Letter and reflection( 9hours)

Fundraising Strategies, Part 1:

In this week's module, we're reviewing various fundraising tactics.

Assigned Readings: Chapters 12-17; 25-28. I recommend you focus on chapters 13-15 and 25. You can skim the rest, and I've provided an outline below to help you take notes of what is most important in each chapter. Each mini-lecture reviews this content and is 3-8 minutes in length.

 Module 6 Outline.docx  Module 6 Outline.docx - Alternative Formats

 

Learning Objectives:

· Identify and evaluate strategies for multi-channel fundraising

· Apply best practices in using direct mail

· Identify appropriate online fundraising strategies based on organizational mission and resources

· Identify basic components of phone solicitations and special events

· Identify strategies for managing large campaigns; define differences between annual, capital, and endowment campaigns

· Develop strategies for evaluating fundraising messaging and tactics

1. Strategic Planning for Multi Channel Fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DEvIpgV-Hk&feature=youtu.be

2. Direct Mail Best Practices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0_Gisko3js&feature=youtu.be

3. Online Fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2jnKxMaI7Q&feature=youtu.be

4. Special Event Fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-A2TDbQuhY&feature=youtu.be

5. A fundraising campaign refers to fundraising for a pre-determined goal (money, attention, etc.) over a certain period of time (usually up to 2 years). 

Your text highlights the following:

Capital Campaigns: seeking major gifts (large amounts) for projects including building renovations or purchases

Annual Campaign: seeking funding for organization's annual revenue

Major Gift Campaign: seeking funding from large donors (often related to a specific program, for example, a large scholarship fund, or starting a new initiative)

Campaigns can also be used for the following:

#GivingTuesday: seeking funding on this particular day- organizations must prepare for this campaign by driving people to their websites/social media, and relying on others to share their message

Advocacy Campaign: seeking action related to policy issues; this can include requesting for people to share information, contact policy-makers, etc. in order to affect policy change

Year-End Campaign: seeking funding before and during the holiday season

You can find a list of other types of campaigns here, if you are interested.

The important thing to remember about campaigns is that they are a unique fundraising operation- they have a set, pre-deteremined goal, and set time-line for when they will start and end (although the timeline may be extended). This helps an organization plan multi-channel fundraising as needed surrounding a particular effort.

6. PlayPosit: Capital Campaigns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9WZTQDm3lg

7. Evaluating Your Fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIh8Dh7DszE&feature=youtu.be

The copy of Textbook: chapter 13  What Successful Mass Appeals Have in Common

Although many people find it anxiety-provoking to ask someone for money in person for reasons we have discussed earlier, there is one important way in which asking one person for money is much easier than any other strategy: all you have to do is ascertain whether that one person is interested in your cause, and find out (usually by your knowledge of that person or by asking questions) what he would need to know in order to consider making a gift. This is far different from trying to ascertain whether some hundreds or thousands of people are interested in your cause and then what all of them would probably want to know. But because it is unwieldy and, for the most part, unrealistic, to build an organization one donor conversation at a time, sending the same appeal to hundreds or thousands of people at once is what we have to do. Fortunately, there is a science to mass appeals and there are a variety of ways to appeal to a large number of people at once.

First, keep in mind that the success rate with direct mail, e-mail, social media, and even phoning is very low. The response to direct mail and e-mail appeals hovers around .5 to 1 percent when appealing to new donors and between 5 to 30 percent when appealing to donors who have given before. Phoning a “hot” list (see below) may yield a 5 percent response, and there are ways to boost that, but not past 30 percent. Most people who give once do not give again. The number of people who gave for the first time in one year and made a second gift that same year is called your “conversion rate.” It generally hovers around 25 percent. Your “retention rate” expresses the proportion of donors who have given more than once and who give this year and can be expected to give at least once next year. That rate averages about 60 to 65 percent of donors. So, although the initial response to a mass appeal can be expected to be low, you can expect to convert about one-quarter of those donors to second-time givers; of those givers, you can expect nearly two-thirds to give during a second year. These further gifts depend on you treating your donors right.

More than any other strategies, direct mail and e-mail show how you must be willing to get into fundraising all the way to make it work. If you do an appeal, attract some donors, and then don’t communicate with them regularly, all the money and time you spent attracting them is wasted. Your focus needs to be on retention and upgrading, which is where you will see a financial return on your investment. In order to retain, you must first acquire.

People new to fundraising often find these response rates demoralizing. But acquiring and keeping donors is a numbers game that will ultimately play out in your favor. If you keep in mind some principles from the field of marketing, you will create a strategy that is built, in part, on repetition of the message and on appealing to as large a number of people as you can manage. We know from marketing that a person needs to see the name of a product at least three times before she or he will buy it. How do we know that a person has “seen” it three times? This is called the Law of 21—they have to be exposed to the name of the product at least twenty-one times for the seller to be confident their intended audiences has actually “seen” it—that they have actually allowed it into their brains.

