Fundraising Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Claxon Communication

Big hug or lame handshake–which are you dishing up for donors?

June 12, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Bear Hug Last week, I teamed up with Peter Drury to present a session at the NDOA Spring Conference. It was called “Hook, Hug, Repeat: how to attract new donors and keep current ones super happy”.

Our basic premise was this: if you make donors feel awesome (i.e. you make them feel hug-erific), not only will you up your retention rate, you’ll attract new donors.

Because let’s be honest: not many organizations give a good hug. They give the equivalent of a lame, limp handshake. Makes you shiver just thinking about it, doesn’t it? A few examples of lameness:

When you only send an auto-generated, standard tax receipt to a donor? Lame.
When the only communication a donor receives is an ask for more money? Lame.
When someone gives at an event and you don’t communicate with them again until the following year when you ask them to attend again? Lame.

And don’t give me the old, “But we don’t have enough money to shower donors with love.” This is about having what Peter calls a ‘culture of gratitude’, not about spending oodles of money. It’s a way of being that informs your way of doing. For instance:

There’s no law that says your tax receipt has to be boring. Kiss boring bye bye and instead make the donor feel like their gift was a great, big, huge deal. Because it was.
Have staff–or board–call donors to simply say, Thank You. No ask. Not even to ring you back, if you end up leaving a voicemail (which you likely will). Just thank you. You did something amazing by supporting this organization and I want to say thank you. You rock.
Make sure your table captains are armed with note cards so they can jot off a handwritten note of gratitude right after the event. A handwritten note goes a long, long, long way to making a donor feel loved.

Brene Brown says the trick to happiness is to “tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.” Tell your donors how much you appreciate them with your whole heart. Bet some pretty great things happen. Bet they stick with you longer, engage more deeply and can’t stop talking about how fabulous it is to be part of your organization. And guess what? When that happens, hooking new donors becomes way easier.

Focus on your hugs and the hooks will follow.

Know your major donor audience, know your CTA

April 10, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Old hands with dollar symbol The internet and plucky little requests for support have online giving up year-over-year. What doesn’t happen as much online are major gifts. You know, the kind that require a relationship with the donor over a period of time that would lead them to want to engage really, really deeply with your organization…usually by way of cutting a check or parting with shares of stock. Not by clicking the ‘donate now’ button.

What, you might ask, does this mean for messaging to these potential major donors? What can we say that invites engagement? That introduces the idea that, at some point, they might want to consider moving all the way up the engagement ladder to the ‘major donor’ wrung. And how do we say it?

Here’s some research that suggests alternative approaches to major donor engagement:

Major donors respond to engagement by board members and people they know
Major donors frequently seek out opportunities to shape the direction of organizations they support
Consider appropriate volunteer opportunities an intermediate step on your major donor ladder. Turns out donors of substantial means give to organizations they gift with their time

Of course, this research applies to many other donors as well (AND you are, of course, showering all of our donors not just major donors with love year-round, right?), but these approaches may be particularly effective with major donors.

Wave your WHY flag

March 29, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Why does your organization exist? It’s a simple question, but few organizations do a good job of answering it. You talk about what you do, and how you do it. But the factor that separates most highly-successful, mission-driven organizations from the rest is clear articulation of their WHY.

WHY tells your audiences not only what you do but why they should care. And according to Simon Sinek, it’s what separates Martin Luther King, Jr. and Apple from their contemporaries — their ability to lead with their WHY has drawn interest and engagement for decades. It set them apart as innovators.

As nonprofit leaders and communicators, it’s your job to motivate teams and engage supporters. It should all start with WHY. Think of your WHY as a flag you fly that makes it easy for people who also believe what you believe (a.k.a. your believers) to find you, connect with you, and engage with you. Wave your flag proudly, my friends!

An organization that does a good job of waving their WHY flag is the Charleston Park Conservancy, which cares for Charleston, South Carolina’s over 120 parks. There it is, right on their homepage. Loud and proud.

Why do they lead with their WHY? Because they believe caring for parks will improve the city’s “health, community and economic strength”. Now you might not be a big park person – I mean sometimes there are unruly dogs and delinquent, smoking teenagers there. But who could argue with improving the health, community and economic strength of your city? Most people wouldn’t say “Oh, economic strength? No thank you. Not for me!” And if you were the Charleston Park Conservancy and someone did say that, you’d be at peace knowing they were an atheist and you get back to the business of connecting with your believers.

You understand why you do what you do. Sharing it with others –leading with your WHY – gives potential supporters something to say yes to.

