July 2007
1. Spotlinght On Success...25 ways to stay 15 minutes ahead
By Ken Burnett
2. Answerman...How to create an appeal (Part 1)
By Peter Schoewe
3. Hands On...Getting the family on board
By Lola Mauer
4. Data...Profit
By John Sauvé-Rodd
5. What's Working...The old one-two punch
6. Copy Corner...The Darfur puppy
By Deborah Block and Paul Karps
7. Tips!
By L. M.
8. Appreciation!
By Jerry Panas
1. 25 ways to stay 15 minutes ahead
By Ken Burnett
Success in fundraising—or in any human endeavor—isn’t often a matter of big ideas and major breakthroughs. More often it’s based on an organization’s (or individual’s) ability to identify the easy wins and incremental advances that can be found in abundance, whatever your field of activity.
To my way of thinking, it’s a matter of “staying 15 minutes ahead” of the competition.
What follows is a short selection of ideas you can use to enable your nonprofit organization to be just far enough ahead of all the others to ensure you have all the success you need. Not all of what follows will be relevant for your organization. Adapt these ideas to suit your own needs and circumstances.
Good luck!
IN UNDERSTANDING YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES, RELATIVE TO THOSE OF YOUR COMPETITORS
1. At regular intervals, test your own nonprofit and others in your area that you admire or consider as competitors. Devise a formal way of monitoring how they respond to donors. Copy the best of their systems. Avoid their obvious mistakes.
2. Set customer service standards and targets that ensure your organization gives faster, friendlier, more appropriate, and better service that will delight your donors.
3. Get yourself on the mailing lists of organizations that you think you could learn from.
4. Ask for advice and support from other nonprofits. Take advantage of the generous spirit of sharing that generally prevails in the nonprofit sector.
5. Sole fundraisers or those in smaller organizations can often find willing mentors among staff of the larger organizations. It does no harm to ask.
6. Practice creative plagiarism. Search out great new ideas and copy any that might be appropriate for you.
7. Adapt, don’t just adopt.
8. Don’t neglect the possibility of copying from commercial service providers. Sadly, nonprofits don’t lead the way in being customer-friendly.
IN UNDERSTANDING AND LISTENING TO DONORS
9. Meet your donors at every opportunity. Ask their opinions and listen to their advice. (Obvious, I know. But most don’t do it. Yet it’s the best form of regular research. And it builds trust, confidence, and loyalty. And it’s free!)
10. Make yours a listening organization. Train yourself and your colleagues in donor care. Offer your donors a say in formulating your strategy. Encourage feedback, comments, questions, and complaints. Regularly research your donors’ views—and lapsed donors, too. Survey and measure donors’ satisfaction, keeping simple indices that in time will become key erformance indicators (KPIs), the regular data you use to monitor fundraising performance. You’ll be ahead in this, because most fundraisers only measure their performance in money received now.
11. Set up an annual rolling research program so you can monitor your donors’ attitudes over time. Improvements in donors’ understanding of and feelings for your nonprofit can be one of your KPIs.
12. Get your thinking right (and encourage your colleagues, too). Work on attitudes as well as techniques. Make the 90-degree shift, to see everything you do through your donors’ eyes. This takes constant practice.
13. Make sure you’re giving your donors what they want, not what you want them to have.
14. Here’s another example of the 90-degree shift. Your donors also have to understand you, so they can trust you and have confidence in you and your organization. This will be essential if donors are to let you have the information and permissions you’ll need from them, to practice true donor relationship management.
15. Take action to secure the vital second gift.
Remember, a donor’s prime needs are:
- to know the gift was received.
- to know the gift was “set to work” as intended.
- to know the project/program is having the desired effect.
IN PROVIDING AN APPROPRIATE, RESPONSIVE, CUSTOMER-LED SERVICE TO YOUR DONORS
16. Set high standards for donor service in your organization. Publish these, and make sure all staff know of them. Let your donors know, too.
17. Make sure your thank-you and welcome procedures are the best anywhere. Get a copy of Penelope Burk’s book, Donor-Centered Fundraising.
18. With a little help from Penelope’s book, create the best-ever “thank-you and welcome” policy for your organization.
19. Get thank-you letters and gift acknowledgements out within 24 hours (48 at most).
20. Set up a donor-support helpline. Have it operate at times most convenient for your donors, not for you. An answering machine outside office hours is a start.
21. Show your people. List named individuals, their job titles, photos, and phone numbers in your annual report, newsletter, or wherever appropriate. Invite contact on appropriate issues. The message is “We’re here to help you.”