Much of what we do all day is filter out messages: ads, street signs, news, and so forth. I compare it to an experience I often have: I am driving down a busy street that I have driven down many times. A store I never went to has gone out of business, and I cannot, for the life of me, remember what the store sold. I had filtered out that name, as I had no need to know it. As I discussed in the previous chapter, a compelling and consistent message, delivered in a variety of ways over many channels, is the only way your organization is going to get on the radar of a potential donor. You are probably not affiliated with an organization whose name is well known, so you have a bar to reach just to be considered. Experienced fundraisers see a challenge in the truism that most people, when invited to give to your organization, are going to decline, so they are eager to promote the mission of their organization as widely as possible.

To do that, keep in mind three things that appeals to large numbers of people have in common: a good list, an understanding of the psychology of an appeal, and an evaluation of results.

A GOOD LIST

Whether you are using e-mail, direct mail, or the telephone, the key to success or failure will be the quality of your list. There are three kinds of lists, with the highly technical names of HOT, WARM, and COLD. They describe the likelihood of people on that list making a donation.

Hot Lists

A hot list consists of people who have already made some kind of commitment to your organization. The hottest list of people for any organization is its list of current donors. The second-hottest list includes friends of current donors, because most people’s friends share their values and commitments. Remind donors to pass their paper newsletter on to friends, and have campaigns in which donors are asked to forward e-mail solicitations to people they think would be interested.

Another source of hot prospects is your board members, volunteers, and staff. On a yearly basis, these people should also be asked to provide a list of names, which can be compared to the current mailing list; anyone who is not already a donor can be solicited. Of course, any board member, staff person, or volunteer who isn’t already a donor is a hot prospect as well.

A word about asking volunteers for money: I meet many people who are hesitant to do this but when I remind them that more adults in the United States give away money than volunteer, and that almost all volunteers give away money, they realize that their volunteers are giving money somewhere, just not to them. And the reason the volunteers are giving money elsewhere is because someone is asking them.

Warm Lists

A warm list consists of people who have either used or heard of your services or your work, people who are donors to organizations similar to yours but probably have not heard of your organization, or people who have come to your special events. In other words, these are people who either know about your organization or they care about your cause, but you cannot say for sure that they do both.

People who attend special events who are not donors should receive an appeal soon after the event. Pass out a sign-up sheet or conduct a door prize drawing to get names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. People who previously gave your organization money but no longer do also constitute a warm list if you have correct addresses for them.

If your organization gives people advice, referrals, or other service by phone, mail, or online, create a system to gather the names of people served, unless that information is confidential or obtaining an address would be inappropriate in some other way. This list is the least warm because not all the people using your organization donate to anything, you don’t know whether they were satisfied with what they received from you, and they may feel they deserve to get the information you are giving out for free. However, some will be grateful and want to help, and some will prefer to pay for the information rather than accept it for free.

chapter 14  Direct Mail

Simply described, direct mail involves sending a form letter seeking support for your nonprofit, and including a return envelope in which people can send back a donation. Direct mail appeals go to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people by bulk mail.

For decades and to the present day, direct mail is the most common and familiar type of solicitation in use in the United States and one of the most common in Canada, Australia, and England. Because of its long history of use and the sheer volume of direct mail, it is one of the most studied strategies, so there are data that can be used to ensure effectiveness.

Some have proclaimed that direct mail is dead, but direct mail is not even sick. E-mail and social media have given us some wonderful new strategies for raising funds, but even organizations that use a lot of social media platforms for fundraising still use direct mail, using the strategies together to maximize response (see Chapter Twelve, “Multi-Channel Fundraising”). Direct mail, e-mail, and social media are similar strategies for engaging prospects and donors, but they are not interchangeable. For general correspondence, e-mail has largely taken the place of both mail and phone, so paper mail has become less common, making it more attractive to the recipient. Organizations are finding that direct mail is actually doing better than it was earlier in this century, when the market for mail was saturated, for a number of reasons. People who genuinely dislike direct mail have registered with various agencies to have their names taken off of direct mail lists, reducing the amount of mail they receive. Environmental concerns, along with big increases in the costs of printing and mailing, have caused many organizations to cut back their direct mail programs, replacing personal snail mail with e-mail, online social networks, or even texting. With far less volume and with the mail being sent far more focused on people who may respond, direct mail is doing well.

Used carefully, direct mail not only produces new donors but also enables you to identify donors to whom you likely have no other access. Stories abound of donors recruited through direct mail whom no one in the organization had ever met but who sent $500 or $1,000 in response to a first appeal; other stories recount donors whom no one knew giving $25 for years and then leaving a large bequest.

A direct mail appeal is very simple: a letter describing the organization and its needs is put into an attractive envelope, along with a self-addressed return envelope and possibly a reply card that makes it easy for the donor to return a gift, and the identical letter is sent to hundreds or thousands of people. Appeals that are addressed to an individual—“Dear Mrs. Smith”—or letters sent by first-class mail are not technically considered direct mail pieces, although these more personalized letters may borrow from direct mail principles in their look or style of writing, and identical text may be going to dozens—or thousands—of recipients, with the only differences being the salutation. In the United States, direct mail appeals are sent in minimum quantities of two hundred, presorted by ZIP code for the post office; at the post office they receive bottom priority for processing in return for a deep discount in the postage rate.

