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Learn about ten of the main reasons donors stop supporting a charity and what you can do to prevent those things in your relationships with donors. Includes four practical tips for keeping donors happily involved with your organization.
To listen, click here to download the audio file or visit the Fundraising Is Beautiful page here, where you'll find several listening and subscription options.
Or subscribe with iTunes: 
How often have you read a fundraising appeal that couldn't quite work up the courage to tell the reader what they ought to do?
It happens all the time. When it comes time to ask, many of us stop using direct language and start using hints, metaphors, and double-talk.
The Direct Creative Blog has noticed this too and has some advice: Be bossy in your copy! Big mistake. If you want people to do something, tell them clearly and exactly what:
People are not proactive most of the time. Yes, they'll know they need to fill out the order form or call a phone number or visit a Web site, but with their brain in passive mode, knowing doesn't translate into doing. Giving a little command such as "call now" is often all it takes to push the action button in their brain.
It's not bossy, really. It's just being clear. And that's a service to your readers, who really don't have the time (most of them) to figure out what your hints mean.
Technorati Tag: copywriting
After years of increasing, the volume of direct mail is expected to decrease this year, according to a survey by Direct magazine: Survey Shows Mail Volume Slowdown.
(The survey only looked at consumer and business-to-business direct mail, not nonprofit.)
Basically, the survey finds that fewer businesses plan to increase direct mail, and more plan to decrease it. That's something that happens in recessionary times.
And, if you're smart, it's very good news for you.
It means your mail sits in a less-packed mailbox, so it gets more mind-share. Unless you make the same mistake and cut back too.
Recession is not time for business-as-usual for fundraisers; it does have a negative impact on fundraising. But the last thing you should do is cut back. Doing that will only deepen and prolong your own down-turn.
Technorati Tags: direct mail, recession
It looks like the brand shamans are at work again. This time, they got their hands on Oxfam Great Britain. With typical results.
The Intelligent Giving blog takes a look at it in Hooray for Oxfam! I'm not exactly saying hooray about this bizarre travesty.
First, I should say I admire the fact that they opened up their "new look" to comments at New-look Oxfam - tell us what you think!. Here's where you see first-hand that everyone is an expert. And while I'd rather have people talking about what a nonprofit does than how they look, engagement is good. Another thing they've done that I think quite nice is a sort of tagline they use here and there: Get rich quick. Give. Brilliant, really. Donor-centered and true.
Now the ugly stuff. They've fallen into a couple of typical errors that seem to be endemic among newly branded nonprofits:
1. Hard-to-read design
Like so many others new brands, Oxfam's has chosen to favor a saturated color palette, especially colored type over colored backgrounds.
Special note to Branding Design Wizards: That's hard to read. It's hard to read in print; it's hard to read online. And what's hard to read doesn't get read.
Please -- have mercy on bifocal-wearing duffers like myself (and everyone else, really) by sticking to the design basics. The purpose of design is to enhance and clarify the message, not to obscure it by making it hard to read.
Why do the Brand Shamans always do this? Did they all go to the same Bad Design School? Or have they been told "nobody reads anyway," so you might as well design for looks without reference to readability? Or are they hiding something?
2. Reducing the message to abstractions
What's the deal? Oxfam does all kinds of very cool, very specific things to fight hunger and poverty. But when it comes to messaging, the new brand wants to reduce it all to symbolic actions against symbolic problems.
This isn't unique to Oxfam's new brand. It happens nearly every time the Brand Geniuses touch a nonprofit brand. You'd think they're allergic to reality.
A freakish example of the abstractionism at work is a TV spot created for the new Oxfam brand (you can see it here on YouTube if you want a laugh).
In the real world, donors give actual money in real amounts to help organizations do real things that have actual outcomes in the lives of real people. In Oxfam's new brand world, people vomit white stuff at animated conceptual words like "injustice," and this is how the world becomes a better place -- or at least one covered with rainbows. (I'm not being silly -- that's what you see in the ad.)
Maybe the urge toward unreadable design and the urge to make the message abstract are facets of the same problem: They don't like the real world. They want to hide it.
Maybe that feels good to some people. But it's not going to motivate actual donors.
So if the Brand Shamans come sniffing around, offering a super-cool new brand -- just say no!
Technorati Tags: fundraising, Oxfam
Why are some nonprofits reluctant to get out their message? Because they think that's marketing, and they think marketing is evil
Many churches have the same delusion, according to Church Marketing Online at Is Marketing Evil?
The marketing is evil argument says you should do it because:
Sometimes marketing is one or more of those things. But none of those things are innate qualities of marketing.
Your marketing doesn't have to be manipulative, superficial, sucky, or annoying. If it is, shame on you.
But if you're hiding your light under a bushel on the perceived belief that telling others about you is automatically manipulative, superficial, sucky, or annoying -- well, double shame on you.