22. Switch from monologue to dialogue. Ask donors to give their views. Put a contact number and name at the end of every article in your newsletter and annual report. Offer further information or follow-up.
23. Teach your staff how to be loyal to donors. Involve everyone from the receptionist to the CEO.
24. Be proactively accountable. Publish “the standards we set ourselves” in your annual report.
25. Make sure all your job titles and donor segment descriptions are the kind donors would be comfortable with. Consider, for example, that hideous sounding group, “lapsed donors.” Would you want to live next door to a “lapsed donor?” But that’s not even the worst I’ve seen. I’ve also come across organizations who have labeled groups of poorly performing donors as “the residue,” “the sediment,” and even “the dead pool.” Nearly as bad as the fundraiser who signed his letters under the grand title of “Director, Donor Targeting and Segmentation.”
Adapted from Zen and the Art of Donor Development by Ken Burnett. Copyright © Ken Burnett 2004. Printed with permission. Ken Burnett operates The White Lion Press Limited, Kermarquer, 56310 Melrand, France, phone +33 297 39 52 63, fax +33 297 39 57 59, Web www.whitelionpress.com, e-mail ken@kenburnett.com.
2. How to create an appeal (Part 1)
By Peter Schoewe
The appeals you send to your housefile donors can be the most perplexing mailings to create. Because you’re talking to the people who know and like you, the temptation is to load up the appeal with information about programmatic initiatives and bury, deep at the end of the letter, a timid reminder that additional funds would be a welcome surprise.
Of course, this is absolutely the wrong way to go about creating an appeal. Appeals should be targeted to the donor audience rather than created around programmatic initiatives. They should state in a frank and obvious manner that you’re asking for an additional gift—and they should be tested and refined as much as any acquisition control.
But, luckily, once you turn your thinking about appeals around, it’s not difficult to create a mailing that’s a success at appealing for funds, while still expanding the understanding your donors have of your organization and its mission.
There are four elements—beyond the Ask, offer, and package—that go toward creating a successful appeal. If you can combine all four into one mailing, you probably have a recordbreaking appeal on your hands. But if you look at an upcoming appeal’s strategy and find none of the four present, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
(1) The first element of a successful appeal is urgency. Even donors who have been contributing to your cause for decades will respond more readily to an urgent need than a request for continuing help. If your organization has any unforeseen expenses, if your budget is out of whack, or if issues close to your organization’s mission are in the news, all of these are good reasons to create an appeal with an urgent Ask.
One thing to note: Even though an urgent appeal may be built around a once-in-a-lifetime issue, that’s no reason to create a new package from scratch. A well-run direct mail fundraising program should have package treatments and reply device techniques tested and ready to go that are known to work with different types of Asks.
(2) The second element of a successful appeal is specificity. If you can state you need a specific amount of money to accomplish a specific goal, you’ll inspire more donors to make an extra gift to your cause. Your job is to fight for copy that’s specific about your organization’s needs, while avoiding language that requires gifts to be restricted in any way.
(3) The third element of a successful appeal is emotional connection. I’ve written before about the plague of direct mail fundraising copy that’s sterile, trite, or watered-down. Appeal copy, like acquisition copy, needs to jump over a high bar to stand out in crowded mailboxes and inspire donors to action. If you can get your donors angry or break their hearts by telling a wonderful story, you’ll be much more likely to get a response.
(4) The final element of a successful appeal is involvement. A successful appeal will provide the donor with a way to feel involved other than writing a check. In an appeal I worked on with the Ocean Conservancy this year, we asked donors to sign a card or send a note of encouragement to scientists working to protect the ocean. Not only is net revenue going up quite a bit (returns are still coming in), but hundreds of donors are deepening their connection to the organization by writing heartfelt notes of encouragement.
If there’s a hard and fast rule in direct mail, it’s that the most urgent, specific, emotional, and involving appeal still won’t work if it’s mailed to the wrong person. That’s why, in my next column, I’ll tackle the second great challenge of creating a successful appeal—how to choose which donors to mail.
Peter Schoewe is Senior Consultant, Mal Warwick Associates, 2550 Ninth Street, Suite 103, Berkeley CA 94710-2516, phone (510) 843-8888, fax (510) 843-0142, Web www.malwarwick.com, e-mail peter@malwarwick.com.