Those who claim that direct mail is dead are augmented by those who claim that young people don’t respond to it. Although Generation X and Millennials may not send in a check, mail appeals that offer an online option for giving will often generate a large online response. For Millennials, direct mail is a novelty. In university classes that I teach, undergraduates will sometimes bring in mail appeals with great delight. “I got this in the mail—it was addressed to me!” one exclaimed. He handed it around the class with the request “Don’t mess it up.” His classmates’ curiosity reminded me of how few pieces of snail mail Millennials receive and how this could work to our advantage.

Direct mail remains the least expensive way to reach the most people with a message that they can hold in their hands and examine at their leisure. A well-designed and well-written direct mail piece sent to a good list can still yield a response that makes it worthwhile to develop and send: 0.5 to 1 percent on a first-time appeal, and 10 percent and often more from donors who have given before. Many organizations use direct mail letters beyond acquisition to communicate with current donors and to ask for additional gifts. Used properly, direct mail is one of the most powerful strategies a small nonprofit can have. After looking at how direct mail works for slightly larger organizations, I will show how even the tiniest grassroots group can make it work for them.

ACQUISITION: GET SOMEONE TO GIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Donor acquisition is the main reason that many organizations use direct mail. To see how it works, consider the experience of People for Good. People for Good trades the names of five thousand of their donors for an equal number of names of donors to another group, Friends of Progress.1 People for Good merges the names from Friends of Progress with its own donor list to eliminate as many duplicate names as possible, eliminating three hundred names. To the rest of the list from Friends of Progress, People for Good sends a direct mail appeal asking for a donation to its work. The appeal returns just under 1 percent response, or forty gifts, most of them $40, the suggested donation, but others in the range of $25 to $500. Because the appeal also directed prospects to their website, it also produces ten new online donors, giving it a grand total of fifty new donors and $4,000 in income from a response of just over 1 percent. The cost of sending the mailing to 4,700 names was $7,050, or $1.50 for each piece of mail (including postage, printing, paper, and the use of a mail house for sorting and sending the mailing).

The net cost for People for Good is $3,050, or about $61 for each of the fifty donors it acquired. This is called the “acquisition cost”—essentially the group paid $61 dollars to acquire one donor, which is a legitimate cost of doing business. These donors will now be moved to the next stage, retention. From this account, you can see right away that there is no point in starting a direct mail program unless you are willing to go all the way with it—trying to retain and upgrade these donors—because the first mailing usually loses money—sometimes a lot of money. Read on to see how that money not only will be recouped, but will grow.

RETENTION: GET DONORS TO REPEAT THEIR GIFTS

Once a person becomes a donor, the organization tries to get that person to repeat his or her gift, then to give routinely. The program starts by thanking donors within seventy-two hours of receiving their gifts and then, as discussed in the previous chapter, asking the donors for additional gifts several times during the year. Small organizations should ask their current donors for additional donations two to four times a year, with a combination of mail, e-mail, phone solicitations, and special events. These requests should be interspersed with other communication about what the organization is doing with the money the donor has given that doesn’t involve asking.

People for Good follows this advice and, with a combination of e-mail and snail mail, solicits donations from this cohort of new donors three times a year. 

chapter 15  Online Fundraising

Online fundraising involves using e-mail, your website, and other online strategies, including blogs, crowdfunding, search engine optimization, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on, usually in combination with each other and with offline efforts, to help raise money and build relationships with donors. Social media allows anyone with access to the Internet to follow your work and comment on it. Crowdfunding makes it possible to aggregate lots of gifts into a significant amount, allowing people who can only make smaller donations to do so and to feel good about it. The speed of crowdfunding has worked very well for getting money quickly to on-the-ground organizations for natural disaster aid; funding special, time-limited projects; and fueling a lot of political campaigns. However, the very democracy and immediate access the Internet provides means you are in an almost unimaginable competition for attention. According to research compiled by The Cultureist (www.thecultureist.com/) in 2015, about 2.5 billion people use the Internet every day, 144 billion e-mails are sent each day, and almost 140,000 new websites are launched each day. For every online appeal that works well, there are dozens that languish. The difference is all about the quality and quantity of your lists and the strength of your message.

So how can a small social change organization with one or two staff (or fewer) dedicated to fundraising and a willing board take advantage of this capability in a meaningful way? First, you must see all Internet options as tools in a much larger strategy toolbox. Experts in online fundraising will tell you that much of the success of any online campaign will depend on the basics: Do you have donors? Do you treat your donors properly? Are you interested in building relationships with your donors? Can you sustain the work of maintaining these relationships over time? The answers to all these questions go far beyond a simple use of the Internet for fundraising.

Online fundraising must be part of any organization’s plan, but it should not be the whole plan. Like all fundraising strategies, online strategies do not work instantly—it takes time to build an e-list, to drive traffic to a website, to create an audience for a blog, to build an active following on social media platforms.

Online strategies are excellent for recruiting donors, but these donors have to be taken care of: thanked, sent more information, kept up to date, and so on. We need to take a page from direct mail fundraising. Many organizations acquired thousands of donors using direct mail, but organizations that have continued to increase the income from their donor base and to acquire new donors were those that built relationships with their donors using more personalized mail, the phone, thank-you notes, personal invitations, and personal solicitation. Strategies have to be integrated with each other and they need to complement each other. No strategy, even my personal favorite—face-to-face solicitation—should be seen as the one way to relate to donors. Despite the great things technology can do, people remain attuned to being treated as valued individuals.