Good marketing -- especially that done by good nonprofits -- motivates people do be and do their best. It goes to the heart of what it is to be human. It's smart. It's welcomed by those it's aimed at.
Down with evil marketing! Up with good marketing!
Thanks to Church Marketing Sucks for the tip.
Technorati Tags: marketing
Here's my column in this month's FundRaising Success magazine, Six Bad Habits of Ineffective Fundraisers.
Teaser: Are you asking folks who routinely write you checks for $500 to give you $20? If you are, you're not only leaving money on the table, you're saying loud and clear, "We don't really know you!"
You don't have to be an "expert" to know that your donors don't all think the way you do. In fact, as the Customer Experience Matters blog notes at Your Customers Are Martians, "The gender gap is nothing compared with the company-customer gap." In fact, you could say companies are from Venus and customers are from Mars.
Or nonprofits are from Venus, donors are from Mars. (Or the other way 'round!)
You think it's important for everyone to fully understand your methods and processes. Donors want to make the world a better place.
As long as you focus on methods and processes, you aren't communicating with those donors.
There's nothing wrong with your methods and processes. I hope they're very good. I hope they're part of what set you apart. They're just beside the point for most donors, most of the time.
When you learn to think like a donor, you'll see what's important to them. And you'll communicate better.
Technorati Tag: marketing
It's here. The spiffiest new fundraising podcast on the block: Fundraising Is Beautiful -- inspiration and ammunition for fundraisers.
If you believe fundraising can change the world, I think you'll enjoy the podcast. Today's program is called "The Myth of Donor Burnout." Don't miss it.
It's created by me and Steven Screen of ÜberDirect -- both fundraising geeks. We don't see fundraising as a necessary evil. And it's not an unwanted sidekick of good deeds. Fundraising is itself a great good deed that helps make people kinder, wiser, more centered, and more joyful than they are if they don't give to charity. That's what fundraising does before one cent goes to the good causes that help change the world.
To listen, jump over to fundraisingisbeautiful.org, where you'll find several listening and subscription options.
Or, if you use iTunes to manage your podcasts, save yourself the trip and just click here:
Here's one of those blogosphere storms, nicely summed up at Web Strategy by Jeremiah in Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked, Collateral Damage in Anti-Genocide Campaign.
Seems an artist named Nadia Plesner created this image to make an obscure point about Darfur. Then, stupidly, Louis Vuitton sued her for misusing their brand.
The point, apparently, is that Paris Hilton types get a lot of media exposure, while the suffering masses in Darfur don't. So let's show a starving child with Paris Hilton accessories. The point being ... well ... it seems trenchant and edgy, anyhow.
This is just an artist expressing her opinion, not a nonprofit trying to motivate anyone to action, so it's technically not a stupid nonprofit ad. But it's exactly the type of thing some nonprofits love to do: complex visual meta-metaphors that, should you take the trouble to analyze them, tell you you're a dolt for not thinking they way they do.
The other lesson from this situation -- the one that's got all the blogs going -- is what should Louis Vuitton do when someone hijacks their brand?
Well, one thing they shouldn't do for sure is sue an artist who's trying to stand up for starving babies. Because now it looks like International Fashion Designer vs. Starving Babies. Yeah, that really keeps their precious brand intact.
Vuitton could have joined in and turned the noise in their favor. But the brand cops just don't get it, and think they can wield total control over what people say in a world where anyone can talk to almost anyone.
Similar things can happen to nonprofit brand. (A fun recent example is this video from The Onion: Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish For Unlimited Wishes.)
You can ignore it. Or you can join the party and grab some of the attention. But don't sue. It makes you look like an idiot. And it doesn't stop the talk.
Technorati Tags: fundraising, Louis Vuitton, Darfur
This will blow your mind. Watch this video, then ask yourself: What does this "cognitive surplus" mean for nonprofits? I think we should get out the champagne and celebrate. But it's a little bit scary too. You'll see what I mean.
Thanks to Steven Screen and Lifehacker for the tip.
Technorati Tag: fundraising
If it's obvious, why doesn't everybody do it this way?
The Constant Contact Blog shows how to Get your readers to take action in email marketing. Briefly:
By the way, this applies also to offline fundraising.
Thanks to BeRelevant for the tip.
Technorati Tag: fundraising
Have you ever given an assignment to a writer, and when the copy came back it wasn't at all what you wanted?
It happens. Whose fault is it? There are two possibilities:
That's because creating clear, complete, thought-through assignment is very hard to do. So hard, in fact, that most people don't bother to do it.
