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Fundraising Tuesday: You’re My Hero

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Every Tuesday this season, I’m offering a tip on how to write better fundraising appeals. The first post, about greetings, was Call Me By Name. The second was about postscripts: Last Things First.

 

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 2014 didn’t renew their gift in 2015.

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

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.”

 

What Nonprofits Can Learn from Peter Pan

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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 companies’ stories?

  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 do it more subtly. But if you ever refused to come in for dinner until you finished the 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.

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?

Lead Your Organization by Telling a Story

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tug of war

Get your people pulling in the same direction

Here’s a problem leaders face every day. You want to get something done. It will take everyone in your organization to do it.

How will you get them pulling in the same direction?

You could go around and have a heart-to-heart with each person in the organization. You could explain in detail the role each person should play and how they are supposed to do it.

That might work…if you have three people in your organization. In a larger group, you’d be spending a huge amount of time and you still wouldn’t know whether or not your people “get it” until you saw them in action.

You’d also be accused of “micro-management”—and your accusers would be right. Why tell other people how to do their jobs, which is something they might already know better than you do?

You don’t need to tell them how to do it. You need to make sure they know what needs to be done. And the best way to do that just might be through telling a story.

Find out how:

http://www.trippbraden.com/2015/03/13/who-is-the-hero-of-the-story/

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