3. Getting the family on board
By Lola Mauer
The Faculty/Staff campaign at the University of South Carolina (Columbia SC) has reached $1.7 million in gifts and pledges this fiscal year. The 27-year-old endeavor boasts over 150 volunteers, two co-chairs, and an executive board of leading faculty and staff. Known at Carolina as the Family Fund, the longstanding tradition is now part of one of the fastest growing trends in annual giving offices across the country. Universities are reaching out to those closest to them, their faculty and staff, as administrators explore a variety of ways to increase overall participation and dollars raised.
Although the Family Fund runs throughout the course of the fiscal year, the major push is during the fall. Even before the current fiscal year wraps up, we’ve already selected the next co-chairs (typically one faculty member and one staff) and formulated a plan for the upcoming campaign. Here’s a brief look at Carolina’s campaign timeline:
MARCH
Select campaign co-chairs and hold first meeting
APRIL
Meet with co-chairs to select executive board; set campaign priorities
MAY
Work with Publications on theme and direct mail design, and ensure volunteers within each department are chosen
JUNE AND JULY
Compile list of donors who are still paying on prior year pledges; communicate with volunteers about their role in the campaign; put pledge packets together
AUGUST
Send pledge packets to all faculty/staff except those with outstanding pledges; hold first executive board meeting of the semester
SEPTEMBER
E-mail campaign flash video to all faculty/staff October: Kick-off luncheon (prizes, speakers, photographer, fanfare, etc.); donors who give at least $15 receive flu shot at no cost
DECEMBER
President’s breakfast with departments that reached 100% participation
FEBRUARY
Follow-up appeal to those who gave the previous fiscal year but not yet during the current one
WEEKLY
E-mail volunteers campaign status report; meet with departments across campus (weekly in September and October only)
MONTHLY
Articles in faculty/staff newsletter; articles in student newspaper (September and November only); attend mini-campaign rallies in departments across campus; letters to donors whose continuing pledges will end the following month; new-hire welcome letters and pledge packets mailed; meet with co-chairs and executive board (August-November only); mail thank-you postcards to donors
One important factor in the success of the campaign is that our constituents are well educated about the Family Fund. New employees are introduced to the campaign not long after they begin working at the University. Their pledge packet materials accompany a welcome letter, and many of the new hires learn about the campaign at employee orientation. Volunteers across campus ensure that colleagues within their departments are well versed on the Family Fund, as well as the many facets of the campaign.
Those who come on board as volunteers, after being nominated by a dean or department chair, are a major voice of the campaign. Each week, this team provides essential updates to our colleagues after the Annual Giving office sends campus-wide participation totals to them. The volunteers are true Family Fund advocates who help spread the campaign’s messages. Executive board members set the pace for the campaign and work with the co-chairs to establish goals. This leadership group also provides quotes for press releases and writes articles for the bi-monthly faculty/staff newsletter.
Most of the campaign’s success is the result of departmental visits that take place thanks to our myriad volunteers. The cochairs and I attend as many divisional meetings as possible for the opportunity of educating multiple colleagues at once. Our volunteers ensure we’re on the agenda for these meetings, where we’re able to target specific campaign goals by department. Every departmental visit we’ve made in my four years at the University has resulted in increased participation for those respective areas. There is, perhaps, no greater advantage than addressing colleagues face to face.
What do we share with faculty and staff at departmental meetings?
- Gifts may be designated to any area at the University. Most are enthused to know a gift can directly benefit their departmental fund.
- Most gifts are check payments, with payroll deduction a close second.
- Those paying on a pledge from the previous campaign will not receive the newest pledge packet until that pledges ends.
- Participation, not dollar amount, is vital.
That last bullet point brings an important question to light. As you’re planning your campaign, what message is more important to you: dollars raised or participation? Do you want to publicize a 20% participation rate, which shows that 80% did not give? We obviously want both participation and dollars to be at their peak, but must be careful about how the news is delivered to our colleagues. Highlight gifts of all sizes so that faculty and staff know their involvement at $50 is just as important as someone who pledged $500. Educate alumni about the passion you and your colleagues have for advancing the university. If your “family” believes in supporting the institution, then others will, too.
Whether you’re beginning a campaign for the first time or have an established faculty/staff program, the same techniques aren’t going to work at every institution. Each college and university must not only have an understanding of their colleagues’ perceptions to private philanthropy, but must spend time educating this group. As your campaign ages and becomes more of a tradition, you’ll realize even more how faculty and staff significantly impact campus life outside the classroom and office.
Lola Mauer is Director of Annual Giving Programs, University of South Carolina, 1600 Hampton Street, #738F, Columbia SC 29208, phone (803) 777-4092, Web www.sc.edu/annualgiving, e-mail lmauer@gwm.sc.edu.
