Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Nonprofits, Make Your Donors Love You

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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 2015. 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, take a good look at your website.

Your 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.

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

Fundraising Tuesday: Call Me By Name

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Every Tuesday this season, I’m offering a tip on how to write better fundraising appeals. Here’s the first in the series.

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

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.

Fundraising Letters HAVE to Improve in 2016!

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Fundraising lettersSince Thanksgiving, I have received 90 fundraising appeals through the mail. I spent a morning looking through each and every one of them.

Friends, we have to do better.

7 Reasons You’re Not Getting Enough Donations (and what you can do about it)

1) You’re starting your letter “Dear Friend.”  32 out of 90 letters I received called me Friend or Supporter–or didn’t call me anything at all.  Wrong!

As fundraising expert Gail Perry says, “Your donor expects that you know her name and who she is, since she’s been sending you money for a while!”  Fix this by using a good database and adding a First Name mail merge field to your appeal letter.

2) You’re mainly talking about your organization. 47 out of 90 letters were in French: they said “we, we, we.” But that’s making your organization the hero of the story!

As Seth Godin has pointed out, in a good appeal letter, the donor is the hero of the story.  That’s why they give. Fix this by talking about how the donors are helping to right wrongs, save lives, or help people.

3) You’re not telling an “impact story.”  There are six types of stories that nonprofits should tell. In your appeal letter, you should tell an impact story, showing how the donors’ contribution makes a difference.  41 out of the 90 letters I received told just the facts, ma’am. Another 29 included a brief quotation from a client, or a general anecdote about a client, and how the agency helped them.

These letters blur on me. They all sound alike. Fix this by telling a compelling story about one person whose life is better because the donor helped.

4) You’re not including a photo. People are becoming more visually oriented, and a photo helps your appeal stand out. Yet 40 of 90 letters I received were text only! Another 24 included blurry black-and-white photos, or nice color photos that added nothing to the message.

Fix this by taking striking photos of people in action throughout the year. Then you won’t have to scramble for a picture in December.

5) You’re not letting me know you appreciate what I already gave.  This, I find really shocking: 60 out of 90 letters I received–a full two-thirds–used exactly the same language to me that they would use to someone who had never given them a penny!

Fix this by segmenting your list, writing different letters to prospects, lapsed donors, and renewing donors, and acknowledging the date and amount of the previous gift.

6) You’re not personalizing your letters. It used to be a no-brainer for Executive Directors, Development Directors, or Board members who knew the donor to write a personal note on appeal letters. People, we are going in the wrong direction on this! 81 out of 90 letters arrived in my mailbox with no personal touches whatever–even when my wife and I have known the person sending the letter for many years.

Fix this by composing your appeals long enough in advance to add those personal notes…and doing so. (Kudos to the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund, whose Director, Carol Kraemer, wrote by hand, “So grateful for your wonderful, longtime support!” You can count on a renewed gift from the Fischmans.)

7) You’re neglecting the power of the postscript. When people read letters, they look at the banner, the salutation, and the first line…and then their eyes jump to the bottom of the page. I’m happy to say that 60 of the letter-writers realized that (even if their P.S. was a bit perfunctory).

As for the 30 of you who didn’t add a postscript, you skipped doing the simplest thing you can do to increase donations! Fix this. Add a postscript unless there’s a really good reason not to.

Look for Tips on Tuesday

You may be wondering now, “What did our appeal letters look like?” Go back and check your letter. If you made even one of those seven mistakes, you probably left donation money on the table.

How do you write better fundraising letters? I can help.

Between now and Tax Day 2016, read this blog every Tuesday. You will get a no-nonsense, how-to, “do it today” tip on every aspect of your appeal letter, from the salutation to the P.S.

Some of them will be so easy you’ll kick yourself for not doing them before! Some will take a little work–but I will show you how to do them, step by step, with video when necessary.

Look for Tips on Tuesday beginning next week, January 12!

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