That's where the brief comes in, as described at Ted Grigg's Reflections about Direct Marketing in The Seven Essentials of the Direct Marketing Creative Brief. (This post focuses on creating a brief for a commercial direct-marketing project, but nearly all the principles apply to fundraising projects.) Here's some of Ted's advice about a good brief:
The key: Put all the important stuff in writing. If it isn't written down, don't assume anyone knows it. Even if everyone knows it, put it in writing to make sure. Then require your writer to read and understand it.
Every hour you put in at the front end of the job (before the creative process starts) saves you between two and ten hours later on. So writing a brief may be a pain, but it's less painful than trying to figure out what you want said through multiple drafts of copy.
Technorati Tags: marketing, copywriting
The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants for this week is up, at The Bamboo Project Blog.
A new study, the 2008 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, (done by NTEN and M+R Strategic Services has some useful facts, culled from the experiences of a number of nonprofits online:
My experience is similar. Revenue coming to nonprofits through the web is growing by double digits every year. We no doubt have a few more years of that to look forward to before it slows down.
On the other hand, raising funds by means of e-appeals is getting tougher -- no doubt because our donors' inboxes are getting fuller. Growth of online files tends to more than make up for lower response numbers.
Lesson: If you aren't actively at work online, you are losing money. And if you aren't experimenting with tactics and strategies for online fundraising, you are painting yourself into a corner.
Press release here, full study available for download here (registration required).
Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech
Seth Godin makes another of his good points, this time about the role of copyeditors, in Sucking all the juice out.
Seems a copyeditor got her hands on something he'd written and turned it all "boring and dry and mechanical." Trouble is, many copyeditors (and all kinds of others) think their job is to "normalize" copy, taking out everything that makes it eccentric, unusual, and non-standard -- that is, everything that gives it life and makes it memorable:
If the job description of your lawyer or boss or editor or client is to make sure everything is pure and perfect and proven and beyond reproach, they are making things worse, not better.
Amen. Just say no to boring copy. And to the people who think it's their job to make copy boring.
The world is filled with lifeless, dull writing. If you have a writer who's capable of the kind of crazy, energetic writing that grabs attention -- leave it alone. Correct the spelling. Put the commas in the right places. Fix any inaccuracies. But leave the rest alone!
Technorati Tags: fundraising, copyediting
It's one of the most self-destructive myths active in fundraising: That if you ask donors too often they'll stop giving. Or, as Step by Step Fundraising calls it, The Myth of the Dried Up Well.
If you're relevant, honest, and respectful to your donors, you can't ask too much.
Or, as Step by Step put it:
If your organization is one of your donor’s favorites (and if you’re doing your job well, it should be), they WANT to support you and see you be successful. They care about your mission and they know it takes resources for you to fulfill it.And they will be a well that you can visit as often as is needed.
Don't worry about too much asking. Worry about too little relevance.
Technorati Tag: marketing revolution
Get your head around this trippy inference, expressed at The Power of Influence: Coming soon - Advertising damages your brand. Here's how it goes:
Brands that need to use traditional advertising are not getting (enough) personal recommendation to succeed.... Brands that have to rely on traditional advertising are not as good as ones that succeed through word of mouth.... Advertising will actually damage a brand's reputation
Not as weird as it might sound. You may have noticed the impulse in people around you: Folks sometimes distrust brands that seem "over-marketed." They search for better, more obscure, the recommended-by-someone-cool.
A generation ago, advertising helped "validate" brands. Not so much any more.
What does this mean to nonprofits? We seldom have the budgets to overexpose ourselves and saturate television with spots. But do we ever "try too hard" and create the impression that we don't really have much to offer?
If we get our cues from the advertising world, we probably make the same mistakes they make. But more imortant -- and more likely -- we should be asking ourselves if we're offering donors something truly remarkable to do. Something that would actually spread through word-of-mouth, making advertising unnecessary.
Technorati Tags: advertising, fundraising
So often, fundraising copy just sounds wooden, artificial, and inhuman.
Here's a sample, pulled at random from the Donor Power Fortress of Charity Junk Mail Vault:
Winter disasters and other emergencies are on the way. And your gift to [name of charity deleted] is critically important. Please send your gift of $35, $25, $50 or more right way. Use the enclosed envelope, or simply call [phone number deleted].
There's nothing flat-out bad about this copy. It's clear and readable, which is more than you can say for a lot of copy that gets written and published. There's just one thing:
It doesn't sound like a human being. No mentally healthy person would speak those sentences. It sounds like a robot.
Here's what we need to get into our heads: Nobody wants to hear from a robot any more than they have to! We waste too many hours with voice-mail menus, voice-recognition bots, auto-generated emails, and inhuman notifications from our banks, insurance companies, utilities, and others.
It's soul-crushing. People shouldn't have to put up with it. Increasingly, they're refusing to put up with it.
