Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

TY Thursday: Thank Your Donors by Helping Them

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Help from my friendsIn the nonprofit world, we talk about our donors as “friends of” our organization. But when they hit a rough patch, do we act like friends to them?

Think about what you do for your personal friends when they fall sick, or lose their jobs, or have a death in the family. Do you:

  • Send a card, or flowers?
  • Cook a meal and drop it by?
  • Do something nice for their kids?
  • Refer them to good doctors, or employers, or other helping professionals?

There’s no reason our nonprofits can’t do that too.

How Nonprofits Can Offer Help

Sending a get-well card to a donor who is seriously ill is a gesture that’s always appreciated. Make sure to have people sign it personally–as many people who know the donor as possible!

Sending a sympathy card also matters, a lot. I can tell you that from personal experience. When my brother died in October 2014, clients and colleagues reached out to my wife and me, and every one of them made us feel surrounded by love.

(Be careful with flowers, however. Some people are allergic, and it’s not a Jewish custom. Sending a food tray might be better. Ask someone who knows the mourners well–and find out if they keep kosher, or halal, or eat only vegetarian or vegan food, too. You want to give them something that actually helps!)

If you have a program for children, then it’s a natural to offer the children of the donor’s family a free pass, or transportation, to do something fun for them. Adults need time to themselves sometimes, and that’s a gift you can give the whole family.

And you or a partner organization may be able to give your donor legal advice, or healthcare, or assistance accessing the legal, health, housing, or food benefits they need. The anti-poverty agency where I used to work did just that for a longtime donor and for a friend of a Board member.

What Not to Do

When a longtime friend of your organization is having a hard time, that’s the wrong time to ask them for money. If common decency isn’t enough reason for you to check your campaign calendars and take people recovering from surgery or people in mourning off your list for once, think of this: do you want people to think of their loved one’s death every time they think of you?

If the donor is really a “friend of” your organization, then treat him or her like a friend.

5 lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

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tweener reading

Does your agency tell stories like kids’ and YA books ?

People say there’s a part of me that’s got to be permanently twelve years old. I love children’s books!

In my house, there’s a shelf of them: some picture books, some chapter books, some classics, some translated into Spanish.

And I should probably take them off my taxes as a professional expense.  They have taught me how to write.

What can children’s books and their big cousins, YA fiction, teach us about telling our agencies’ stories?

Five lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

  1. Start with an improbable hero.  Zoom in on one person.  An ordinary person, because our readers need to identify with him or her.  That could be Harry Potter or Halla from Travel Light–or it could be your nonprofit’s client.
  2. Give them a challenge. It’s not a story if nothing’s going wrong. Here’s your chance to show the problem that your client faces (whether it’s poverty, illness, bad schools, or bad air) and make it real to your reader.
  3. Show their character.  When she struggles, your client shows who she really is.  She has no superpowers or magic: only the qualities that make her human.
  4. Give them helpers.  Of course, this includes your organization.  But this is  your golden opportunity to…
  5. Bring the reader into the story.  J.M. Barrie did that overtly in Peter Pan: “If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”  Most bring the reader in more subtly. But if you have ever refused to come in for dinner until you finished a chapter, you know what it feels like to take the hero’s place.

Great writers make us feel that the ending of the story depends on us.

Above all, you want your readers to feel that they are irreplaceable. If they can see their donations as the key thing needed to ensure a happy ending, they will not only give. They will want to give. So much depends upon their heroic action!

When you write newsletters, appeal letters, blog posts–even Facebook posts and tweets–how do you make your supporters into the hero of the story?

TY Thursday: Will Your Donor Welcome Your Email?

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I heard a knock at the door. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Who could that be?”

welcome visitor

Will they welcome your email?

I hadn’t ordered a pizza. I wasn’t expecting a package.

I went to the door and peered through the peephole, braced for someone trying to convert me to their religion (and/or sell me a magazine subscription).

What a pleasant surprise it was when my friend Miriam was there with a bundle of fresh-cut lilacs from her garden!

Your email should make donors happy

When a donor gets email from your nonprofit organization, they should react like I did when Miriam showed up at my door. It should make them happy. Write your email like a friend and you can have donors looking forward to seeing it!

Why email your donors?  I know your nonprofit sends a thank-you letter to every donor. You send it within 48 hours from the time you received their donation. It’s full of appreciation for the donor, and it helps them believe they made the right choice when they gave to you.

Great! But thanking the donor is not “one and done.”

You need to continue thanking them all year round. And email is one of the best ways of sending your thanks.

Is your email a welcome visitor?

Now, you know how many emails you get every day. They can turn into one big blur. You might start reading them in order, but soon, you scan for names of friends and leave the rest of the messages unopened–or even delete them.

Your audience is just like you. They get overwhelmed just as fast. And the delete button is always handy!

How to make your email delight your donors

If you want people to read your email, you have to be like Miriam.

  • Be a good friend. (Not that guy who only shows up to borrow money!)
  • Come bearing gifts. Present them with something they want: entertainment, information, a chance to see their friends and feel good about themselves at the same time…
  • Knock. Make sure the subject line of each email announces you in a way that makes your readers say, “I’m so glad you stopped by. Come in, come in!”

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