Now is the season when nonprofits are scrambling to get out their end of year fundraising letters. Nonprofits who sent out letters over a week ago have been forgotten, since everyone reboots their brains over Thanksgiving, and nonprofits who send out letters after next week are running the risk of being outflanked by competitors.
I’ve written a lot of fundraising letters and have been involved in a few that may hit your mailbox this season, so I thought I’d pass along some general advice on how to write one and how to evaluate its success after you’ve sent it out.
Writing a fundraising letter
There are many creative angles nonprofits can take on fundraising letters, but here are three rules that will always serve you well.
Decide whether you’re going to be personal or pitchy. Because you can’t really be both. Is there a kitten with a thought bubble on the front of your letter’s envelope? Do you have an itemized list of “$100 buys x, $1,000 buys y, $10,000 buys z”? Then your letter is a pitch. It’s not personal because you’d never use those sorts of tactics in an actual personal letter.
The decision of whether to be personal or pitchy is important because it sets the tone for your organization’s relationships with constituents. I myself never create pitchy material, because my style is to use data to make communications as authentically personal as possible. I don’t like the relationship that pitchyness establishes, but I concede that it can make money in the right context.
If you’re personal, make sure your letter has not one ounce of pitchyness in it. If you’re pitchy, don’t waste your efforts hyper-personalizing it.
Be as straight as you can about how the money will be used. Donors want the charity itself to be the thinnest reasonable administrative layer between themselves and the cause they want to support. And if they’re reading your letter at all, they probably agree with your premise about the worthiness of your cause.
So go easy on attempts to persuade them that your cause is important and instead describe explicitly how their money will be used. And I’m not talking about the “$100 buys x, $1,000 buys y, $10,000 buys z” stuff, unless you’re really proposing to buy x, y, and z. If donations simply fund operations, say so, and say why unrestricted giving is important. People will appreciate your candor.
Be as specific as you can about everything you discuss. Talk about specific people you have helped, problems you have solved, supporters you have thanked, difficulties you’ve overcome.
Platitudes are boring and superfluous. When I read a letters with more than a few platitudes I question whether the nonprofit is doing anything at all besides selling platitudes. Specificity increases credibility, and credibility translates into fundraising success.
Evaluating it
Make intelligent comparisons. When I started out in fundraising I was surprised to discover how split people are on how to interpret the results of fundraising letters. Sober interpretation of results is all about making the right comparisons.
What comparisons do you make to determine your letter’s success? Between this letter and last year’s letter? Between this letter’s revenue and its budgeted revenue? Between the board chair’s reaction to this letter and her reaction to the previous one? Between this letter and the one that went out two months ago?
None of these comparisons tell you anything about why one letter performed better than another. To answer that sort of question, the type of comparison you need is what can be found in a randomized controlled experiment. And the vast majority of nonprofits do not do them with their fundraising mail.
If you’re not doing them already, take a look at this free chapter from my book and give it a thought. If you don’t have to time/infrastructure/interest, it’s not the end of the world, but make sure you keep your comparative judgments in the right frame of reference.
Watch for donor signals. People will receive your letter, and they’ll react. A donor you lost five years ago will suddenly make a gift. A donor who reliably gives $20 a year will give $1,000. A donor who responds to every letter will be silent. A nongiving volunteer will become a donor.
What do these signals mean? Talk to your donors and find out. Perhaps one of them is saying that she wants to be cultivated for a major gift. Perhaps another is saying that he’s angry over something you did and wants to discuss it. And perhaps another reacted for no particular reason, because of random variations in outcome.
After the gifts come in, you still have work to do to wring the maximum use out of that letter. Look carefully at your database, try to interpret it to see what your donors are “telling” you through their giving patterns, and then pick up the phone and see what they have to say for real.
Follow up aggressively. If you’ve interpreted those signals correctly, you should be able to put your donors on individual plans. Maybe their giving patterns suggest that you send them mail solicitations for a restricted gift. Maybe their patterns suggest that you upgrade them into a major prospect category. Maybe their patterns suggest they need a much gentler touch the next time you reach out to them. You need to make sure that your reaction is rooted in the intelligence your letter has generated.
Conclusion
These tips for evaluating your letter’s success are all about making sure that you use the letters as learning experiences. And just in case the search for “learning experiences” sounds trite, let me put the point another way.
You know nothing about your donors. Ok, maybe you know something. But your understanding of your donors is spotty, incomplete, inaccurate, and rooted in the past. The only way you can improve your understanding is by eliciting responses through gestures like fundraising letters and interpreting those responses correctly.
It’s easy to construct an idea of “what my donors think and want.” It’s easy to imagine one archetypal person, whose tastes overlap remarkably with my own, and tailor all my communications to that archetype. But the real task for the direct marketer is to tease out the diversity and richness in the beliefs and desires of her constituent population.