There's nothing forcing you to write that way. When you write to donors -- whether you're asking for money, thanking them for a gift, telling them what their giving accomplished, or even taking care of details -- keep it natural, warm, and human. Make sure you're awake from the organizational stupor that can strike.
And then write like a human. Your donors will thank you for it.
Technorati Tags: fundraising, copywriting
I'm pleased to report another nonprofit guarantee has cropped up out there, as reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Keeping Promises to Donors.
The smart organization that's offering a guarantee is DonorsChoose, which I've written about a lot.
Here's how this guarantee works: When you donate to DonorsChoose, you get real feedback from the classrooms whose projects you fund (it's very cool). But sometimes, around 2% of the time, something goes wrong and there's no feedback to the donor. In that case, DonorsChoose contacts the donor with the offer to fund a different project at the organization's expense. The funds to make this possible are from a grant made specifically for that purpose (nice touch).
Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose, said of the guarantee, "Proactively admitting a screw-up generates a whole lot of good will. Instances abound of donors saying they will give more."
It's still not the iron-clad, no-questions-asked donor guarantee that donors are eventually going to demand.
But it's another step in the right direction.
Technorati Tags: guarantee, DonorsChoose
If you know they're watching, you're nicer. That's more or less what a recent study found, as reported by Reuters: Worried about gossip? It could influence generosity.
Study subjects were asked to distribute tokens with monetary value between themselves and someone else. Half were told that what they did was going to be discussed...
Participants who were told that the receiver would be communicating their economic decision with the third party were significantly more generous in their allocations of the tokens than participants who were not led to believe that their decisions would be discussed.
So once they thought others would know what they were up to, their philanthropic behavior improved. Big surprise, huh?
One of the reasons donors give is because they are part of a community. Call it gossip, or call it social interchange, but communities keep tabs on their members -- and members keep their eyes on their communities.
It's easy in our numbers-driven direct-response fundraising world to see donor transactions as isolated, private events. That's what they are -- sometimes. But more often, a donor gives for more than purely internal motives.
This may be one of the reasons large disasters like Hurricane Katrina motivate so many people to donate: Everyone's doing it; I guess I'd better do it too.
You probably don't want to encourage donors to rat each other out. But what can you do to foster the community that encourages giving?
Technorati Tag: fundraising
A well-built website is wonderful thing. But it's only a start, according to the Connection Café in Think Outside the Site. Your online strategy should also include:
Your website is really just a brochure. It just sits there; one piece of a larger communication nexus. If you build the coolest website on the planet, but that's your entire online strategy, it's not going to do you a lot of good.
Technorati Tags: fundraising, websites
I got tagged by one of those goofy blog memes, where you're asked to post something odd and tag more people to do the same. A long time ago, I vowed I wouldn't participate in such exercises. Then I realized I enjoyed reading them in other people's blogs when I saw them.
So today I break my vow. Here's what I've been tagged to do:
(At least I don't have to reveal something embarrassing.)
I'm thankful that the nearest book wasn't some geeky fundraising, marketing, or nonprofit management book -- there are plenty of those around. That would have been so boring.
The nearest book, A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, was less than 123 pages long. So I picked up the next nearest book, The Secret History of the English Language by M.J. Harper, which yielded a delightfully out-of-context passage:
How many Latin-speakers do you suppose a 2nd-century shepherd in the Auvergne is going to come across in the course of his lifetime? What, in your opinion, is the likelihood of him meeting, then marrying, a Latin-speaking shepherdess and raising Latin-speaking children? Apparently they all did.
The person who tagged me was Michael Hovnanian of the Bass Blog.
I tag the following bloggers:
This tagging has no teeth -- no curse if you don't obey or good luck if you do. But it could be interesting if you want to play along.
Before you get too wound up about your lack of a social media strategy, check out what a recent survey, reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, said: Few Charity Supporters Read Nonprofit Blogs (subscription required) ...
Only a small percentage of charity supporters -- 6 percent -- read blogs, social-networking sites, or RSS feeds to keep up with the organizations they care about, according to a new survey.But 43 percent of the people surveyed said that they were interested in receiving such information through social-media tools.
You know me and surveys (always take them with a grain of salt). But this does point out that these spiffy new Web 2.0 tools are still pretty exotic and unusual among donors.
Unless you have an unusually young or tech-savvy donorbase, your investments in these things are still pretty speculative. Spending in those areas is not likely to bring a lot of ROI. Yet.
Gold rushes are exciting, I'm told. Everybody putting all their effort into the same dream at the same time and same place. In the end, though, most of the panicky speculators go home disappointed. Other than a few lucky prospectors, the people who make the money are the ones who took it slow, didn't lose their heads, paid attention.
So keep your eyes open. The charitable giving landscape is changing. But don't bet the farm on sudden change, or change in one particular direction.
Technorati Tags: fundraising, web 2.0