With all that in mind, here is what almost every organization should do to take advantage of online fundraising.

FOLLOW THE RESEARCH

With millions of people, nonprofits, and corporations using hundreds of platforms, getting data on what works, what used to work, and what experiments are going on with online fundraising is not hard. Keeping up with what is being learned, however, is. There are two places I go for accurate, easy to understand research: the M+R annual benchmarks report (http://mrbenchmarks.com) and the Nonprofit Technology Network or NTEN (https://www.nten.org/). Their websites are a wealth of free information and access to amazing people working in this arena. Things change so fast that you might want to go to these sites before even reading further. Then you will be surprised at how grounded in some basic principles this kind of fundraising is.

Have the following in place:

· An attractive and comprehensive website.

· A presence on social media. Facebook is the most common, but others are popular with subsets of the population. Learn what your constituents use. For example, according to Cayden Mark at 18millionrising.org, “Tumblr skews young on the age axis and Asian American and Latino on the race axis.” Again, research can show you where your constituents hang out.

· An e-mail list segmented into donors, colleagues, press contacts, board members, etc. Use the segments so people are not drowned in your e-mails.

· Make sure that all the ways someone can find you are listed on your website and in your e-mail signatures, with links to each.

FOCUS ON YOUR WEBSITE AND BUILDING YOUR E-MAIL LIST

The most important elements of online fundraising are your e-mail list and your website. In fact, if you do nothing else but focus on these you will raise your profile and you will raise money. On the other hand, if you are present on many platforms but only sporadically keep up with them and you do not build an e-mail list, your time will have mostly been wasted.

Imagine the amount of work you would do to get ready to have a hundred people visit your office for an open house. You would clean and dust, hang up pictures, put away files, possibly buy some flowers or plants, and generally make your space one you could be proud of. You want the people coming to your open house to think “This organization looks like it gets a lot done and it welcomes visitors.” Imagine the care you would spend on creating materials for twenty major donors interested in your work. You would have pictures, graphs, and fact sheets, and you would put them together in a logical order in a nice folder. A website is all that kind of work and more. Potentially millions of people could visit your organization there, and you want as many of them as is humanly possible to easily find what they are looking for and to see an invitation to give as often as possible.

Don’t try to save money by building a site cheaply or using someone to build the site who understands only the technology and not the marketing aspects. Hiring a web designer is a good investment. What you pay for design can range enormously, but be prepared to spend at least $2,000 to get started and more as you add more pages and have more options. A really excellent web presence and web strategy can easily cost $15,000, even for a small organization, so this is a project you might want to approach your major donors to underwrite. Further, unlike remodeling your bathroom, this is not a one-time expense. Every two to three years you may need to overhaul your site, and you need to have someone on staff, or at least on call, who can maintain it and fix the small problems that inevitably arise. Keep in mind also that your website needs to be mobile friendly. More than half the traffic to your site will be from people opening the site on their phones.

Many sophisticated donors understand the need for a top-notch website and will help you with an extra gift. Dropping unprofitable fundraising strategies and freeing up the money to focus on your website is another way to pay for it. Many organizations have found the money for their site simply by eliminating people from their snail mail list who have never donated or haven’t made a gift in several years. One organization with a mailing list of ten thousand and a donor base of two thousand dropped five thousand names from its list after figuring out that it was costing $2 per person per year to keep those non-donors on the list. The organization invested the $10,000 it saved into creating an entire online fundraising program with its website as the key element. Building a website has hidden costs because you can’t just contract with someone and, a few days later, voila! a great website. Generally, the work breaks down into these categories, several of which require staff involvement:

· Planning: What is going to be on the site? What do you want the site to do? For example, if you want to be able to embed videos, you will go to greater expense than if you don’t. You will also need to decide on a webhost at this stage.

· User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI): includes sitemap and wireframes as well as visual design: what background colors, what typeface, will it be friendly and easy to navigate?

· Programming and Content Support: how things move across the page, what content management system you use.

· Training: for staff on how to change things on the site, how to troubleshoot minor problems.

· Testing and Launch

(To get more detailed explanations of each of these steps, go online!)

Your website must have a prominent “Donate” icon on the home page and preferably on every page. The “donate ” button takes users to a secure site where they can make a gift by credit card, PayPal, or the like. One way to be able to accept credit cards is through a service such as Network for Good, FirstGiving, Click & Pledge, or other charity portals, which enable nonprofits to collect donations via credit card payments and even pledges. Your bank may also be able to serve as a portal for accepting online donations. (There will be a charge for this service, and some services will also charge the donor a small fee.) If you anticipate a high enough volume or you sell products and services on your site as well as accept donations, you may want to explore having your own merchant system. Doing the research to pick your merchant system will take time and require thinking through what you need your portal to do.

