A Fundraising Offer Is Specific

Remember how a fundraising offer is a problem and its solution? If it's a general solution to an open-ended problem, it's not quite an offer. It needs to be a specific solution to a clearly defined problem. That's one of the most difficult qualities to achieve in fundraising. And it's one of the most important.

I know you've read dozens of fundraising messages that don't even come close to this ideal. That's because there are two powerful forces at work that keep offers vague. Both are revenue killers that you can avoid when you know what they are:

1. Many nonprofits can't or won't clearly define what they do. Defining is hard work, as the next few pages will show you. It takes a lot of information. Asking questions that nobody has ever asked. Doing calculations galore. You may have to work with uncooperative people who “don't have time” to help uncover what you need. No wonder so many nonprofits just give up and ask donors to “stand with us.”
2. Brand Expert “vision.” Their version of an offer is usually little more than the abstract concept of the brand waved in donors' faces. Or clever phrases like “feed the need.” Or visual puns, wordplay, or grandiose concepts like—you guessed it—hope. Those are not offers. They aren't even fundraising.

Whether your offers are flattened by lack of information or by abstraction, you end up with ineffective fundraising. That's corrosive to your brand and your efforts to get donor support. It plays right into donors' cynicism. It inadvertently says, “We don't really need your money for anything specific.” Without specificity, you give the impression that the donor's gift just goes into a giant pot, and it's used to pay executive salaries—unless it's spent frivolously or fraudulently. That's not what vagueness says, but the lack of information encourages a cynical donor to fill in the blanks.

You can beat that nasty rap by telling donors how their specific dollars will accomplish specific, desirable goals in the real world. When you supply specific information, you will immediately rise to the top of many donors' lists of organizations they'll consider supporting.

Here's an easy way to think about it: If you can't take a photo of the object or action you're asking the donor to pay for, it's probably not specific enough.

• Sell a bowl of lentils, not “improved nutrition.”
• Get them to support a performance Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 washing across a spellbound audience, not “music” or “the arts.”
• Talk about a quiet cathedral of old-growth forest, not “the environment.”
• Promote cures for cancer, not just support for the fight against cancer.

The mistake many nonprofits make in fundraising is to think when it comes to talking about the cause, “bigger is better.” They believe the philosophical underpinnings of the cause are more important than its specific activities. As if the cause is more meaningful when seen from the 30,000-foot level than it is from right next to it. Fundraising doesn't work that way. No type of marketing or communication works that way.

Suppose you went to the bakery and the guy at the counter asked you to buy in to the concept of the Circle of Life: Everything we are and do eventually returns to the earth, which sends forth grain that's harvested and made into bread that sustains us until we return to the earth.

“Sorry! I just want some bread,” you'd mumble as you backed out of the shop. (Don't giggle. I live in Seattle, where we actually have shops like that. They don't last, but new ones keep popping up.) That whole circle-of-life thing is pretty cool if you stop and think about it. But really, even if you do stop and think (which, honestly, most of us don't have time for), you're at the bakery because you want some bread and need to know how much it costs. The guy could have your money in his hand in about 10 seconds if he'd just zero in on what you are there for, instead of what he is into.

A lot of fundraising is like that bakery. It's selling high-level concepts people don't care about instead of the bread they want.

Don't let that happen to your offer. Be doggedly specific. Not all specific offers are equally great, but the specific ones have a huge advantage over the concepts.

A Fundraising Offer Is Believable

One of the good things about making your fundraising offer specific is that it forces you to be realistic. You confront the question: Is this something people will actually believe in and pay for? If your head is in the cloud realm of brand abstraction—the “promoting hope” version of the offer—you can easily fool yourself into thinking your own claims are attractive and motivating, even when they're empty and weak.

Back at ground level, with specific offers, you can do a reality check. Does this look real or abstract? Believable or ridiculous? Would it make your mother ask, “Now what are you trying to say?” Or would it have her digging out her checkbook?

