Talk about your donors, not yourself

The top reason fundraising efforts fail: They're not about donors. They're inwardly focused, usually obsessing about:

• How effective we are.
  
• How respected we are.
  
• How unique we are.
  
• How urgent our need is.
  

If that's what you're telling donors, you're missing the point. If you want to motivate a donor, you need to talk to her about herself:

• How effective she is.
  
• How unique she is.
  
• How your urgent need aligns with her values.
  

Future Now, home of the A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect blog offers a quick, neat way to see whether your talking about your donor or yourself: the Customer Focus Calculator.

Check it out. You can either enter a URL or paste in a block of copy. You'll get a score of your Customer Focus Rate. You might be amazed by what you learn.

Shifting your focus from yourself to your donor will improve results. Every time.

Technorati Tags: direct marketing, copywriting

Comments

[BigBlueBottle]

Thanks for this. My group and I are in the process of gearing up on a fund-raising campaign for our team in the Pan-Mass Challenge, and ride across Massachusetts in support of the Dana-Farber Institute, and I have been so caught up in the process of writing why WE were important, that I missed some of this.

[Jeff Brooks]

Best of luck! I hope you raise a ton of money and have a great time doing it.

[Allison Kurpius]

I'm going to make the customer focus calculator mandatory for all our clients - and for us as writers and consultants. You're right on target with your focus on the "you" not the "we." Just completed work on cases for giving after an inspirational kick from Tom Ahern, who writes about the same thing in Raising More Money with Newsletter than You Ever Thought Possible. I'm planning to pass along the caclulator to a few unsuspecting clients and friends. I can think of several people stuck on we, we, we.