Your website’s “look” must be the same as everything else you publish. A simple example, but surprisingly often not observed, is that the logo on your website should match the logo you use on anything else. The content of your annual report should also appear on your site. Collect names of visitors with an e-mail sign up.

The best way to learn about websites is to visit the sites of organizations with missions that are similar to yours, even if they are larger organizations than yours, and to visit the sites of organizations you know do well with online fundraising. Ask who designs their sites and contact those designers to see how much they would charge you. Many fine and talented online fundraising firms, which work with very large institutions, will work with much smaller organizations for little or nothing from time to time, as will online marketing firms. They enjoy the challenge of promoting an organization that is not well known, or perhaps your organization may better reflect their politics than the larger organizations that pay them better. You will never know until you ask.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE

Part of the planning for your site is determining who would use it and how you are going to get these people to visit the site. Here are some simple and low-cost ways to drive traffic to your site.

Make sure your web address is on everything you publish—your business cards, your e-mail signature, your letterhead, your printed or online newsletter (in several places, often as a footer on the bottom of each page)—and that it is part of your voice mail message and on any information you give out about your organization.

Register with all the key search engines: Yahoo, Google, and the like (find a list of current search engines at www.searchenginewatch.com). Further, ask your web manager to make sure that your “meta tag” and “title”—two items hidden at the top of the code for your site—have as many relevant words as possible so that search engines can index your site. Get help thinking through the two- or three-word description for your organization that will show up in a web search that will encourage people to click your website. For example, if I type the three words related to your issue into Google or another search engine, your site should come up in the results, preferably in the top ten results. Ditto if I type in, for example, “Prison reform, Springfield, MO” and you are a prison reform organization serving southwest Missouri, your name should pop up right away. Make sure that any printed or online directories of nonprofits, service providers, chambers of commerce, and so on list your website along with your postal address.

Link to other organizations and ask them to link to you, particularly organizations you would see as allies or as offering complementary information to yours. Every so often visit related sites and see what they say about you.

E-mail is one of the best ways to get people to visit your site. When a person becomes a donor, ask for his or her e-mail address and send an e-mail newsletter or e-mail alert monthly or quarterly. You can use this communication to announce new content on your site or to suggest action, with a hyperlink that brings readers to the site for more details.

As with all fundraising strategies, never promise on the front end what you can’t deliver on the back end. If you say your e-newsletter is quarterly, it has to come out quarterly and not twice a year! I have signed up for more than a dozen e- newsletters and never received any of them. On the other hand, I am on lists of e-newsletters that I never signed up for. It does not make sense to add someone to your list who hasn’t asked to be on it, and it really doesn’t make sense not to add people when they have used your website to sign up. Be sure that “fulfillment”—the cost in time and money to fulfill promises made—is built into all your planning.

E-MAIL

Building an e-list is the most important aspect of online fundraising. Make sure you have sign-up sheets at any meeting or event your organization sponsors, and always include a line for an e-mail address in any reply device or correspondence with donors and prospects. You can use your e-mail list in a number of ways—from sending action alerts and invitations to events to reposting press you have received—but most organizations will do well to use it for fundraising in the following two ways.

E-Newsletters

An e-newsletter is not the same as your paper newsletter. It is much shorter, with lots of headlines and hyperlinks to the website for those wanting to read more. It can come out more often than a paper newsletter. Most organizations find that a combination of a paper newsletter that arrives two or three times a year and a monthly e-newsletter works very well. The e-newsletter can also solicit advice or ask for comments, and thus invite more interaction from those reading it. Every e-newsletter should contain an invitation to give online.

Because I work with so many organizations and give money to quite a few, I used to get a pile of newsletters every month. Most organizations now ask their donors and readers to move from paper to e-newsletter formats. Generally, this is done with a fairly guilt-inducing appeal: “Would you like to save trees and help our organization use our money more wisely?” Well, of course I would prefer to save trees and not waste money. “So, please do not insist on getting the newsletter in the mail anymore, you self-absorbed old fossil” (of course, this is not how it is worded, simply how it comes across). So, with a sigh, I agree to receive the newsletter online.

While I feel good about myself, I also feel mixed, as I like paper newsletters. I stuff them in my briefcase to read on the subway or prop them up on my sugar bowl while eating breakfast. Now I receive very few newsletters in the mail and dozens online. But, like many people, I get so much e-mail and get so behind on e-mail that I delete all the e-newsletters without reading them, as they seem like so much clutter in my inbox. Whereas I used to read (or at least glance through) 80 percent of the newsletters I received in the mail, I now read at most 10 percent of those I receive online.

More critical from the point of view of the organization is the fact that I also delete their e-appeals, and in the last two years I have stopped giving to several organizations for no other reason than that I did not see their appeals. To be sure, when I want to know something about an organization, I can visit its website, and often find the newsletter there, but the impetus is on me to get there. Other Baby Boomers and I have joked about starting an online support group for those of us wanting to do the right thing for the trees, but still liking to get mail. Many organizations have also noted a lower-than-usual renewal rate after trying to convert all their donors to e-mail. This is why I recommend that organizations use both paper and e-format for their newsletters and, over time, using the segmenting strategies described in Chapter Eleven, make sure they are not losing donors because they have converted them to e-mail.

