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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Fundraising Tuesday: 4 Steps to Win Donors’ Hearts

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You’ve heard the saying, “It’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s–it’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas”?  Similarly, it’s not what you write to your donors in your end-of-year appeal letter that determines how they feel about your organization. It’s what you write all year long.

Communication in marriageCommunications are the key to a good marriage. Your nonprofit’s communications are the key to a good relationship between your donors and you.

By next Valentine’s Day, make your donors love you. Here are the four steps to win their hearts.

This winter, work on your email.

When donors or prospects give you their email address, it’s like they met you on a blind date and decided to give you their phone number. What they’re saying is, “I want to hear from you.” It’s a huge gesture of trust.

Be worthy of their trust.

  • Find out the kind of content they want to see, and send it to them as often (and no more often) than they want to see it.
  • Write subject lines that signal, “I wrote this especially for you and I know you’ll want to read it.”
  • Personalize every email. “Dear friend” is not acceptable in 2019. It tells your donors they’re not worth your time.
  • Keep your list up to date. There are good email tools out there: MailChimp and Constant Contact are two that many nonprofits use. Buy one and learn how to use it. You–and your donors–will be glad you did.

This spring, look at your website.

look at your websiteYour website is your online back yard. If you’re going to invite donors there, you want them to relax and stay a while.

  • Make the lighting comfortable. Is the font size large enough for middle-aged eyes? Does it read as well on Chrome or Firefox as on Internet Explorer or Safari? Can donors read it on their mobile devices? Can they read it with their screen readers (if they have limited eyesight)?
  • Make the room easy to get around. Place navigation bars on the homepage and on every page. Clearly label your pages and tabs, and don’t get too cute: “About Us” or “Who We Are” are better than “The 411.”
  • Put out the treats.  Your donors need to find what they’re looking for quickly or they’ll leave your site. Be sure everything is within three clicks from the home page: for instance, 1) home page, 2) contact us, 3) email. If you’re inviting people to sign up for an event, consider using a landing page with its own URL.

This summer, spice up your blog life.

Did you ever meet someone and think to yourself, “I love talking with him. I could spend all night just listening to him?”

Writing a blog gives your donors a chance to say that about you.

Blogging is better for those long explorations than email. It’s more of a conversation than the rest of your website. Blogging is for lovers.

This fall, finally get social.

What would the love of your life think if when you were together, you only talked and never listened? Or if you only listened when he or she was talking about you?

Not very romantic, right?

But too many nonprofits think the reason to use social media is to have one more place to rattle on about themselves.

Social media are really more like social gatherings: parties, conferences, Chamber of Commerce meetings, public forums. You go those events to meet people and become an important part of the community. You go on social media to do the same.

Over time, if you pay attention to them, people come to know, like, and trust your organization. They actually seek you out for information and advice and opportunities to volunteer. They start thinking of you as “their” organization. They fall in love.

How do you use social media to make donors love you? I’ve been studying this subject for years, and I’m happy to share it with you.

social mediaThe No-Nonsense Nonprofit Guide to Social Media: How You Can Start Small, Win Loyal Friends, and Raise Funds Online and Off is your step-by-step guide to courting your donors.

Download it now, and by next fall, you can be happily engaged.

By next winter, you can be busy writing thank-you notes.

By next Valentine’s Day, your donors can be yours for life.

The No-Nonsense Nonprofit Guide to Social Media: How You Can Start Small, Win Loyal Friends, and Raise Funds Online and Off

When Multiple Photos are Better than One

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Thanks for coming along for the ride as I learn how to get more visual in nonprofit communications!

Let’s say you have a bunch of photos from a nonprofit event. How do you use them to tell your story?

Often, the best thing to do is to find just one photo, of one person, that says what you want to say. Your audience will focus in on one person better than two, three, or a hundred.

(That’s especially important when you’re trying to raise money. One story will win donations. Many? They’re likely to be forgotten.)

When is it better to use multiple photos? When you can combine them to tell a story.

What Makes a Story a Story?

A story is not just one darn thing after another. It’s not a timeline or a list of events.

A real story has a character you care about, who wants or needs something and can’t get it. They try and try. They get into trouble, and maybe they get help. And at last, you find out whether they succeed.

Here’s a very simple story about someone I care about. His name is Rocket J, and he’s a cat.

The Cat and the Closed Door

One morning, Rocket J wanted to go out. It was a very cold morning, and his concerned person, Dennis, thought that Rocket J would be better off inside. “No!” the cat said. “I want to go out!”

He came up to me with an earnest expression. He went over to the door. He turned round and round until his silly human finally got the idea and let him out. Then he ran to the street, just to show he could.

Indoors, his blonde brother, Sunshine, looked out the window quizzically. “I don’t think that was very bright of Rocky,” he said. “Look how cold it is out there! I’m just going to sit on the furniture and look out at the world.”

Your Visuals Can Do Better than Mine!

I took these photos on my iPhone, selected them, and uploaded them to Facebook with the comment, “Outdoor cat and indoor cat.” I’m not the world’s greatest photographer, as you can plainly see, but my Facebook audience loved the story.

Besides taking better photos, I know you can improve on what I did. You can:

  • Edit photos you have stored on your computer or phone.
  • Change the sequence, if you need to, so the action becomes more clear.
  • Pick the right number of photos so all of them are shown at one glance. (You can create an album on Facebook if you want to let your most interested viewers go look at them all.)

What are your  tips for better visual storytelling?

(They don’t have to involve cat pictures.)

Going Visual

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picture worth 1000 words

I have a New Year’s resolution for 2019, and I’m going to need your help. Thanks in advance!

I’m a words person. I delight in finding the way to say it that will make an idea shimmer, dance, and sing.

I don’t even like watching video online. It takes so long! I could read an article in the time it takes you to introduce yourself on a video. But would I remember it as well?

Probably not–and what’s more, I am not my audience. You are. And all the research tells me that you are getting more visual online. When you see beautiful images, you stop and look. When you run into a cute video, you share it with your friends. YouTube is now the second biggest search engine precisely because nobody wants to “read the fucking manual”: we want to see how it’s done, right before our eyes.

I get it. So, my resolution for 2019 is to get more visual. I want to learn how to:

  • Take photos on my phone that you’ll love lo look at
  • Make and edit videos you’ll want to watch
  • Go live on Facebook, as John Haydon does to our great benefit
  • Use Instagram to tell stories
  • Create regular graphics, too. Because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words.

I’ll be telling you about what I learn, in a series of blog posts on Mondays. And I hope that over time, those posts will show, as well as tell. That’s the point: becoming visual!

Here’s where I’ll need your help. Where should I go to learn the tricks and techniques? What are your favorite tools for photos, videos, and images? What topics do you want to hear more about from me that would be better explored in pictures than in words?

Thanks for being awesome

 

 

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