Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Fundraising Tuesday: Every Day is Giving Tuesday

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Christmas cookiesYou’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 do for your donors between Halloween and Giving Tuesday that determines how much love they feel toward your nonprofit organization. It’s what you do all year.

Communications 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 November, 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 great 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.
  • Even better: make it personal! You can’t do that for every single email message you send, but every time you do talk to a person in a way that says “I know you,” they will remember it.
  • Keep your list up to date. There are good email tools out there: MailChimp and Constant Contact are two that many nonprofits use. There are also donor databases with email built right in. Buy one and learn how to use it. You–and your donors–will be glad you did.

This spring, take a good look at your website.

living room fireplaceYour website is your online living room. If you’re going to invite donors there, you want them to 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 blogging 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. Listen and interact.

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. Not to post. To meet people.

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.

The Personally Paradox

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CRM personalIt’s a paradox: to treat people more personally, you need the right tools.

If you’re still keeping your donor records on paper or on a spreadsheet, there’s no way you can be as friendly with them as you’d like.

But if you have a good database (or CRM, for “constituent relationship management tool”), you can do amazing things!

See what a difference the right tools make by reading my guest post on John Haydon’s blog: https://www.johnhaydon.com/deeper-relationships-donor-communications.

Because a database is not just a cool tool. The important thing about a nonprofit database or CRM is how it helps you treat your donors personally, as real human beings.

Fundraising Tuesday: The Right & Wrong Ways to Use a Donor’s Name

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Do you know me?Your first chance to persuade the donor to give is the very first line of your letter: the salutation.

Mess up the salutation and it may be your last chance, too.

If I open your appeal letter and find it addressed to “Dear Friend” or “Supporter,” I throw it in the recycling bin. And I’m not alone.

I’ve given you money. Don’t you know me?

All your donors are receiving more and more solicitations. They have to winnow the pile–and tossing the letters that don’t call them by name is an easy way to do it.

Think about it. Who calls you “Dear Friend” when they’re not asking you for money? As Alan Sharpe says:

My wife never sends me a letter that begins, “Dear Friend.” Neither do my friends. And neither should you when writing to your donors.

Calling your donor “Dear Friend” is signaling that you don’t know or care who she is as long as she writes a check. And that’s insulting. As fundraising expert Gail Perry points out, “Your donor expects that you know her name and who she is, since she’s been sending you money for a while!”

A little more work–but I’m worth it.

It takes a little more work to call your donors by name.

1. You have to set up your fundraising letter with a “merge field.” That’s a short code that lets you pull names off a list and plug them in where they belong. Fortunately, the simplest word processing program can handle that. (Here’s a quick tutorial that will show you how.)

2. You really ought to take the chance to put your donor information into a database. If you’re still using a spreadsheet, you’re making life difficult on yourself–and increasing the chance that you’ll call your donors by the wrong name. Oops! There’s a donor who won’t renew!

3. And once you’ve printed the fundraising appeal letter with the correct name, you have to make sure the letter goes in the envelope that matches. You can’t just grab a letter off the pile and stuff it any more.

Truly, though, this is just a little more work. Once you’ve done it, you won’t have any problem doing it again.  And as your donor, I’m worth it.

(If you tell me I’m not, I may never give to you again–and “Dear Friend” tells me exactly that!)

The wrong way to use my name in fundraising

Call your donor by name in the salutation of the letter, but be careful about using it in the body. It is possible to use your donor’s name so often it sounds artificial. That puts them off, instead of bringing them closer.

Here’s a reader comment from my blog post last week, Fundraising Letters HAVE to Improve in 2016!:

Using my name too much, or trying to fake something handwritten (e.g., the fake post-it) are disingenuous and/or creepy. I would rather you call me friend once than use my name 5 times like a used car salesman.

But using the donor’s name in the salutation is still vital.

How to win me over for a lifetime

You may still be saying to yourself, “We’re getting donations sending Dear Friend letters. Why should we switch?”

I want to quote Alan Sharpe again, because he has had an experience that you probably have had too.

At the Business Depot where I buy my office supplies, there is a store clerk who always remembers my name. She serves hundreds of customers. Yet when I approach the cash, she makes me feel like I’m a special customer. I feel a little flattered every time. Her name, by the way, is Allyson.

Specialists in customer service have long known that remembering a customer’s name—and using it—is one of the most effective ways (and free ways) to encourage repeat business, customer loyalty and free word-of-mouth advertising. The same is just as true in fundraising.

It costs you seven times as much to find a new donor as it does to keep an old one. And the easiest way to keep me for a lifetime is always to call me by name.

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