Donor-Focused Stories

Everyone who's paying attention knows that storytelling is the best way to motivate people to give. Facts and statistics don't connect with your donors' hearts and don't move them to action.

But let's take a deeper look at that well-known truth. Because not all stories are equal. Some do all the great things stories are supposed to do. Others are flat, revenue-killing duds you'd be better off without—no better than a bullet list of statistics.

It's a matter of who the hero is.

The central element of any story is its hero. A story is hardly a story at all if it doesn't feature a hero: the central figure in your story. The person (it's not always an individual, and it's not always a human being) who matters most in the story. The one everything important happens to and/or the one who does the important things.

Here are three types of fundraising stories with different heroes and how they connect with donors.

1. The nonprofit as hero

   It goes like this: We were founded in 1948 by a genius who invented our dynamic, cutting-edge methodologies. And our excellent staff are the best! You've seen this type of story many times, right?

   When the nonprofit is the hero, the story is mainly bragging. Empty bragging. It has little impact on people, because it isn't interesting. Think about it: We all swim in a sea of boastful claims (by commercial marketers, mostly). Does anyone want to hear yet another “We are the best”proclamation? Will anyone even believe it?

   You may be technically telling a story when your organization is the hero, but it has little power to stir the heart. And it almost never works in fundraising. Don't waste your time telling stories with your organization as the hero!

2. A beneficiary as hero

   This is the story most fundraisers who are paying attention want to tell. It goes like this: The day Hannah learned she was HIV-positive was the worst day of her life.

   At its best, a beneficiary story offers emotional and believable proof that the work is needed. But even when it's powerful, interesting, and relevant—it doesn't necessarily connect with the donor. It's just a story.

   A beneficiary-as-hero story is not the guaranteed winner people make it out to be. It works in fundraising when the pure drama and relevance make it stand out among the hundreds of stories your donor will encounter the day she sees yours. Then, it might do the job and motivate a gift. But there's a much better hero you should build your stories around.…

3. The donor as hero

   This is the story the real fundraising pros tell. It goes like this: Some people can't stand to hear about the spread of tuberculosis. It makes them feel powerless and depressed. Not you. You read about this deadly disease, and you know you can help change the situation.

   Usually (not always), a donor-as-hero story has a beneficiary in it. But it's told in a way that makes the donor a part of the action: Hannah may be HIV-positive, but she has hope because the donor cares enough to reach out generously.

   Donor-as-hero stories usually work in fundraising. They're as close to a slam-dunk fundraising technique as you'll find.

   A wonderful thing happens to your writing when you tell a donor-as-hero story. It gets less “writerly” and more conversational. You move away from the temptation to impress with your five-star creative writing ability and toward simply communicating with your reader. You use the word you a lot. Your style gets more like a letter and less like something from a creative writing workshop.

   This baffles some nonprofits. They may think, “What the heck? I hire a professional writer and his copy sounds like my Aunt Ruth!” But the verbal fireworks they're looking for (and that you can count on many writers to produce) is not the best style for fundraising. And here's a secret: Writing so you sound genuinely like Aunt Ruth is much more difficult to master than writing like an overcaffeinated Hemingway.

   Here's the colloquial Aunt Ruth writing style I'm talking about:

   Dear Mrs. Donor:

   Just [time since last donation] ago, you sent a gift of [last donation amount]. Your gift is now hard at work saving lives and keeping children safe in the inner city. Thank you so much for caring!

   It doesn't have the taut rhythm, explosive verbs, and souped-up details of “creative” writing. But it sounds real. And it's about the donor. Sounding real and writing about the donor are the killer tactics of fundraising.

Reporting Back: Set Yourself Apart

The first thing you say to someone when he comes home at the end of the day is almost always something like “How was your day?”

Humans want feedback. We need to know how things are going. That's why we pay so much attention to report cards (our own or especially our kids'), performance reviews, and gossip. These things are deeply compelling, even when they tell us news we don't like.

Donors need to know, too. If your donors give you money, but they never find out what happened with that money—you have created a disconnect. It's almost a betrayal. Imagine what your relationship with your significant other would be like if every day he or she came home and stonily refused to tell you about their day. It would be like living with a teenager!