E-Appeals

Once you have a list of people—including donors and non-donors—who have opted to be on your e-list, you can appeal to them for money. E-appeals work best when they are tied to a campaign and occur within a very tight time frame. The appeal is sent out, with a request to give online right now for an urgent cause. Three or four days later, all the people who haven’t given are sent a second appeal. The second appeal highlights progress toward the goal mentioned in the first appeal in order to create some excitement that may push the initial non-responders to give now. Three or four days later, a final appeal is sent to all those who still haven’t given. This appeal notes that the campaign is coming to an end and invites people to be part of it so as to put the organization over its goal. This three-part format delivers maximum effectiveness.

The structure of an e-appeal is very similar to that of direct snail mail, only even more brief.

The subject line is crucial. It should be no more than fifty characters and, if you have enough people, you can test various options. The subject line needs to convey urgency—the idea that if someone doesn’t click on this right now, he will miss something. The fact is, if they don’t open the appeal now, it will most likely be buried in a virtual pile and never be opened. The subject line is very similar to teaser copy on an envelope or a clever opening line for a direct mail appeal. Talking about what you need gives you the worst subject lines. Creating a sense of mystery, telling a short story, or providing incentives create the best openers.

For example, “Important News” or “Your donation needed more than ever” are both boring and uninspiring.

Contrast these openers:

· “Can’t argue with the math” is mysterious. In this case, it was the opener for an organization’s campaign to publicize the true cost of private prisons.

· “You made it possible” is the beginning of a story that continues in the e-mail—people will keep reading to learn more about themselves.

· “Free tickets until midnight” will draw in a lot of people.

Watch for subject lines that lead you to open an e-mail and see whether you can adapt them to your cause.

Create a sense of urgency, either in the subject line or the first sentence of the e-mail:

· Subject Line: “Make the difference between winning and losing.”

· First Sentence: “We need your help right now. The election is in ten days. We are going to get 5,000 new voters to the polls. We need $7,000 to make that happen.”

· Subject Line: “Don’t leave them in the cold.”

· First Sentence: “Winter is here. Last week’s drop in temperature brought fifty new people into our youth shelter—thirty more than it can hold. With $10,000 we can rent space for the winter months, but we must find that money in the next five days. Will you help?”

As with a hard-copy letter, the appeal uses “you” and “me” and includes personal stories. But with an e-appeal, everything is very brief and easy to read—one to two paragraphs at the most. A postscript is used much less often than in direct mail. E-mail appeals are short because people read the information that is “above the fold” (to use a term taken from the old world of newsprint), that is, what appears on their screen without needing to scroll down. Particularly on a mobile device, where more than half of e-mail is read, only a very few words will actually be seen.

Here is a sample of the three-part appeal from an organization working to stop pollution from the smokestacks of a major corporation’s plant located in a poor neighborhood by requiring them to install scrubbers in the plant chimneys. This organization had conducted a successful canvass petition drive calling on the health department to crack down on the corporation’s air pollution activities; the canvass also gathered people’s e-mail addresses. In the appeals, phrases such as “Join Us” or “Give Now” or “Sign Up” are hyperlinked to the organization’s online donation page. “Read More” takes the reader to an informational page of the website, which also has a “Donate” button. In the following appeals, the links are indicated by italics.

First Appeal

SUBJECT LINE: CLEAN AIR IS JUST A STEP AWAY

Dear Mary,

Thank you for joining with more than eight thousand people to call for an end to air pollution by SteelWorks in the Morepark neighborhood. By signing up with Clean Air for All you and thousands of others have said the government needs to enforce existing laws concerning pollution.

Now, we ask that you take one more step:

Become a member of Clean Air for All

Our goal is two hundred new members before the next City Council Meeting to show the local strength behind the organization’s efforts. We want to welcome you! And we promise you will see the fruits of our joint activities.

Your membership donation of $35, $50, or whatever you can afford, ensures that you will be helping to keep the pressure on to stop air pollution and stave off more cases of asthma, bronchial infection, and other pulmonary diseases that are far too common in the Morepark area of our community.

Recently our members have:

· Demonstrated outside the house of the president of SteelWorks, who is famous for saying, “Poor people get all kinds of diseases, and I am tired of being blamed for it.” (read more . . .)

· Joined with hundreds of people to demand hearings at City Hall on why the Health Department continues to drags its feet on this issue. (read more . . .)

chapter 25  What All Large Campaigns Have in Common

Capital and endowment campaigns operate from the same fundamentals as any well-done fundraising campaign: they have financial goals for which a gift range chart and a timeline have been developed to ensure that the organization meets the goal, and they have a committee of volunteer solicitors, a list of qualified prospects, and creative materials that describe the campaign and its benefits. Because of the size of capital and endowment campaigns, some organizations seek further assurance by commissioning a feasibility study that helps determine what the goal of the campaign should reasonably be, whether your donors have the ability and willingness to access assets, and sometimes even indicates whether to commit to the campaign at all (see Chapter Twenty-Eight for a discussion of feasibility studies).