4. Profit
By John Sauvé-Rodd
Ironically, all “not-for-profits” still have to realize a surplus. That’s what most people call profit. And, in fundraising, one of the most useful ways to monitor profit is at the level of the individual donor.
My interest—passion, as it has become—in donor-level profit began when I responded to a Swiss client who said, “You’ve done some great work for us, John. What do you want to tackle next?”
I said, “I want to look at some of the Big Questions. How about donor-level profitability?”
“Gehen Sie bitte so vor!” said the client (“Go right ahead!”). Carte blanche to dive into their data and examine profitability. And with pay!
What I found astonished me. Remember George Orwell and his famous book Animal Farm? In it, the pigs say, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” So it is with donors. But just how much so has been an eye-opener.
First, let me tell you what I mean by donorlevel profit. It’s what you get when you subtract the costs to acquire, service, and maintain a donor from the gross revenue that donor produces. Counting the gross revenue is easy—it’s what turns up naturally in the database. Counting the costs—not so easy.
After a wait of nearly two months for the information on costs to arrive from Switzerland, I divided them into three groups: C1 for direct costs (chiefly postage, production, and the like). Then C2, the salaries of the staff involved. Finally C3, the overhead— the share of heat, light, insurance, and so on. C1 costs are by far the largest.
The overall profit margin for the most recent year, I found, was 65%—pretty respectable, I think you’ll agree. But behind this happy number there was a deeper truth: Only half the year’s donors were profitable. The rest were loss-making.
Picture this: The organization was supported by around 66,000 donors that year—but half of them cost money and only half made money!
It gets better: Among the profit-making donors, a few—the top 10%—contributed 90% of the net profit.
What happened next? Well, it seems that Orwell really did know a thing or two about donors even though he wrote about politics.
My immediate recommendations were:
- Corral off the super-profitable donors and get someone—a real, living, breathing person to look after them. Or as you Americans do more fluently than we Europeans, steward them
- Deal politely and compassionately with the many thousands of unprofitable donors, but recognize where the real money is coming from, cut back on your large-scale appeals, and focus on the real money-generators
This was my first donor-level profit study, but not the last. I’m up to seven now, with more in the pipeline, and in general the results are always similar.
A caveat: Monthly givers of more than trivial amounts are usually profitable, varying little. It’s among the non-monthly, non-direct debit donors where the greatest savings (and greatest growth) are to be found.
The moral of this story is this: Remember what every businessperson knows—that there are high-value, high-profit customers who should be courted and on whom you should focus. Then there is a middle ground of donors who are marginal in net value—and a long tail that loses you scads of money.
Be realistic. Be smart. Make donor-level profit a principle of your fundraising. And tell me how you get on.
John Sauvé-Rodd is Director of Datapreneurs, phone +44 (0) 208-742-1131, cell +44 (0) 7712-00-32-32, e-mail johnrodd@datapreneurs.net. John is Chairman of the Special Interest Group Analysis in Fundraising of the UK’s Institute of Fundraising. A longer version of this column is available at www.datapreneurs.net.
5. The old one-two punch
Giving it “the old one-two punch” is an apt way to describe a follow-up mailing. That is, when a second package reiterates a previous appeal’s Marketing Concept—and re-emphasizes the need for a gift.
Sometimes, organizations will simply resend the exact same package with a “COPY” stamp at the top. For special appeals, though, it usually makes more sense to reinforce the message in a slightly different format. But how much do you say in the second package? How much can be the same as the first and how much should be new?
If this is a dilemma you’ve encountered, then take a look at this package from the American Bible Society (New York NY). The mailing followed up an earlier special appeal that asked donors to provide bibles for “brothers and sisters in China who hunger for God’s Word.”
By point of reference, the original appeal letter printed 8-1/2 x 11" and mailed in a #10 carrier.
The follow-up, on the other hand, is a Monarch package with the outer stamped “IMPORTANT REMINDER.” A 6-1/2 x 10" sheet with one-sided letter and attached reply is both appropriately succinct and motivational. It begins, “Several weeks ago, I wrote to you about a special opportunity to distribute 270,000 Bibles in China!”
Two paragraphs outlining this effort come next, and then this acknowledgment: “Perhaps you’ve already sent your gift. If so, you have my eternal gratitude! But if you haven’t mailed your gift yet, please send it now. The need is almost beyond comprehension. But so is the opportunity to change lives.”
The first package’s response form was a three-panel piece. The top two were each labeled “China Bible Delivery Certificate”— one asking for a gift of $25 (this particular donor’s highest previous contribution) and the other $38.