Make sure your offer doesn't stray from being realistic and attractive to donors in any of these common ways:

• Too big. I don't want to rain on your parade by saying we aren't going to eliminate poverty from the world by 2015. Possible or not, it's not believable. Likewise, we aren't going to reverse climate change or find a cure for Alzheimer's in the next few months. But in every one of those too-big cases, we can make meaningful progress—and our donors can make progress. Like the boy in the story who was tossing stranded starfish back into the ocean from a beach covered with millions of them, progress is satisfying. Even small progress. If the boy had been told to clear the whole beach of starfish, he would have felt defeated before he started. Giant tasks are discouraging.
• Too much about philosophy. Philosophy is important, but it's not what donors “buy” when they give. Donors buy action. Every word you use talking about philosophy is a word not talking about action—not telling donors what they need to know in order to give.
• Too much about process. Process is important. That doesn't make it good fundraising. Donors aren't interested in funding your processes, no matter how elegant. Donors are buying your outcomes. Trying to raise funds by talking about processes is like taking your dog to the park and instead of throwing a stick for him, giving him a lesson in stick aerodynamics. You'll have a disengaged canine companion.
• Too far from the experience of nonexperts. One of the things that makes an expert an expert is the ability to see behind the obvious. If an expert visits a community and finds malnourished children, his thought is not, “We need a whole bunch of food here!” He looks at what causes the malnutrition: What about the economy, transportation, soil health, or culture is the real problem? With his insight, he might go to donors and say, “There are hungry children here. Please help repair a bridge 10 miles from here.” If he did that, the nonexpert donors wouldn't understand. You need to say to donors: “We need a whole bunch of food here!” The fact that we'll get the food there by repairing a bridge is less important.

Fundraising is not for the proud. It's not for those who need to demonstrate their expertise and who think everyone else should be just as interested in their field as they are.

One of the great fundraising offers is the $1.79 meal.¹ It's a great offer because it's specific, it's something that's in the life experience of your donor—and it's cheap (more on that later).

Most organizations that can use the $1.79 meal offer do a lot more than serve meals. In fact, the meals are usually among the least important parts of their programs. But donors want solid, simple, clear offers they can understand. Are you willing to say, “Sorry, Ms. Donor. We don't want your money until you comprehend our programs in all their complex fullness.”

That's an expensive attitude. It's one some nonprofits take.

A Fundraising Offer Is Bite-Sized for Donors and Flexible

The boss said, “Order plenty of bags this time!” Last time, I'd ordered 5,000 paper bags for the grocery store that was my summer job during college. We'd run out too quickly for his taste. So I increased the order to 20,000.

But I made one small mistake. On the order form for the grocery supply company, I wrote “20m” instead of “20k.” M and K both stand for thousand, right?

No. For the grocery supply company, “M” meant million. I ordered 20 million paper bags. A thousand times as many bags as I wanted. They wouldn't have fit in the store, even if we got rid of all the groceries and packed all the shelves and aisles with paper bags. The order probably would have required weeks of overtime shifts at the bag factory—not to mention wanton slaughter of a forest or two. Fortunately, an alert order taker called to see if our neighborhood corner grocery really wanted enough paper bags to fill a small stadium. The boss had a good yell at me, and nobody was hurt.

There's a right size for everything. For the store, 5,000 bags was too small. Twenty million was too big. Somewhere between was the just-right “Goldilocks” amount.

It's the same for your donors. If you ask them to do too little, you make them feel underestimated. They can feel as if you assume they're poor or stingy. If you ask for too much, it's hard for them to respond. It puts them in the position of doing less than what you've said matters.

Let's say it costs $1,000 to feed everyone in a hunger-stricken village. Your donor can afford to give $100. She can accomplish only 10 percent of the goal. Going 10 percent of the way feels a lot less heroic and motivating than fully accomplishing a smaller goal—like feeding 50 hungry people for $100 dollars. When you asked her for the $1,000 she couldn't afford, she felt like a failure, picturing how she'd leave 90 percent of the hungry people hungry. But when you asked her for the $100 that's within her capacity, suddenly she's feeling empowered and generous.

To make sure you can ask a wide range of donors to accomplish exciting things within their budget, it helps to have offers that come in small, complete units that you can “repackage” for different donors—bite-sized asks.

Here's what makes this complicated: Donors have different-sized “bites.”

The majority of donors can realistically consider giving you somewhere between $10 and $100. If your offer is $1.79 meals, that means you should give these donors an array of choices like this:

1. 10 meals for $17.90
2. 20 meals for $35.80
3. 50 meals for $89.50

That gives the under-$100 donors something satisfying they can do.