The difference between a campaign and an ongoing program is simply that a campaign begins and ends. A major gifts program goes on all year long; but during the year, you may focus attention on major gifts using the vehicle of a time-limited campaign. A capital campaign for a building or some other large cost will not be an ongoing need, so it is always done in a campaign format. An endowment can simply be opened and you can focus attention on it all year round, or it can be started or expanded by a campaign. Unlike a capital campaign, major gifts and endowment programs never really end, although campaigns relating to them will.

The following are the main steps in every campaign and the steps you will follow if you decide to do a major gifts campaign. In the chapters that follow I discuss further some of the differences between capital and endowment campaigns.

STEP 1: SET A GOAL AND CREATE A GIFT RANGE CHART

By now you may be tired of reading that having a goal is imperative, so I will merely remind you of that fact. Having a goal enables you to construct a Gift Range Chart, which is essential for a campaign. For an annual major donor campaign, the lead gift in the Gift Range Chart is figured at 10 percent of the goal, whereas for capital and endowment campaigns, the lead gift should equal 20 percent of the goal.

A chart for a campaign with a goal of $1 million is shown here. The chart calls for one gift equal to 20 percent of the goal (as in a capital or endowment campaign), two gifts that equal 10 percent of the goal, and three to five gifts that make up the next 10 percent of the goal. Five to ten donors, then, contribute about one-third of the total goal.

Campaign Gift Range Chart
Number of Gifts	Gift Size	Cumulative Total
1	$200,000	$200,000
2	100,000	400,000
4	50,000	600,000
5	25,000	725,000
10	10,000	825,000
20	5,000	925,000
20	2,500	975,000
25	1,000	1,000,000

In general, gifts of less than $1,000 are not sought (although all gifts are gratefully accepted). For all gifts, donors may pledge a total and pay off that pledge over a period of a few years if they like. This enables people to make larger gifts over time than they may be able to do at one time. Because donors have several years to complete their gifts, a pledge of $1,000 may be affordable even for lower-income people, who could pledge $27 per month for three years to reach their $1,000 total.

STEP 2: CREATE THE TIMELINE

The timeline for a big campaign is usually not less than two years and definitely not more than five years. The timeline does not include the discussion involved in deciding to do a campaign or the time to carry out the feasibility study, but it does include the preparation time in terms of researching prospects and developing materials. It usually takes the best part of a year just to create appropriate materials and to solicit the lead gifts (because many of the lead donors will have to be talked with several times), and it may take another year to solicit all the other gifts. Three years allows for the unforeseen to be dealt with and the maximum number of donors to be solicited. Five years is the outside maximum amount of time an organization can sustain interest and passion for a campaign while maintaining annual fundraising. Usually, two to three years is the ideal amount of time to conduct a campaign. A fourth year can be used as a “wind-down” period, and pledges can be paid over five or more years, even if the solicitation phase of the campaign is completed in two years.

STEP 3: FORM A SOLICITATION TEAM

In forming a committee, you are looking for people who are comfortable asking donors for assets; usually, these are people who have made an asset gift themselves. The people on the solicitation team include members of the board and people who, once asked, have made large gifts to the campaign. The role of volunteers in these campaigns cannot be overstated. Staff can ask, and they do, but to do so credibly, even a staff person will need to have made a campaign gift in addition to an annual gift.

To form the solicitation team, first identify the people closest to your organization who believe in the goal of the campaign and can make the largest gifts. A team consisting of a board member and a staff member asks each of these potential solicitors for a gift, then asks them all to be on the solicitation team. Some members of the solicitation team are usually identified during the discussion about whether to conduct a capital or endowment campaign, or they may be surfaced during the feasibility study. They are the ones who argue in favor of it and say that they will give to such a campaign.

Conventional financial planning dictates that one should “never touch principal.” Yet principal is what you are asking for. In a sense, you are asking people to transfer some of their capital to your capital needs or to your endowment. This process requires thought, commitment, and careful consideration on the part of the donor. People will make these kinds of gifts only a few times in their lifetimes. All the solicitors must be people whom the donors trust to have gone through this process themselves. Moreover, there is something very convincing when a person can say, “My husband and I have accumulated a nest egg of $1,000,000 over many years of saving. It is for our retirement and for emergencies. But the threat to the environment (or our children, or world peace) is bigger than our need for a nest egg. We want to make sure that Important Group is able to do its work well into the future and maintain its economic stability. So we are giving 10 percent of what we have invested in our nest egg—$100,000—to the endowment as our investment in our community’s future.”

Even someone with no real assets can make a good solicitor, as long as he or she has given a significant gift. In one organization, a board member postponed buying a new car. He described his gift this way: “My old car can be coaxed into a couple more years of use. In the meantime, I am going to give the equivalent of a car payment on a new car for two years to the capital campaign. That will bring my gift to $5,000. I don’t have any real assets, but I can give by postponing acquiring an asset, and my gift will have far more permanence than a new car.” In another instance, a solicitor described her gift this way: “I put some money aside every month, and once a year I use it to go away for two weeks. This year, I vacationed at home. I saw friends, I planted a garden, I read books, I went to free events at my library, and I gave the money I saved to our campaign. I had a great time, and although my gift was a significant amount for me, it was not painful.”

