Helping you to fundraise properly
Jeff Brooks takes guidance produced on customer experience and reviews it through the lens of a fundraiser because it’s a look at how people think and decide.
Here are the “6 components of human beings” with what each might mean for fundraisers to give you a powerful advantage.
These are dark times for direct mail fundraising. Response rates are down (and have been trending lower for more than a decade). At the same time, costs of paper, printing, and postage keep going up, usually faster than inflation.
So direct mail is dead, right? The sooner you stop using it for fundraising, the better. Right?
Not so fast.
Jeff Brooks takes a sober and non-panicked look tells at direct mail to see that it isn’t dead. It’s not even sick. But it’s changing, like everything else.
Brain science is commonly taken into consideration when developing marketing and communication strategies, particularly concerning visual content. After all, the best way to influence behavior is to understand its drivers. And behavior is driven by our psychological brains. At the same time, basing a strategy on invalid data can quickly waste time and resources.
Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding our visual brains, plenty of myths clutter the published universe. To save everyone a lot of wasted effort, Samantha Lile at Visme
has debunked 10 common myths about our brains and their visual abilities.
We’ve covered tips on how to write successful appeal letters before, but this list by Marc Pitman really breaks it down into eight easy-to-implement steps. This blog simply can’t be ignored.
https://npengage.com/nonprofit-fundraising/fundraising-letters/
A Giving Day is a 24 hour digitally driven fundraising and engagement campaign with the goal of rallying a university’s or nonprofit’s community behind a particular cause.
The original and most famous Giving Day is #GivingTuesday and has since been embraced by universites and nonprofits across the globe looking to run their own campaigns.
In this plan from Hubbub, you will gain a clear idea of the steps required to launch a successful Giving Day campaign. Much of this is targeted at universities, schools and colleges, but is applicable to the whole nonprofit sector.
Creating a presentation powerful enough to stay in your audience’s mind is key whether you’re presenting to potential prospects, showing off your incredible KPIs at your board meeting or sharing best practise with other fundraisers at the next CASE conference!
Visme has put together an incredible selection of free presentation templates that will ensure you stand out.
More free stuff and this time we focus on email templates. Emails are a key method for non-profits to communicate with your supporters and getting the design right is key in getting your message read.
Really Good Emails is an amazing resource with over 4000 real email campaigns to inspire you PLUS if you sign up for free, the code behind the email for you to tailor to your needs.
Every week, Mary Cahalane provides expert fundraising advice in her blog – I could easily reshare her blog here every week (hint – sign up to the Hands on Fundraising blog).
Anyway, Mary’s post at the beginning of the month really stood out for offering links to loads of free content to help fundraisers get creative. There are sites listed which offer free photos, photo editing, graphic design, office tools but what really stands out is the list of writing tools!
Miss it, miss out!
While organizations focus on their development goal and raising money through major gifts, events, direct mail, grants and online, it is often stewardship and retention that fall by the wayside.
According to Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay, a 10% increase in donor retention can enhance the lifetime value of your donor base by up to 200%.
Those are sobering statistics and make it pretty clear what we should be focusing on. Here, Danielle J Vermenton provides 10 tips on how to embrace donor retention.
https://npengage.com/nonprofit-fundraising/retention-is-the-new-acquisition/
Retention is one of the Big 5 KPIs to measure, but why is it so important?
A 10 percent improvement in attrition can yield up to a 200 percent increase in projected value, as with lower attrition significantly more donors upgrade their giving, give in multiple ways, recommend others, and, ultimately, perhaps, pledge a planned gift to the organization.
In this sense the behavior of “customers” and the value they generate appear to mirror that reported in the for-profit consumer sector, where similar patterns of value and behavior emerge. Indeed, the marketing literature is replete with references to the benefits that a focus on customer retention can bring.
Adrian Sargeant explains more in this article.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/donor-retention-nonprofit-donors/
Reinier Spruit discusses how we’re in the relationship building business and how we need to measure and register every response.
Ironically, we must quantify the relations with our donors, so we can improve the quality of the contact we have with them.
