.

    Think about your shared purpose and your big goal. Those are the keys to real dedication. As marketing guru Seth Godin has said again and again, people desperately want to do work that matters. It’s something that workers in nonprofits already know. Make your work matter too.

  • Tell me a story — but make it fast

    Storytelling. It’s an essential part of persuasion for fundraising and marketing.

    But your story can’t be a rambling, meandering yarn that goes on without a point. Not in the hyper-paced, information-now world we live in. No, stories have to be focused and most of all succinct.

    How to stay on point? A good place to start is by crystallizing the message … to determine the crux of the story before writing to make sure the point you’re making is right out front.

    That’s where the six-word story comes in.

    What’s a six-word story? It’s kind of like a haiku poem with a dash of narrative thrown in. It gives just enough information for the reader to fill in the blanks. More importantly, it’s a great exercise to get to the heart of your story and keep it front and center as you write the longer version.

    One of the most famous six-word stories is this one from Hemmingway:

    For sale: baby shoes. Never used.

    Just six simple words that start the story playing in the reader’s head.

    For marketing, think of a case history about how someone used the product you’re selling; or for fundraising, how someone benefited from the services they received from the charity. Then pare it down to its essence, to six simple words.

    That’s the key message of your story.

    Try a six-word story when you’re working on your next marketing or fundraising project. It’s a great exercise.

    For inspiration, visit a great website – http://www.sixwordstories.com – and see stories on just about every conceivable topic that capture your imagination while they celebrate brevity. It is the soul of wit, after all.

  • What’s the right pacing for your promotional copy?

    A direct response letter – whether it’s for fundraising or for a consumer or B2B product –tends to take on a life of its own. It has a tone, a voice, an overall feel.

    A big part of creating that feel is pacing – how the letter moves along once the reader starts into it, how it progresses from beginning to end.

    Here are a couple of good examples from the fundraising world.

    The first is from Mercy Home, a well-known charity. The letter comes in a window envelope without any teaser.

    At the top of the letter is a Johnson Box that says, “If you read one letter from me this year, please read this one … because what I’m about to tell you is a limited-time opportunity – and concerns the future of every child at Mercy Home.”

    Then the letter begins:

    Dear Mrs. Joan Sample,

    I met recently with a member of our Board of Directors, a good friend of Mercy Home. And he gave me some of the biggest news I’ve heard in a very long time.

    He told me that if I can raise $52,000 by August 31 for our kids, he will match it with another $52,000!

    Allow me to explain.

    That means if you send a gift of $10 to help our kids right now – you’ll really be offering a total gift of $20 toward giving our kids the second chance they desperately need!

    Okay, it’s a matching grant appeal, a fairly commonplace offer to donors in which each gift is doubled by a charitable grant. But in this letter, it took a Johnson box and four paragraphs to get the reader to that point.

    Now compare that with a completely different way of pacing, this one from Bible League.

    The envelope has the teaser, “Now your gift will go twice as far! See inside …”

    At the top of the letter is a brief and direct overline – “Special grant will double your gift!” – and the letter dives right in.

    Dear Mrs. Joan Sample,

    Great news! Now your gift goes twice as far. You can place twice as many Bibles in the hands of the spiritually hungry who are begging for an opportunity to read God’s Word.

    Imagine – twice as many! And the best part is, there’s no need to add even one extra cent to the amount of your donation. I’m thrilled to tell you this, because demand for scripture is exploding. Here’s how it works …

    Notice the difference between these two approaches. The first mailing sidles up to the reader gingerly, almost tentatively. There’s the plain envelope, the Johnson box that refers somewhat vaguely to need. And even when the letter begins, it takes its time getting around to the matching grant, and then goes on to explain how the grant works.

    All of this is no doubt deliberate. Mercy Homes knows its donors. Maybe the charity rarely offers a matching grant and feels it must allow donors the time to warm up to the idea. Or maybe the slower pacing is simply intended to match the sentiments of its donors base, most of whom are seniors.

    It’s completely different from the second letter, the one from Bible League.

    Right from the get-go, this letter takes aim at the donor’s gift. The teaser on the envelope puts the matching grant squarely in the donor’s sights. The overline on the letter reinforces it, and then the letter immediately presents the benefit to the donor – the fact that her donation will be automatically doubled.

    Where the first letter is relaxed and calm in the way that it brings readers along, the second one is more rushed, more in-your-face, more of an overt push for a donation.

    These are two widely different ways of going about pacing a letter. It’s not that fast pacing is better than slow or that an overt push is better than a more subtle one. It just depends. Just as salesperson will sometimes mirror the gestures and expressions of his prospect, the pacing of a letter has to match up with the temperament of the reader. When it comes to results, getting that right makes all the difference.

