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Fundraising Tuesday: Lies, Damn Lies, and Great Stories

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statistics vs. stories

Even true stats can’t match true stories

You’ve probably seen them. Maybe you’ve even written them. Did you write one at the end of 2018?

We’re talking about the fundraising appeal letters that are based on statistics.

 

“Last year we served 10,000 meals to 500 people at 5 different locations.”

“We delivered a petition to the White House with 49,000 signatures demanding action.”

“We raised $120,000 to give college scholarships to students in our community.”

These numbers matter to us…but not to our donors. They may not even read them. They will not remember them.

Why Statistics Don’t Matter

The problem with statistics is not that they don’t reveal enough. (Even though they don’t. For example: Is 10,000 meals a lot or a little? How many people stayed hungry?)

The problem isn’t that the numbers can be fudged, either.

The real problem is that statistics don’t touch the heart.

Donors decide to give because you engage their emotions. They feel the pain of a child going hungry, the pride of a community sending its brightest high school students to college. Without an appeal to the heart, they will not even pay attention. Once you move their hearts, you will get a chance to make them nod their heads, too. But not until then.

Why Stories Work

As a species, we crave stories. Like water, like food, like the air we breathe, stories are vital to us. We listen to stories to make sense of the world around us. We shape the events of our own lives into narratives to give our lives meaning.

Stories stick in the memory. Have you ever tried to memorize a grocery list? After a certain length, it becomes impossible. You can try singing the list to a well-known tune, or counting it on your fingers, or alphabetizing it, and still you’re likely to come home and realize you’ve left several items sitting on the supermarket shelves. But if you give it even a little bit of narrative structure–“We’re having pasta tonight, so I need tomato sauce and salad fixings”–it becomes so much easier.

Telling stories to your donors makes the work you’re asking them to support tangible, meaningful, and memorable. If you touch the donor’s heart, you can even make it compelling. The donor will want to give!

3 Steps to Turn Your Statistics into Stories

What if you’re used to writing fundraising letters that are full of statistics? You can learn how to take what you have written in the past and turn it into storytelling your donors will love.

Let’s take one of the sentences full of numbers I mentioned above and transform it.

“Last year we served 10,000 meals to 500 people at 5 different locations.”

Step One: Talk about One Person

Telling the story of one person moves the heart more than citing large numbers. Research has proved this again and again. So, forget those 500 people. Talk about one person, and perhaps her family. Who is this person who ate your meals? What can you tell your donors that will help them get to know her?

Example: “Maria and Joe moved to this community ten years ago to take care of Maria’s elderly mom, who needed help paying her bills and even remembering to take her medication. Joe is the friendly face behind the wheel of the Route 89 bus every morning. Maria is trained as a nurse’s aide, and she puts those skills to work taking care of her mom and her two daughters who have been born in our town.”

Step Two: Show the Challenge That Person is Facing

What changed so that your one person and her family need help? What would life be like for them without that food your donor is providing?

“In the ten years they have lived here, the cost of renting a small two-bedroom apartment has gone up and up. Joe’s wages have not increased at all. Any time they have an unexpected expense–a child who needs to see the doctor, or a new walker to help Maria’s mom get from her bedroom to her front door–then that month, they run out of food. Without the help that you provide, Maria and Joe would go hungry to feed their daughters. And there still might not be enough to go around.”

Step Three: Explain How the Donor is Helping That Person Succeed

How has getting the food for free changed Maria’s life, and her husband and children’s lives? What difference does a donation make, in tangible terms?

“Because you cared about Maria and Joe and donated to this agency, their two girls go to school every day well-fed and ready to learn. Joe doesn’t have to be an absentee parent, working extra shifts. He can drive his bus and come home to his family. Maria doesn’t have to worry about being too faint from hunger, and she can give her loving attention to her mother’s needs.”

 

You can turn any statistic into a story if you are prepared. Make sure you give yourself enough time to collect stories and bank them so you can use whenever you need them. And remember to make the donor the hero of the story. When you tell donors a tale of what happens “because of you,” you will touch the heart and move donors to give.

 

 

Fundraising Tuesday: Does Your Appeal Letter LOSE Donors?

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Let’s try an experiment. You’ll need your latest fundraising letter, a blue pen, and a yellow highlighter. Put them all on your desk. Ready?

highlighter

Highlight your donor, not your organization

Pick up the pen and circle every mention of your organization. It could be the agency’s name. It could be the word “we,” used to refer to your organization. How many blue circles do you see? A lot, I’ll bet.

Now, pick up the highlighter and underline every mention of your donor. Yes, you can count the salutation if you called them by name. You can also highlight the word “you”–if that means the donor who’s reading the letter.