A receipt can get donors part of the way there: It tells them the gift was received and the check was cashed. But they still need rich, emotional proof that the money accomplished something. They gave to make something happen; most receipts don't tell them that it happened. For all they know, maybe it didn't. They're stuck wondering: Did those hungry children who broke my heart get the food they needed? Did the research continue on its path of discovery? Is there going to be a ballet season next year?

And yet the charities come back again and again, asking for more help without ever showing donors they made a difference. That doesn't close the loop. You haven't said, “It worked! Your gift made possible the miracle we promised it would!”

Given this silence, it's surprising that donors give at all, much less give a second or third time. Would you?

I can't prove this, but I think this lack of feedback is one of the reasons for dismayingly low donor retention rates across our industry. I'll tell you this: Most of the organizations I work with excel at reporting back to their donors, and their donor retention numbers stand head and shoulders above the national benchmarks.

The two key ingredients to people's reporting back are receipts and newsletters. We'll look at the best way to do both of these, as well as some other ways to tell donors what their gifts mean.

Donor Control Over Communication

We don't control donors. They are in the driver's seat and can leave us at any time. And they do. There's nothing we can do to change that fact.

But we can work with their control.

Overtly give your donors the control they already have. Actively solicit their control, giving them choices like these:

• Let them choose the media you contact them with. Let them opt in or out of telephone, e-mail, or direct mail.
• Ask them what topics they'd prefer to hear from you about.
• Let them control how often you reach out to them.
• Let them leave your list if they want to.

Do this by sending them (by mail and/or e-mail) questionaires that give them these choices. Here's what will happen: few donors will exercise any of these choices. But overall retention and other donor metrics will improve. That includes the large majority who don't opt for any of the choices you put in front of them.

Will you lose donors? A few. But you were going to lose those ones anyway—after you spent several dollars trying to get response that was never coming.

The real impact will be donors who trust you more, feel more connected, give more, and stay with you longer. It's one of the strongest fundraising techniques available to you.

Appropriate Design

Design can be a difficult subject for fundraisers. Most of us (myself included) are not graphic designers. We depend on professional designers to get our messages out in ways that won't embarrass us. It doesn't always work.

The right designer can take great fundraising ideas and breathe pure right-brain power into them. They can move your fundraising to levels of emotional resonance that words alone can hardly approach. The wrong designer—even a slightly wrong one—can turn your work into a pudding of awfulness that costs you dearly by confusing or even repelling donors.

One reason it's so hard to get design right is a false dichotomy held by many in the marketing and advertising industries: They think “creative” and “old-fashioned” are opposites. Creative means something brand new and exciting, that expresses the soul and genius of the designer. Old-fashioned means design that a designer is tired of. Effectiveness is seldom considered in this calculation.

Designers who are trapped in that mind-set will hurt your fundraising (and make your life miserable). Find designers who understand that creative and old-fashioned are not opposites. Find designers who know you can (and must) do both.

Don't get me wrong: Boring, bland, unemotional design hurts fundraising. Don't put up with it! But the opposite of boring design is not edgy, modern design, as some would have you believe. The opposite of boring design is good design. Readable, likable, and packed with the emotions of philanthropy. And it's usually old-fashioned.

This can be a challenge, because many designers are younger people, recently educated, conversant with high-tech tools. They've seen cutting-edge design receive all the praise, win the awards, and get covered by design publications. This gives them the false sense that looking up-to-the-minute is a high virtue. And that looking old-fashioned is a terrible sin. As we'll see in a moment, neither is true.

