Future Fundraising Now

Try this useful tool for keeping fundraising copy simple

Simple writing is good writing. If you think people like you better because you use lots of big words, think again. The bigger your words, the less people understand. The less they even try to understand. The less they care. If they don't care, they won't give. So please keep your writing simple.

The above paragraph uses only words from among the 1,000 most common English words. I used The Up-Goer Five text editor, which immediately flags any word you use that's not in the top thousand.

It's an interesting diagnostic tool for simplifying your writing. Just don't think you need to use it to remove every word that's #1,001 or higher from your vocabulary. You'll end up with some really awkward circumlocutions. You'd be in deep trouble if you're a cancer charity: the word "cancer" is not in the top thousand. The editor itself has to refer to the top "ten hundred" words, because "thousand" is not among them.

However, if you check out your copy and find a majority of your words flagged -- you may have a problem: Copy that's hard to understand.

Thanks to Bad Language for the tip.

How to make your donation form better

Poorly built donation form pages will cost you a lot of lost revenue. And what constitutes poor built may surprise you. Here's a post from npENGAGE you should read: Donor Acquisition: 3 Donation Form Tweaks that will Quickly Improve Online Fundraising.

1. Ask only for the information you need. Don't ask donors for information you don't absolutely need. Each extra field you make them fill out sends more of them away. (More on that here: How Many Fields Belong On Your Landing Pages?.)
2. Don't distract from the act of donating. Don't have links away from the page, and don't put a lot of information beyond what's needed to get the gift.
3. Be sure it's secure. Many donors are still nervous about giving out their credit card information online. Make sure you have the "https" in the URL and the "lock" symbol visible.

Make your nonprofit website usable for seniors

If you're a fundraiser, you should also be conversant in "elder marketing." These are the people who drive the charitable giving bus. And they're steadily moving online.

That's why you should look at this study at Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Seniors as Web Users.

Key findings (among many):

• Reduced visual acuity is probably the best-known aging problem, and yet websites with tiny type are legion.
• Pull-down menus, hierarchically walking menus, and other moving interface elements are problematic for seniors who are not always steady with the mouse.
• Seniors also have a harder time using unforgiving search engines and forms.
• Seniors often had problems reading error messages, either because the wording was obscure or imprecise, or the message's placement on the page was easily overlooked.
• Drastic design changes hurt seniors the most.

Barriers to web usability are barriers to participation. That means less revenue for your cause.

How to make an ad man jump out the window

Another great cartoon from Marketoonist:

Why can we imagine an advertising creative director ending it all because someone wants to see proof that his work actually accomplishes what it's meant to accomplish?

Easy: He knows it won't come out looking good.

He knows that what he does is a flimsy construction built on a bad combination of wishful thinking, BS, and artistic self-expression. He knows it!

Take the warning: don't work with standard ad agencies. Too many are not about accomplishing your goals. They have their own goals. They've been misusing their commercial clients for decades. They'll do the same to you.

Two tempting ways not to raise funds

Failed fundraising projects often have one (or both) of these basic faults:

1. Pedagogical. It's trying to educate people into giving.
2. Polemical. It's trying to debate people into giving.

Neither one works, as noted at Happy Donors: The #2 Secret to Writing Fundraising Letters that Maximize Results.

Fundraising is about finding and cultivating people who already get it, who already want to be part of your cause:

... the purpose of your letter is not to educate or convince, it's to prompt them to do something they're already quite willing to do ... and to make that donation right now.

You can't teach or argue people into giving. All you can do is present a clear need and a clear call to action with emotion and urgency. That's what fundraising is.

Connecting with Boomers in your fundraising

If you're hoping to raise money from Boomers (and you'd better be doing that!) -- here are some thoughts from the Engage:Boomers blog: New Branding Rules.

Check out these hints for connecting with the demographic group that will soon (if not already) dominate the ranks of your donors:

1. I'm not a stereotype. (Don't treat them as a generation. They think of themselves as individuals.)
2. Help me first. (Show them what's in it for them.)
3. Embrace the basics. (Clarity, urgency, and emotion win every time.)
4. Make me feel good about myself. (Charitable giving is the ultimate feel-good action. Remind them!)
5. Involve me in the solution.

