My wife can still remember the name of her math teacher from grade four. You know why? Because he, um, paused every few words, and ah, ahhhhh, you know, ahh, added an ahh to what he was saying, ah, so that Ruth, was driven to, um, distraction. (more…)
If your non-profit organization is typical, your direct mail program raises 50 percent of its revenue with one mailing-the Christmas appeal. More people give more money to the “Holiday Season” letter than they give to any other single mailing all year. Your goal this Christmas is to persuade these generous donors to give again. Here’s how. (more…)
If you want your fundraising letters to sound more vigorous, get tense. The present tense, that is.
Listen to the sports news on the radio and you’ll hear the announcer saying, “tomorrow the Atlanta Falcons take on the Minnesota Vikings.” The announcer doesn’t say, “the Atlanta Falcons will take on the Minnesota Vikings.” He doesn’t say that they will, but that they do. (more…)
My wife and I listed our house for sale last Monday and sold it on Wednesday. The buyer offered us a few hundred dollars more than our asking price, so we accepted. But we have lingering doubts. Maybe you would, too.
You know how it is. You name your price, and your buyer agrees immediately. So you immediately wonder if your price was too low. Maybe that’s why the buyer agreed to your price so quickly.
In direct mail fundraising you’ll find this same challenge. How much should you ask a person to donate if they have never donated before? (more…)
Your donors do not respond to your direct mail appeals because you include a postage-paid reply envelope. They respond because they believe in your cause, admire your organization, and want to help the people you serve. (more…)
The secret to reducing your direct mail fundraising costs is counterintuitive, like fertilizer.
Next time you’re out in the boonies, watch as a farmer spreads fertilizer over his field. As he passes over the parts of his field that always produce the smallest yield, he spreads little or no fertilizer. As he passes over those parts of his field that traditionally deliver the highest yield, he pours the fertilizer on thick.
If you’re a city-slicker like me, that doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t the farmer fertilize the part of his field that obviously needs the most help? Surely the poor soil needs the fertilizer more than the healthy soil, right?
Wrong. (more…)
Want to learn a lesson in direct mail fundraising from Winston Churchill? He once observed that a fanatic is “someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
A fundraising letter fanatic, of course, is someone who thinks the only thing you can mail a donor is a fundraising letter. But that’s just one of more than 40 things you can mail to make friends and raise funds using paper and postage. (more…)
I spent last night visiting two hospitals with my four-year-old son, Spencer. I noticed that the staff at each hospital took the same vital signs (pulse, oxygen saturation, temperature, breathing) to determine Spencer’s health. Nurses and doctors miles apart, working for different hospitals, on different shifts, knew the same things to look for to determine the health of their patient.
You must do the same with your direct mail fundraising program. Here are the five vital signs to watch for to make sure your program is healthy, and remains healthy. (more…)
The secret to raising funds with direct mail appeal letters is not found in what you say or in how you say it but in why you say it.
Success is found not in technique but in truth. The truth of your case for support. That’s why, before you write a word of your fundraising letter you must state your case for why a donor should support you. I am not talking about a “case for need.” In donor-centered fundraising there is no such bird. Your needs are immaterial. What’s important to your donors is why they should support you. Their needs come first, not your’s. (more…)
When was the last time you agonized over what to put on your business reply envelope? If you’re like most non-profit organizations, your BRE never changes. You mail the same BRE with every direct mail fundraising letter. And you likely print your BREs in bulk to save on printing.
But maybe you should re-think the humble BRE. (more…)
Back in the 1990s, I worked for a non-profit organization that mailed a multi-page, full-colour newsletter to around 14,000 people each month, at a cost of around $0.50 a piece. The majority of people who received the newsletter had never given a donation to the organization. Yet the organization had been mailing thousands of these people month in and month out, for years. (more…)
If your donor has the choice of reading your fundraising letter or reading the latest issue of Reader’s Digest, which one will she read?
This is not a trick question. The competition for your donor’s attention has never been greater. If you want your donors and members to read your fundraising letters from start to finish, learn a few lessons from the editors at Reader’s Digest, the largest-selling magazine in the world. (more…)
Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.
Your job as a direct mail fundraiser is to give your donors both a reason for donating and an incentive for donating.
Your enemy is inertia. Your enemy is Coronation Street. Plenty of perfectly nice donors with perfectly good intentions to donate will nevertheless procrastinate or get distracted, lay your fundraising letter aside to deal with tomorrow, but then forget.
Which is why you should consider using an incentive, something that will give your appeal letter a sense of urgency. Something that’ll motivate your donor to act today. I recommend a deadline. Give your donor a deadline for responding and you will likely boost your response rate. (more…)
Your non-profit loses 15 percent of its donors every year, if you are typical. What can you do to reduce that percentage? (more…)
One of the quickest ways to win the attention of your distracted donors is to take a popular icon and make it a villain. By linking your cause with a trend or fad, and by taking a contrarian view, you demonstrate to donors that you are relevant, innovative and worthy of continued support. (more…)
If you want to be successful at raising money with fundraising letters, the first lesson you must learn is that there’s no such thing as a fundraising letter. (more…)
Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is just showing up.”