There are a ton of metrics we can track, and should track, like email open rates, sign-up rates per hour, one-off cash donations and appeal response rates. But there are 5 that are simply much more important. Mainly because they are the building blocks for making sensible decisions for the longer term.
I call them the Big Five. The Big Five are Volume, Expenditure, Income, Retention and Return on Investment.
Find out more by clicking the link below:
https://101fundraising.org/2014/05/big-5-fundraising-performance-metrics/
Philippa Christoforou has been part of the OxReach team at Oxford University Innovation since 2016. Since then over £200,000 for social good projects originating at the Uhttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-crowdfund-philippa-christoforouniversity of Oxford has been raised.
But why crowdfunding? Why not just apply for grant applications? What is the benefit to the project in watching the pledge count slowly creep towards the target, whilst the anxiety builds that we might not make it?
Here, Philippa describes her experience of crowdfunding and the benefits gained.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-crowdfund-philippa-christoforou
Getting alumni, especially younger graduates, to donate is a challenge for many colleges and universities, especially those that rely on approaches that could end up in voicemail or the rubbish bin.
Crowdfunding models are increasingly popular for students to undertake peer-to-peer and social fundraising on behalf of a fundraising program to bring in new donors.
In this article in the Washington Post, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel provides a number of real life examples of crowdfunding campaigns and the impact they’ve had on college and university fundraising.
Crowdfunding campaigns aren’t just successful by chance. They require a lot of planning to ensure you’re reaching the right people to propagate your message.
In this essential guide, Jonathan May from hubbub provides excellent tips on how to plan your crowdfunding campaign.
https://www.hubbub.net/blog/how-to-plan-a-major-nonprofit-crowdfunding-campaign
Crowdfunding isn’t a new concept; it’s been around for nearly two decades. However, it has recently become more prominent as an alternative tool for the Higher Education sector.
In this blog, Eliott Falvert-Martin explains how Crowdfunding gives donors a unique opportunity to get interested in a cause on an emotional level and becomes an acquisition tool.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-you-crowdfunding-elliot-falvert-martin
Many smaller fundraising and non-profit teams can’t make the investment to fully utilise analytics.
In this blog, the great Peter Wylie uses data from two schools to demonstrate how to build a very simple predictive score using nothing but Excel.
https://cooldata.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/a-simple-score-you-can-probably-build-in-excel/
If you’re struggling to adopt predictive analytics, this guide provides guidance on the initial steps to take to create nine segments based on capacity and propensity.
http://www.lesterusa.com/Powering-Annual-Giving-with-Predictive-Analytics.php
This article by Becky Slack first appeared in the Guardian some time ago, but it’s still a great starting point for those interested in understanding how analytics can drive insight and aid decision making in non-profits.
Don’t be put off by data. It’s all about understanding your audiences. This guide contains some straight forward steps to get you started.
Many rural communities across the developing world rely on hand pumps for their daily water needs. However, at any one time, one in four pumps is broken. Smart Handpumps have a transmitter that show how much they are being used, and if they are broken. In the areas where they have been installed in Eastern Kenya 98% of repairs are now completed within three days, rather than weeks or months, as was the case before. With your help, we can bring this technology to more communities in other parts of Kenya, and beyond, so that more people can benefit from sustainable water supplies.
Gifts to this appeal will be matched by the Global Challenges Research Fund, which means your money will go twice as far.
This appeal runs for the month of June on the University of Oxford’s crowdfunding site Oxreach. Their Twitter feed will be featured on this site during June 2019.
Visit the site to find out more about the project, and how you can help – and please spread the word!
This is a special post highlighting a real appeal. If you would like to feature an appeal that is special to you, please contact me. Hopefully, we can make this a regular feature.
When deciding on what to focus your time on, it’s also important to understand what makes you or your cause distinctive. The change imperative helps you to manage your competitive position.
In this insight written while developing the book “The challenge of being distinctive”, Susannah Baker explains her thinking.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/change-imperative-susannah-baker