Interestingly, the follow-up includes a buckslip that duplicates the original’s $38 certificate, but replaces it with the $25 amount. Perhaps the thinking is that someone who needs an extra push to respond might be less inclined to upgrade her giving.
To see the entire follow-up package, click here. When you do, don’t miss the P.S.—a variation on the standard “cross-in-the-mail” language. And to see the original appeal, click here.
6. The Darfur puppy
By Deborah Block and Paul Karps
As we've often written in this newsletter, telling a compelling story in a direct mail fundraising package is a terrific way to bring a broader issue down to an individual level. In effect, by personalizing the issue, you give the reader an easier and more tangible way to grasp the bigger message.
Until now, at least, we’ve pretty much taken this idea on faith: that this approach makes for effective copywriting and effective fundraising. So when we read Save the Darfur Puppy, a recent Nicholas Kristof op-ed column in The New York Times, we were more than a little interested to learn there’s an academic body of research that actually reinforces the entire notion.
Kristof’s starting point is a journal article written by Professor Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon entitled, “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic Numbing and Genocide. Both Kristof and Slovic are primarily concerned with the question of why otherwise good people aren’t moved to act in response to genocide or mass suffering, particularly in Darfur. At the same time, as Kristof says, “an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.”
Slovic’s take is that people “become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are ‘one of many’ in a much greater problem.” And how numbers on mass murder or genocide “represent dry statistics, ‘human beings with the tears dried off,’ that fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action.”
THE DATA
Putting aside the Darfur/genocide issue, from our perspective Slovic’s contribution is his review of the relevant scholarly literature on the nature of charitable giving.
In one study, people were asked to donate $5 to Save the Children to combat hunger in Africa. They were given one of three separate conditions: (A) to help a seven-year-old girl named Rokia; (B) to help 21 million starving Africans; or (C) to help Rokia, who was portrayed as one of 21 million victims of hunger.
Not only did Scenario A generate a far greater donation than Scenario B, but Scenario C “significantly reduced” the contributions to Rokia.
A second study by a different set of researchers used the same format, but gave the three panels different giving options: to help Rokia, to help a hungry boy named Moussa, or to help both children. Rokia and Moussa each received similar mean donations. But gifts dropped when the Ask incorporated both children.
Here’s another study cited by Slovic: One group of participants was asked how much they would contribute toward an expensive, life-saving treatment for one sick child. A second group was asked how much they would each donate to save eight children. Gifts for the individual child ran twice as high.
THE BOTTOM LINE
All in all, Slovic concludes, “Our capacity to feel is limited.” Psychologically, people are more likely to get emotionally worked up over individual stories compared to mind-numbing statistics.
So the “takeaway” for us—and for direct mail fundraising copy in general—is to keep doing what we’re doing. To try to zero in on one engrossing story that embodies the good work of the organization we’re writing for. But more than just arguing that this is a great way to “put a face” on what the group does, now we’ve got academia behind us!
To read Kristof’s op-ed piece, click here. To read Slovic’s article, click here.
Managing Editor Deborah Block and Paul Karps are partners in BK Kreative, 1010 Varsity Court, Mountain View CA 94040, phone (650) 962-9562, fax (650) 962-1499, e-mail bkkreative@aol.com.
7. Tips!
By L. M.
- Place campaign reminders, as well as quotes from faculty/staff, in your campus newsletter.
- Educate students about the campaign (and philanthropy) by running one ad or article in the student paper, once per semester or quarterly.
- Send weekly campaign updates to your volunteers so they may share them with their respective departments.
- Set departmental meetings the summer before the campaign begins.
- Meet with campus leadership one on one to discuss their level of involvement.
- Allow the departments to engage in friendly competition. Those in the English Department may want to challenge their peers in Math to see who reaches the highest level of participation.
- Hold a breakfast for the divisions that reach 100% and invite the President/Chancellor.
- Make sure volunteers, cochairs, campus leadership, and the development office are among the first to reach 100% participation.
8. Appreciation!
By Jerry Panas
Allan Marriage is with the Bible Society of Canada. He tells me that the organization became concerned that they hadn’t done a good enough job of thanking their donors.
There are 70,000 on their donorbase. They decided they would call every one to thank them for their support. Yes, everyone.
They hired a team of 20 workers to make the calls. It took six months. They were paid on the basis of every connection they made.
Allan says the results have been dramatic. Giving immediately increased. Hundreds substantially increased the level of their giving. Hundreds gave an immediate second gift.
Thanking the donor appropriately and often works magic.
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