The most valuable thing in direct mail fundraising isn’t your donors, but your donor data. Your building could burn down this afternoon, and all your staff could quit, and you’d still be able to recover if your donor data remained intact. But if you lose your donor data, you lose, period. Read the rest of this entry »
The best way to improve your direct mail fundraising program is through testing. Don’t follow fads, board whims, or a gut feeling that turns out to be indigestion.
Instead, test. And, to save money and time (and further indigestion), follow these eight rules. Read the rest of this entry »
I received an email the other day that reads as follows:
–letter starts–
Hello Mr. Raiser,
My name is _______. I work for a non profit organization, the ____________. We are in a season of taking the ministry international and also growing and empowering the ministries within. I would like to draft up a professional letter, that will go out to major corporations and empowered people, asking for donations, and for it in return be a tax write off! My goal is to mail/email a donation letter to different large companies and multi-millionaires example Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump. I’m not sure at all as to how to even begin the letter. Please help! Read the rest of this entry »
One of your best sources of direct mail donations is people who have stopped giving you direct mail donations. We call these people “lapsed donors” and “expired members,” two uncharitable ways of referring to friends who have not given a donation in 12 months or more. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in 1997, as I sat in the departures lounge at Ottawa International Airport, I didn’t know if Ruth would accept my proposal of marriage. I fidgeted. I procrastinated. Finally, as they announced the final call for her flight back to Ohio, I popped the question.
Ruth said yes. Yes!
That’s the tough part about asking someone to marry you. You have to ask them. You don’t know what their answer will be until you ask, and unless you ask. Read the rest of this entry »
Search engines are the most common way that potential donors will find your website. A non-profit website that appears near the top of search engine results will witness a dramatic increase in traffic compared with competing websites that appear further down in the results.
Like every other charity, you want a high ranking on the search engines. Unfortunately, many charity websites appear poorly in search engine rankings-or not at all-because they are not written and designed to take advantage of how search engines work.
So how do search engines rank your web pages? Read the rest of this entry »
I have on my desk a direct mail fundraising envelope that I have never opened. And never will. Perhaps you can learn a lesson from its failings.
The offending article was mailed by the Canadian Red Cross. It is a full-colour envelope, 6.5 inches wide and 5.75 inches tall, with a window. The envelope promotes the organization’s lottery.
This envelope fails most of the tests in my book.
Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »
When you write your donor newsletter stories, do you write to one reader at a time? One person writing to another? Or do you make the common newsletter mistake of writing from “us” to “them?”
Direct mail donors are individuals. They donate as individuals. And they read your newsletters as individuals. If you want your newsletter stories to inspire them to donate again, you must write to them as individuals. And write as a human being. Read the rest of this entry »
The quickest way to improve your donor newsletters is to start seeing your world in story form. Behind every person there is a story. And behind every story there is a person. Your job is to uncover both. Your donors want to read about people, not projects. So write about people. Show photographs of people. Let me give you an example of what to avoid. Read the rest of this entry »
Your fundraising newsletter will attract more readers, raise more funds and retain more donors when you publish outstanding photographs.
Photographs are the most important images you can feature in your donor newsletter. Good photos make your newsletter pages more interesting. They help your non-profit organization communicate immediately who you are and what you do and who you help. Photos, more than other element, help you distinguish one issue of your newsletter from another.
Readers tend to look at photos first, then headlines, then photo captions, then the article. Which means your photographs must grab the attention of your readers. Here’s how to recognize a great photo when you see one (or take one). Read the rest of this entry »
Do you use direct mail fundraising letters to drive donors to your website to make their donations? If you do, make sure your website donation page answers the three most common questions asked by donors. Read the rest of this entry »
The good news is that 62 percent of adults visit a non-profit’s website before donating (according to a recent online survey conducted by Harris Interactive).
That’s also the bad news.
For many non-profits, the quickest way they can scare away donors is to direct them to the organization’s website. Too many non-profit websites are making blunders that discourage donors from browsing, donating, volunteering or referring others to the site. Here are four common blunders, and how to avoid them. Read the rest of this entry »
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?
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Your non-profit loses 15 percent of its donors every year, if you are typical. What can you do to reduce that percentage? Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is just showing up.”
He was wrong, of course. Read the rest of this entry »
Your success as a direct mail fundraiser depends on the quality of your list. A mediocre letter mailed to the right list will outperform a terrific letter mailed to the wrong list. How you build that list is up to you. Here are three ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Your job as a direct mail fundraiser is to make new friends every and keep them for as long as possible. And to do that you need two kinds of letter, acquisition and renewal. Understand the differences between these two letters and you’ll improve your results. Read the rest of this entry »
I know a non-profit that mailed a direct mail donor acquisition package to thousands of potential donors and generated a response rate of exactly zero. That’s not a typo. Not a single person responded to the mailing. Read the rest of this entry »
The bad news about grant proposal writing is that grant makers will never fund what you want them to. They only fund what they want to fund.
They fund projects that further their mission.
They fund initiatives that meet their priorities. Read the rest of this entry »
If you want to guarantee that your donors will ignore your newsletters, illustrate your stories with cliché photos. Here are the top four: Read the rest of this entry »
One day one of the greatest bores at the Player’s Club said to Oliver Herford, “Oliver, I have been grossly insulted. Just as I passed that group over there I overheard someone say he would give me fifty dollars to resign from the club.”
“Hold out for a hundred,” counselled Hereford, “you’ll get it.” Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »