Let me ask you something: do you really like your donors? I don’t mean as a group or as an idea. I mean as people. Do you like them? I recently read an article by Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing. He was writing, as he often does, about Robert Cialdini and his findings about sales. Your instinct […]
Love your donors? Why you need to care about keeping them
Recently, Tom Belford at The Agitator shared information from the latest Fundraising Effectiveness Project Survey Report. Two statements jumped out at me. Perhaps most striking is the performance difference in retention between the top 20% organizations, who lost on average 14.1% of their new donors, whereas the bottom 20% lost a whopping and unforgivable 68.3%. Who […]
She’s the one.
Your donor, that is. Or she should feel like the one. Strong communication is one to one. Underline that for fundraising communications. Who me? Think about it. You’re writing with a purpose. You want someone to do something. The easiest way to be ignored is to ask if “someone” would do it. (One funny exception: […]
The one thing you need to know about fundraising
It’s not about you I’m embarrassed to say it took me years to realize this. I – like you, maybe – was filled with enthusiasm for my organization. That’s good. It’s really hard to do good work when you don’t feel that way. But I let it color my fundraising perspective. This lesson can come […]
Are you using the magic fundraising word?
Fundraising magic? You’ve heard it before: a magic word that will transform your fundraising. You. So you dutifully make sure that word is everywhere. But maybe it doesn’t do as much magic as you’d expected. You is magic, but there’s more to it than that. Donor-focused writing matters Of course, it does. No one is […]