Change your name at your own risk

One of the dependably silly things you can observe if you watch the fundraising scene is organizations changing their names, leaving behind sensible understandable names for new jaw-droppingly strange ones.

Seachange Strategies Blog notes this sad phenomena at Why name changes suck and branding is hard, pointing out two recent changes (Point Reyes Bird Observatory is now Point Blue Conservation Science and Jewish Funds for Justice is now Bend the Arc), along with a classic, when World Wildlife Fund tried to become World Wide Fund for Nature.

As comical as some of these changes are, they aren't doing it for our entertainment. Somebody believes they're doing something smart: Sometimes they're making a desperate attempt to breathe life into a moribund fundraising program. (Note: It doesn't work; you have to fix what's actually broken, not try to escape by changing your name.) Other times, they're struggling to capture a mission that has grown beyond what the original name describes.

Like this terrible example of an arts organization in Florida that changed from the Naples Philharmonic to Artis-Naples (I'm not making that up. Read about it here.

Changing your name, even when it's not a goofball change like "Artis-Naples," is very risky. (See What’s in a name (change)? for what you can expect from changing your name and other ill-advised moves.)

Your tired, corny, out-dated name may be one of the most valuable assets you have. Don't change it!

See also the sad stories of how World Emergency Relief became Emerge Poverty Free and Cascade Land Conservancy became Forterra.

Melted wax makes a stupid metaphor in failed ads

Here's some very silly work done for World Wildlife Foundation - Philippines. It's in support of Earth Hour, an event that encourages people to turn off electric lights to raise awareness about climate change.

This ridiculous mess is brought to us by our abstraction-loving, award-hungry, nonprofit-predatory friends at Leo Burnett.

(This and several more similar pieces here.)

You can figure this out if you know some background.

That bright orange coral stuff is actually a melted-down candle! Get it? Oh, you didn't realize this whole thing is about Earth Hour? You didn't see the tiny logo in the upper right? You didn't know candles are part of the Earth Hour observance? You haven't heard of Earth Hour?

Well anyhow, see how that melted wax that looks like coral is sheltering the pretty little fish! See? What? You say you aren't conversant in coral-reef ecosystems? You didn't know that looks like coral?

Well, surely you made the central connection: Light your candles for Earth Hour, and that's like sheltering fish and doing other helpful things for the environment. Oh, c'mon! You didn't make that connection? What do we have to do for people these days? Spell it out?

Seasoned fundraisers know that if you want people to do anything, you have to tell them clearly, directly, and repeatedly. Not through complex visual metaphors that require a lot of background to understand.

This is an example of stupid nonprofit advertising because the creators refused to consider what people know, and chose to assume everyone knows what they know. Pretty pictures that carry hidden messages are not how you influence people.

Thanks to Creative Advertisements for NGO for the tip.

More Stupid Nonprofit Ads.

Podcast: Step off the "tactics treadmill" and start raising funds

Discover how to stop wasting time, money and energy jumping from one fundraising tactic to the next and instead focus on what matters: Your relationship with your donors and your fundraising offer. When you understand those two things, you'll be better at choosing the right fundraising tactics, and you'll be much better at making any tactic fulfill its promise.

To listen, click here to download the audio file or visit the Fundraising Is Beautiful page here, where you'll find several listening and subscription options.

Or subscribe with iTunes:

Do you dumb down your fundraising?

Somebody asked Kivi if making an email newsletter a quick, skimmable read constituted "dumbing it down." Read about it here at her blog: Making It Skimmable Is Not Dumbing It Down. (The title gives away the answer, but read it anyway!)

Fear of "dumbing down" is one of the great forces of evil in our industry. It makes many fundraisers do extremely dumb fundraising.

Making something simple is not dumbing down.

Making something clear is not dumbing down.

Making something emotionally compelling is not dumbing down.

On the other hand, making your message complex and opaque is dumb. So is being dry and rational. Any time you refuse to communicate with your audience -- who they are, where they are, and what they need -- and instead communicate in a way you think is compelling to you ... that's dumbing down your work.

We all make mistakes. Some you can call dumb, others honest errors. But if you do ineffective fundraising because you have a need to prove you're smart -- that's the dumbest dumbing-down of all.