Here are the four main design qualities you should focus on:

• Readability. This is the most important design value in fundraising. If design impedes readability, it is a failure. No matter what else it has going for it. Please don't tolerate stupid design tricks like weird fonts, tiny type, or type set over images. These things squeeze the readability out of your copy. They make it opaque to donors, and that means less response.
• Simple, not flashy. I have yet to see a cool, stand-out piece of design outperform simple design in any fundraising medium. In fact, “undesigned” pieces¹ usually do best of all: text-only e-mails, direct-mail envelopes with no pictures or fancy type treatments. Flashy may be where it's at in some forms of marketing. Not in fundraising.
• Culturally appropriate for your donors. You know how old your donors are. Design for them. What may look corny and dated to you likely looks cool to them. You have no duty (and no business) dragging them into the era of modern design. (And you'll be in their shoes someday, longing for the look that resonates with you after young designers have moved on to newer things.)
• Flexible. Fundraising thrives on variety. A straightjacket design scheme that forces uniformity will drive down your fundraising results over time. That contradicts standard branding theory, but it's true. If you always design something a certain way, then you test that against something different (assuming both are appropriate), the new way will almost always perform better.

There's a lot more to design than these four things, but watch these four and you'll be in good shape.

How to Measure Donor Communication

Fundraising is unkind to blowhards. The moment you pontificate, something comes along and proves you wrong. Believe me about this.

That means you should take everything any expert, consultant, or blowhard tells you with a grain of salt. That includes me. My advice to you is based on my experience, not yours. Things could be different for you.

Fortunately, there's an antidote for this lack of certainty: measurement.

If you measure the right things, you'll know if the communications you're putting into practice are actually doing the job of connecting with donors so they give more and stay with you longer. The more you measure, the clearer your picture. Watch the following three indicators, and you'll have clarity:

1. Campaign results. If you're doing donor communication right, most of your fundraising campaigns will do well. Response, average gift, and net revenue are the key numbers to watch. When they are strong and in balance, you are seeing a healthy donor-focused program in action.

   If you measure only campaign results, though, you could easily miss the real story. That's why the next two numbers are so important.

2. Donor retention.² This is a long-term metric, and it can uncover problems and opportunities not revealed by campaign results. Donors who feel connected and satisfied are much more likely to stay with you and keep giving. If you're communicating well with your donors, you should see strong (and usually rising) retention. These rates will differ by donor group (new donors have the lowest retention rates, and it improves with each year a donor stays with you).

   Even a small improvement in donor retention has a huge impact on your long-term revenue picture.

3. Donor migration. Every year, most donors give close to (usually exactly) the amount they gave the previous year. But some of them give more or less by a large percentage. Most significant upgrading and downgrading is a result of events in your donors' lives, and has little connection to what you are doing. But you do have influence: When your fundraising is striking a chord, you'll increase upgrading and minimize downgrading.

Donor retention is important because upgrading donors are your main (maybe only) source of major donors and eventual bequests. When you treat donors right, more of them will increase their giving, often because your relevant fundraising lifts you into the category of preferred charity for them.

These are not the only things you should be measuring, but they are the key indicators of successful donor-focused fundraising.

• • •

There's one more thing you should know about Golden Rule fundraising: Even when you practice it and watch the revenue roll in as a result, it will likely come under attack.

That's a common and unpleasant fact of life in our industry.

The reason is simple: Golden Rule fundraising doesn't stroke the egos of people in your organization. It's too busy making your donors into heroes, and that's not as thrilling as hyped-up boasting and organizational preening.

Even worse, Golden Rule fundraising is not a “shiny object.” It's old hat. You don't need new technology. Just the right kind of attitude. Many leaders are irresistibly drawn toward new and exciting things and the amazing claims you can make for anything before it's been field-tested.

Being successful at fundraising should be satisfying enough, but that's a fact that's often lost on nonprofit leaders. Nearly every time I've seen organizations choose to abandon Golden Rule fundraising in favor of some form of Awesome Nonprofit fundraising, they did so with the claim that they could improve revenue by being cooler, more modern, more like commercial marketing.

It doesn't work. But try telling that to someone who has what he thinks is one solution for two problems: a spiffy new look-at-us approach that will raise more money and make us feel good.

I'm not trying to depress you—just to prepare you for what's coming. Your best move will be to marshal the facts about how being donor focused works financially. If you can't talk them out of Awesome Nonprofit fundraising, see if you can at least get them to test it first.

In the next two chapters, we'll look at some of the steps you can take to spread donor focus widely around your organization. That's the best way of all to fend off any attacks on your Golden Rule fundraising.