But what about that smaller but important group of donors whose “bite” is between $100 and $1,000? You could keep scaling up the number of meals you're asking for:

1. 100 meals for $179
2. 200 meals for $358
3. 500 meals for $895
4. 1,000 meals for $1,790

Is that believable? That's a judgment call. It might be perfectly fine to picture 1,000 meals. But just in case the picture is patently ridiculous, you'll need to recalibrate: Instead of piling more meals into the offer, fund a larger unit, like feed everyone for a day. Let's say that's 100 people. That's a unit of $179. So your ask to this fatter-pocket group of donors might look like this:

1. Feed everyone for a day for $179.
2. Feed everyone for two days for $358.
3. Feed everyone for three days for $537.
4. Feed everyone for a week for $1,253.

Then there are those donors who can easily give you $1,000 and up. Some of them way up. For them, you have to abandon meals and go for much larger units. Like:

• All the food we need for a month.
• New kitchen equipment to make us more efficient.
• A new dining hall to make it possible to help even more people.

You owe your donors this level of thought about what you're asking them to do. It's up to you to make it possible for each donor to make the world a better place by giving an amount they can afford. When you do that, more of them give, and give more often.

A Fundraising Offer Has a Sense of Leverage

The first fundraising offer I remember encountering was this: A penny will keep a child from going blind. I was probably seven years old. I was astounded. My earnings were my weekly 50¢ allowance (minus the nickel I was required to tithe into the Sunday School offering plate). I figured that for 30¢ a week, I could help a whole classroom of them every week, and leave a little for myself.

I envisioned dozens of classrooms full of kids, all eagle-eyed and happy because of me. I pictured them going about in a throng, skipping down the dusty roads and singing for joy at the beauty and color they could see.

That offer was probably the cost of vitamin A pills, which can indeed prevent blindness. That offer still exists. It's more than a penny per child, but not a lot more. (Are there children in your life? Introduce them to this offer!)

You don't have to be elderly and frugal to love a good deal. That's why most great fundraising offers give a sense that the donor is stretching her charitable dollar.

The economics of charity often provide us with leverage. Why is the $1.79 meal so inexpensive? The same reason the vitamin pills were just a penny. It's because the organization gets donated food, volunteer labor, tax breaks, and many other things that maximize efficiency. These things provide leverage for the donors' gifts. If you had to pay the full price to buy, prepare, and serve those meals, that $1.79 would rise to somewhere around $12. That's exciting news for most donors. Tell them!

Leverage comes in three main forms:

1. Low cost (such as the one-cent vitamin or the $1.79 meal).
2. Big impact (digging a well in Africa may cost hundreds of dollars, but the positive impact is deep, wide, and long lasting).
3. Multiplication (see Chapter 8 for examples of offers that multiply donors' giving).

A Fundraising Offer Is Defensible

I feel awkward even mentioning this, but your fundraising offer has to be true. Sadly, not all nonprofits hold tightly to this standard. That's not you, of course.

Your offer must be not only true, but demonstrably so.

Few donors will ever see the proof that you're telling the truth. That's why organizations are sometimes weak at documenting their offers. But it matters. Remember, a lot of donors (and would-be donors) are afraid you're lying about what you do with their money. Every time a nonprofit is caught lying about that—even caught unable to back up its claims—it confirms their worst suspicions. It tells them they're right not to donate.

That's why we have to be like the builders of medieval cathedrals. They put just as much care into the sculptures and decorations high up on the building where nobody could see them as those down at eye level. The cathedral builders did that because they believed God can see all the decorations. Your reason could be that, too, but also: Anyone at any time, might look at any detail of your offer. Be ready!

Here are some things to check to make sure you have in writing the details and facts about your fundraising offers:

• Are costs correct? If your offer is a $1.79 meal, the actual cost should be darn close to $1.79.
• Is it still that much? I knew an organization that didn't recalculate the meal cost for many years. When they finally did, they found it had more than doubled in price.
• Is the money going where you say it's going? If you got donors all excited about saving the wombats, their money needs to go to saving wombats. It's okay if the connection with the wombats is indirect. Just make sure it passes the smell test, and there is no sense that you're getting away with something.
• Is the activity your offer funds real, current, and accurate?
• Is it documented in plain language?

This isn't easy to gather. You'll need to cooperate with accountant types, which can be a challenge. It also might require attorneys. (If it does, please accept my condolences. But you still have to do it.)

• • •

Had enough? Let's climb out of this smelly engine room and rejoin the passengers up in the nicer parts of the ship. In the next chapter, we'll look at some of the best-built fundraising offers out there.