Is there more yellow on the page than blue? If not, you’re losing donors with every letter you send.

To Renew Their Support, Focus on Donors

A lot of us in the nonprofit world are under a misconception. We think that the reason donors give to us is because we do good work.

No, that’s the reason we’re proud of our organizations. It’s not the reason people give!

If doing good work were enough, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting donors to renew. They’d get to know, like, and trust your organization, and then they’d keep on giving into the indefinite future. But about 70% of the people who gave to you in 2017 didn’t renew their gift in 2018.

Don’t focus on what you do. Focus on how the donor feels.

We, the nonprofit vs. they, the donors

What we’re trying to do with those letters is make a case for the donor’s support. What we’re succeeding at doing–far too often–is making them feel insignificant.

Saying “We need your help” is not convincing when the rest of the letter is about what “we” did without the donor even knowing. Worse, it puts us on opposite sides of the fence: “we” who do, and “you” who admire.

Yes, that organization sounds great, the donor thinks. So what? What’s that got to do with me?

That’s the question your ideal appeal letter must answer.

Make the Donor the Hero of the Story

Seth Godin writes:

Why on earth would a rational person give money to charity–particularly a charity that supports strangers? What do they get?

A story.

It might be the story of doing the right thing, or fitting in, or pleasing a friend or honoring a memory, but the story has value. It might be the story that you, and you alone are able to make this difference, or perhaps it’s the story of using leverage to change the world. For many, it’s the story of what it means to be part of a community.

For your donor to renew, she or he has to feel like the hero of the story. You are the one who is going to make donors feel like heroes. And the fundraising appeal letter is just one of the many times during the year you have an opportunity to do that–but it’s a crucial time.

Spiderman emblemUse your fundraising powers for good.

Write fundraising appeals that tell the donor, “Because of you, this happened. You are my hero. And you are needed, now.”

 

You Know How to Do This!

Think back to the end of 2018. At home, in the mail, you got a ton of letters asking for money.

Was there one that made you excited about giving?

If so, I’ll bet it got the little things right. It called you by your name. It referred to your giving history. It packed some punch in the postscript.

But that’s only what it took to get you to read the letter. What made you remember it, and feel excited about it, and want to give?

  • The letter that makes you feel like you were there in the midst of the action all along.
  • The letter that says the success stories are your successes.
  • The appeal letter that makes the donor the hero of the story.

That’s the one that stays in the memory. That’s the letter that donors want to keep, and quote, and show to their friends.

And that’s the letter that your nonprofit organization wants to write.

 

Fundraising Tuesday: The Last Words Shall Be First

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P.S. postscriptMore than 100 appeal letters arrived at the Fischman household last November and December. About two-thirds of them came feet first.

By that I mean that, like your donors, I read the postscript right away.

The p.s. is one of the first things donors read after we open the envelope–probably right after checking to see whether you call your donors by our names. You will make more money if you get the postscript right.

So, how do you write a postscript your donors will love?

Include a Postscript

sad news, happy newsThe sad news is that 37 appeal letters didn’t include any postscript at all.

True, some of them were in a format that didn’t look like a letter. It’s hard to put a p.s. on a report or a sheet of coupons. (That may be a reason not to use those formats very often!)

But many of those 37 were classic appeal letters that came to the signature line and just ended. That’s sad–for the senders.

For your nonprofit, the happy news: it may have given your letter the chance to be noticed. If you used a postscript, good for you!

Make It Urgent

More than 30 letters used their p.s. to stress the reason for giving now.

I was glad to see that none of them said “so we can meet our goal”–that’s your reason to write, not their reason to give. None of them mentioned tax-deductibility, and that’s good: it’s not the reason most people give either.

Most of the time, nonprofits used the postscript to do one of two things:

  • Simply urge the donor not to wait (stressing how easy it is to give online), or,
  • Reiterate the reason to give. “Immigrant families are waiting to find out whether they will be deported. Help them get the legal help they need, today!”

The very best examples made the postscript into a story in brief. They referred back to the clients whose stories they told in the body of the letter and reminded donors, “You can be their hero.”

Experiment with a Call To Action

act nowMostly I advise nonprofits to keep the postscript simple. Ask people to do just one thing: give money. But 18 of the appeal letters I saw this year asked for an additional action.

Some of them requested the donor take steps to make their donation worth more, like “Check if your employer will match your donation.” Others suggested the donor take another action besides giving: fill in a survey, pick a design for a membership card, alert the organization when ICE was in the area.

I’m curious: did your nonprofit try an additional Call To Action in the postscript to your appeal letter? What was the response like? Did people who took that extra step give extra money?

 

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