  • Make your webinar sell — 3 traps to avoid

    It seems as if there are more webinars on offer than ever. Just about every topic in marketing and fundraising is covered, along with just about every other conceivable subject in business or commerce. There are even all-day “conference” webinars, complete with virtual coffee breaks. And perhaps not surprisingly, there are webinars on giving webinars.

    The proliferation is understandable. After all, not much beats a webinar for reaching prospects inexpensively. I’ve been on the receiving end of lots of them, and unfortunately they can often fall short of delivering specific, actionable, useful information. That includes paid webinars as well as free ones. If you’ve attended even some of these events on the webinar circuit, you know it’s true.

    What’s also true is that the presenters don’t want people coming away feeling shortchanged for having spent an hour in their busy day. Certainly the audience doesn’t what that either. So, to the folks out there who are putting webinars together, for the sake of all of us who will be watching and listening, please …

    · Don’t serve up some vague aphorisms about strategy, planning, and benchmarking, and think that it’s information people can use. If we come to a webinar on marketing or fundraising, we want specifics we can put to use right now, today – not the airy, hand-waving, 10,000-foot perspective. We get enough of that in meetings. Give us tips, techniques, how-tos. That’s what we’d expect in an in-person seminar. Why should a webinar be any different?

    · Don’t simply repeat what’s on the slide. It’s the curse of the deadly PowerPoint presentation transferred to our computer screens. If the slide is filled with copy and the webinar presenter is simply going to read what we can see for ourselves on our screens, what do we need a presenter for? No, the wording should be simple bullet-pointed phrases, in most cases. And those phrases should just be thought markers, to provide the presenter with a jumping off point for expanding on the ideas presented and offering more specifics and insight – maybe even an anecdote or a war story. That’s what we want.

    · Don’t speak softly or in a monotone. One of the advantages of a webinar is the same as that of attending an in-person conference – hearing someone speak confidently and enthusiastically about a topic. It’s frustrating for people in the audience to have the moderator interrupt the proceedings to say that people are emailing in with the comment that they can’t hear the presenter. It happens all the time. And it’s just as frustrating to sit through a monologue that’s monotone. Instead, we want the presenter’s enthusiasm to come through so we can get excited about the topic too.

    What do you think? How can webinars be more useful?

    Meantime … obviously not all webinars are poorly done. Many are engaging and useful. Webinars given by Seth Godin and Clay Shirky come to mind. The ones that I attended were so interesting that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who went back the next day to replay them. And neither of these guys hardly even used slides. They let their passion for their topic bring the event to life. And so it did.

  • How NOT to telemarket

    Lots of nonprofits telemarket to persuade donors to give. They can, because the do-not-call laws don’t apply to them. But even so, there’s a right way and a wrong way.

    I received a phone call a few days ago from a nonprofit I support. Without naming names, it’s a well-known civil liberties charity. The guy on the other end of the phone introduced himself politely and explained why he was calling. He went into his rap about what the charity does and why it needs donor support.

    I told him that I was in full support of the charity’s mission but that I preferred to be contacted only by mail. I was expressing a clear preference.

    The caller acknowledged my preference – which is good. But he didn’t honor it – which is very bad. He could have reassured me that future contact would be by mail, politely thanked me for my time, and hung up. Instead, he decided to see this situation as what’s euphemistically called a “service-recovery opportunity.”

    He launched into a lecture about how vital donor support is to keep the work of the charity going. This went on for some minutes. After which, he asked me to make a donation now over the phone and then sign on to become a sustaining member with monthly contributions from my credit card.

    I again reiterated my preference for contact by mail.

    Undaunted, he took a fall-back position. After another dissertation about the need for donors to pony up, he asked for a single donation now over the phone.

    Finally, getting frustrated, I told him that I supported charity’s mission but wanted to be contacted only by mail, and bid him a hasty goodbye. The lasting impression from having been worked over like that for a donations was, “can you believe that guy?”

    Not the impression any nonprofit would want to create. Telemarketing is a fundraising channel that’s supposed to complement other channels like direct mail and email. Telemarketing like this doesn’t compliment other channels – it harms them.

    When I’m contacted by that organization in the future, instead of thinking kindly about them, I’m going to hesitate. That hesitation – even if it’s only for a moment – is deadly for fundraisers. That hesitation could spell the difference between meeting a budget goal and falling short. It’s vital to eliminate it, because as fundraisers, that fleeting moment of decision – or indecision – is all that we get. We have to make the most of it.