Video inspires emotion and emotion inspires action, but only if you do it right

March 23, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Sometimes, inspiring action from your supporters is a matter of timing. And by “sometimes”, I mean pretty much always.

You may already be a Claxonette subscriber. If so, you’re aware of a little thing called the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Google offers some cool stuff for mission-driven organizations. We all know that video is the #hotnewthing (I’m going to recommend you don’t search that hashtag, actually) in the social media space. Google’s program lets you leverage that trend, and your own video brilliance to inspire action. (Yeah, they have this whole CTA thing down.)

Some of the action-tastic things they help you do:

•develop a video channel for your nonprofit

•create a “donate” button right on that channel

•add overlays on your video that encourage clicking to your webpage, campaign pages— wherever you like

Think about all the awesome ways you can use this program…

•Talk about impact with overlays that take viewers to more data if they are so inclined

•Integrate video with your other marketing channels

•Encourage followers and subscribers, to your newsletter, your Facebook page, etc.

•Leverage the connection viewers feel to your impact stories by allowing them to donate right then and there

Assuming you’ve done your planning and identified video as a good way to reach your supporters and, therefore, your goals, these changes will make your life easier by making it easier for people to take action right away—which is often the difference between people learning more about your organization or learning what’s happening in that cute cat video.

Want to show some empathy? We’ve got a button for that!

March 17, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

like People love clicking buttons. If you’ve ever handed a three-year-old your cell phone, you know what I mean. Kids are cute, and it almost makes the bill for that 14 minute accidental call to Taiwan OK.

Buttons get more action today than ever before. People click “like” buttons on Facebook to connect themselves with brands they care about. When it comes to human connections, that “like” button is an expression of what Larry Rosen, Ph.D calls ‘virtual empathy’, which “was the best predictor of being able to express real-world empathy”, according to a study he conducted with colleagues.

Now think about what this means when you talk about your mission online. Engage your audience by creating opportunities for people to “like” or “share”, and it gives them a little opportunity to connect. And they will because they feel you, dawg, they really do.

One organization that does a great job of buttonizing is FreePress.net, which provides clickable CTA buttons that let you send an email to legislators, contact companies, and share themed images with your social networks. Super clear CTAs, super clickable.

Call now! While supplies last!

March 13, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

There’s nothing worse than getting a wimpy marketing email. You know the ones. You start reading, fail to identify the point and—poof!—it’s gone with one click of the delete button. Bad, boring emails are an epidemic these days.

Missing from most of these bad emails is a clear, compelling call-to-action (CTA). You know, that part where you give the reader easy ways for them to engage. Calls to action should be directive. After all, we’re talking about a “call to action”, not a “request for action”. The goal is to make it so compelling and abundantly obvious what you want them to do that, of course, they want to do it.

Mushy and obsequious are not invited to your CTA party. They don’t inspire action. Yes, it can feel funky to ask someone to do something for you. Think of it this way: people who take the time to read your stuff through to the CTA like what you’re doing. They want to help. Make it easy for them to do it.

So you’ll tell your stories to your supporters to set the stage, then simply tell them what you’d like them to do. Be clear and be bold! In your emails, on your website and in your conversations.

Here are few resources to help you create a kick-ass CTA:

How to copywrite a call to action

10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’ online

How to Write Call-to-Action Copy That Gets Visitors Clicking

First time donors…kind of like that first date that never calls back

January 26, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Woman with old telephone I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?

The good news is that for most nonprofit orgs, donations increase at the end of any given calendar year. The bad news? You’ll never see 70% of those donors again. Sorry for the buzz kill.

Over on the Software Advice Non-Profit Blog, Mathew Mielcarek who — to be clear –laid down the buzz kill first, gives some advice on effectively engaging and retaining those donors.

Everyone knows I like me a well-done thank-you note. But I also appreciate that Mathew helps us look beyond the thank you note, calling our attention to how that first gift offers insights that can help you engage donors in a more relevant way. Those insights might seem blasé, e.g. gift amount or billing city/state, but when you’re paying attention, a little bit of boring can go a long way in terms of donor happiness…and therefore retention.

Creating an engagement approach based on donor details can keep your pitches from falling flat (and if they do, there’s always this).

Don’t mind the primate poop, dear donor

January 23, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

We all invite engagement from friends. I mean, Facebook exists, right? And last time I checked, no one was forcing us to read our news feeds. I don’t know about you, but my Facebook news feed is full of updates on the joys and challenges of parenting: videos of little Jimmy’s dance moves and photos of Susie’s first day of school. The people providing these updates are our friends, so we’re interested and invested. The messenger matters.