He was wrong, of course. (more…)
The secret to publishing compelling donor newsletters is to only publish stories that are newsworthy to your donors. But how do you decide if a story is newsworthy? Take this simple test. (more…)
If you look for wealthy donors in all the usual places you’ll receive the usual result.
Disappointment. (more…)
Next time you are arrested, pay attention to what information the police officer asks you to divulge immediately. It’s not a lot. (more…)
Casanova never penned a one-page love letter. So neither should you.
I write fundraising letters for some of the most well-known non-profits in North America, and not one of them has ever hired me to write a one-page fundraising letter. They know from testing that donors read two-page letters. And four-page letters. Even eight-page letters. Donors read what interests them, and not a word more. (more…)
One of the greatest mistakes I see non-profit organizations making is watching their dollars and not their donors. (more…)
What kind of response rates do your direct mail fundraising letters generate? (more…)
One of the easiest ways to boost net revenue in direct mail fundraising is to stop sending every appeal to every donor. (more…)
Next time you write a letter to a donor but can’t think of the best way to express yourself, let someone else do it for you.
Someone like Mother Theresa. Mark Twain. Rosa Parks. Ernest Hemmingway. (more…)
Be warned. If you’re starting a non-profit and don’t have $100,000 in the bank, don’t use direct mail. You literally cannot afford to use direct mail to raise funds right now. (more…)
How long do most of your donors contribute to your organization before they walk away? One year? Five? Ten? You should know. (more…)
One of your greatest obstacles in operating a successful annual fund is thinking of it as an annual fund. (more…)
What would you do if I mailed you a package of black and white photos? Would you throw the package in the trash unopened? (more…)
Direct mail fundraisers learned long ago that stamps boost response rates. Maybe the same will work for your sales letters. Why not test and find out? (more…)
The last thing you should ask for in a fundraising letter is a donation. You have no business asking for money until you have first persuaded your donor that you deserve her attention, value her time, appreciate her as a person, and want to partner with her in turning the world upside-down. (more…)
Want to know one of the most vital truths in direct mail fundraising? Friends stay in touch. (more…)
What would happen if the author of The Da Vinci Code wrote your next direct mail fundraising appeal letter? (more…)
I have a brother-in-law who farms and drives a 16-wheeler for a living. When I told him that I start each business day with a blank computer screen that I must fill with at least 1,000 words by noon, he almost fainted. (more…)
Direct mail fundraising is a numbers game. A game that changes all the time. Who could have predicted the advent of online giving? Or the popularity of sweepstakes? Or the rise of a generation of young donors whose primary method of communication is text messaging? (more…)
Your direct mail fundraising results never lie. But they mislead you if you let them. I worked as Director of Development for a national charity that held a lavish fundraising banquet each year. The staff, from the executive director down to the receptionist, including the development staff, thought this banquet was the organization’s most successful fundraiser. (more…)
Don’t ask me how I know, but in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings you’ll sometimes hear a member mention “The Elephant in the Living Room.” (more…)
Q. What is a premium?
A. In direct mail fundraising letters, a premium is an item offered to a donor, usually at no charge, to encourage the donor to make a donation. (more…)
I have a client whose direct mail fundraising program is in trouble. I think you can profit from his predicament. I know he is going to. (more…)
Your donors read your donor newsletter to discover news about themselves. You are of secondary interest. (more…)
How many of your current donors would give you a larger gift if you only knew how to ask them? Quite a few, quite likely. (more…)
Last time I checked, there were 25,000 response lists and 50,000 compiled lists currently on the market. Among all of these lists, you’ll find hundreds that work for fundraising appeals. Actually, you likely won’t find them. Locating the best names for your mailing is complicated and best left to an experienced list broker. (more…)
Your readers spend only a few seconds deciding the fate of your direct mail fundraising appeals. Either they open them on the spot, set them aside for later, or chuck them in the waste paper basket. Here are some creative ways to tease your donors into opening your envelopes. (more…)
Address your reader as a friend, not as “Friend.”
When was the last time you received a letter from someone dear to you, addressing you as “Dear Friend?” Never, right? (more…)
Do you want your donors to give more, do you want them to give more often, or do you want more of your donors to give?If your answer is “all of the above,” here are some tested ways to increase the size of donor gifts using fundraising letters. (more…)
Anger is one of the best emotions that you can arouse in a donor. Anger is a healthy emotion, particularly when your fundraising letter offers donors a way to assuage their anger. (more…)
Have you ever studied your best donors and wished you could clone them all? Maybe you can, with a bit of creative thinking. (more…)
New donors are a lot closer than you may think. And persuading them to make that vital first donation need not be as hard—or as expensive—as acquiring them in other ways. (more…)
Are you willing to spend $1.25 to raise $1? To lose money to make money? You should be. Most donor acquisition mailings never pay for themselves. They lose money. And rightly so. (more…)