This holds true for donor engagement as well. Consider our little buddy Miko here. The Borneo Orangutan Protection Foundation provides “adoptive parents” of its primates access to a secure website, birthday cards, video updates and status reports from caregivers. Sounds a little like Facebook, doesn’t it?

If the messenger is Miko, we’re happy to ignore his propensity to poop on our shoes while we ogle his cuteness. In fact, we expect this behavior…nay, I say, look forward to it. (“Isn’t it cute the way Johnny burps,” sweetly asks the new mother.) It is his unexpected behavior that makes him so compelling.

This organization also does a particularly good job of communicating from the folks on the front line, where so much the do-gooding happens.

What messengers are on your front lines?

Stop talking to donors like donors

January 14, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

When you’re engaging donors, volunteers, board members, etc in your work, do you keep front and center the fact that:

Most people wear a bunch of hats and don’t think of themselves primarily as donors.

People think of themselves as a mom, dad, friend, daughter, brother, auntie, etc. Or, donning their professional hat, a barista, a nurse, a project manager, a student, a lawyer, a developer, a chef. etc. Or, donning their hobby hat, a runner, a yogi, a musician, a painter, a football fan, a poet, a knitter, etc.

“Well, duh, Erica!” you’re saying right about now. But admit it–when you’re ready to write an e-newsletter, a direct mail piece, a blog post, etc, you likely switch to thinking of the people on the receiving end of that communications first and foremost–and possibly solely–as donors. (It’s okay, we’ve all been there.)

Fundraisers focused on major gifts help people switch hats all the time. The good ones do this really, really well. When they sit down with someone, they know a lot about them. That’s what allows them to start out the conversation with what’s going on in that person’s life. They help them take off their “harried parent/busy professional/OMG-I-forgot-to-swap-out-the-laundry” hat and put on their “I-can-make-the-world-a-better-place-yihaw” hat. Did their son just head off to college? Is their niece in a dance recital? Did their dog just graduate to the next level of doggie school? They start the conversation there and then ease into a conversation about how their donations, investments, philanthropy and charitable choice.

So how do you apply this high-touch, in-person one-on-one fundraising technique to one-to-many marketing efforts? You do everything you can to make everything you do feel as personal as possible.

Two tips:

Look at your list and figure out what hat the people on the receiving end will be wearing when they read or, more likely, quickly scan your piece. (Yes, yes, many people, many hats. Take your best guess. If you have no idea who anyone is on your list, you have a different problem, my friend.) Will they be in front of a computer, having just arrived at their office, slamming back a cup of joe before heading into a day full of meetings? Will they be at home on a mobile device, making dinner, switching out laundry and sifting through their personal email? Or perhaps they’re a retiree who enjoys more in-depth information and has the time to read longer pieces? Figure out their situation and write accordingly. Feed them the information they want, how they want it. (Hint within a hint: Look at your balance of ‘you’ to ‘we’. ‘We’ is usually followed by something about the organization. ‘You’ is usually followed by something about them. You want more ‘you’ than ‘we’.)
Write everything with one person in mind. A real, live person who represents the type of person who will be reading the piece. (This is why personas are so important.) Write something they’d love to read. Others will love it, too.

Obviously, you shouldn’t stop talking to donors, volunteers and board members. But you should stop talking to them as if supporting your cause is the only thing they have going on in their lives. It isn’t.

Bye bye boring thank you letters

January 4, 2013 by Erica Barnhart

Don’t drive your donors to drink with boring thank you letters. Inspire them!

How many thank you letters have you received after making a donation that you remember? Go ahead. Count. It won’t take long. Most are totally and utterly un-memorable.

What a waste of paper and people-power.

Sure, you *have* to send an acknowledgement letter to everyone who donates to your organization. But acknowledging is not thanking. An acknowledgement doesn’t make the recipient feel all warm and fuzzy and good about what they’ve done. It makes them remember that soon they’ll have to file taxes. That’s stressful, not joyful.

Do your organization and everyone else a favor–turn your standard acknowledgement letter into a “thank you, you are awesome and we couldn’t do this without you because you ROCK” letter (or an equivalent that is appropriate for your organization’s brand).

Here are seven examples of awesome thank you letters from Lisa Sargent. They can do it. So can you.

In 2013, let’s say bye bye to boring thank you letters, shall we?