The solicitation team can be formed slowly. It can start with two or three donors and, as more donations are received, new donors can be asked to join the team.

STEP 4: COMPILE AND ORGANIZE THE LIST OF PROSPECTS

In all campaigns, the rule of “top down, inside out” is the way to organize your prospects. Ben Franklin, who was one of America’s earliest and best fundraisers, advised: “Apply to all those whom you know will give something; next, to those whom you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you will be mistaken.”

Franklin’s advice is what we mean by “inside out.” Start with the people closest to the organization. Those will be board members (if they are not the closest people to the organization, then reconsider doing a capital or endowment campaign), other major donors, volunteers, former board members and volunteers (assuming no ill will accompanied their becoming “former”), staff, and so on. Then, start from the top of that list and work your way down. The first gift should be solicited from the person closest to the organization who can give the biggest gift. This may not be the biggest gift you need, but it should be the biggest one you can get right now.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out which of the people who are closest you should approach first. Think through who on the list can give the biggest gifts. This exercise should narrow your list somewhat. Now think about who is most excited about this campaign. Remember, there are going to be major donors who love your organization’s work but who are not going to support your campaign. This is particularly true with endowments because some otherwise very supportive donors simply may not agree that a grassroots organization should have an endowment. There will be some who have given to other endowments only to see the endowment funds spent on annual needs by a careless board. And there will be others who wish your endowment effort well but are only interested in funding more immediate needs. Finding donors who agree with all three premises of the case for an endowment—that the organization currently needs some financial stability, needs to exist indefinitely into the future, and is mature enough or sophisticated enough to handle this kind of money—and who also have the capacity to give is not simple. The argument for a capital campaign is usually more straightforward, but you can still run into disagreement. Perhaps your biggest donors think you should rent office space instead of buying a building, or they wonder whether your organization will be distracted from its mission by working on a capital campaign.

Use common sense in identifying these prospects. Think about what else you know about the people on your list. For example, a person giving $50 every quarter might be close to the group, but she is probably far from the biggest donor. However, if her $50 gifts are derived from income earned from investments, then she goes to the top of the list because perhaps she would give you the asset that is yielding that $50 each quarter. Someone who gave you $1,000 that he won in the lottery, whose gift prior to that was $25, and who actually ekes out a living as an artist, is not going to be high on the list, but he may be an excellent solicitor because he actually gave an asset that he could have used himself.

Many people will say that they have no idea what assets their donors have. If you really have no idea, then you are going to have to find out more about your donors before you begin asking them for gifts to your campaign. However, a general easy rule to follow in soliciting capital or endowment gifts is to ask for a gift that is ten times the amount of the donor’s annual gift. You want to make it clear that this gift is in addition to his or her annual gift—you don’t want your annual income to decline while you are doing the campaign. When you tell donors that you are asking everyone for the same thing—ten times their annual gifts—people are not offended, even if the size of the gift is absolutely out of their range. The real risk you take in following this formula without other knowledge is that you would ask someone for too little.

The final step in compiling a prospect list is to be sure you have enough prospects. A prospect for a capital or endowment gift is someone who has demonstrated a commitment to your nonprofit, usually by giving over several years and often by also being active beyond financial involvement; someone who has the money; and someone whom you know or you have access to.

As with capital campaigns, you need about three times as many prospects as the number of gifts you seek because 50 percent of your prospects will say no and 50 percent of the group that says yes will give you less than what you ask for. Thus, as you go down the chart, it is filled in by people who, for example, said they couldn’t give $25,000 but could give $10,000.

In our $1 million gift range chart shown earlier, you would need about 261 prospects (87 X 3) to be certain that you could meet this goal. You don’t need to have all the prospects right at the start, but you do need at least some of the prospects for the biggest gifts right from the beginning. You would be ill-advised to launch a million-dollar campaign with fewer than one hundred prospects for the gifts of $2,500 or more. Far worse than no campaign at all is a campaign that splutters and moves slowly. The energy of the campaign is part of what makes it successful or not. A report that “Our campaign is going so well” makes people want to give. The news that “Our campaign is getting off to a slow start” or “We asked a bunch of people who said no” is not as appealing.

STEP 5: SOLICIT THE GIFTS

For a full description of the process of soliciting large gifts, please see Chapters Eight, Ten, and Twenty-One on “Getting Comfortable with Asking,” “How to Ask,” and “Building Major Donor Programs.”

The primary difference between major gifts or capital campaigns and endowment campaigns is in the case. A person being asked for a major gift needs to be convinced that there is a pressing, immediate need that your organization can meet and that this need must be addressed with, among other things, some very large gifts. A capital campaign makes the case that the pressing needs of the organization cannot be met adequately in the facility you are in or with the equipment you currently have or without some other large investment. The case for the endowment goes one step further, explaining that the organization needs stability currently and into the future. It tells donors that their commitment to your current programs is so important that you hope they want to help make your work a permanent feature of your community.

Even the most progressive people can become fiscal conservatives when asked for capital or endowment gifts. They may well believe that your organization does wonderful things toward ending racism or providing creative learning opportunities for children with disabilities or advocating for more just tax policies. But do these same donors believe you will be good at managing a building or be able to manage investing large amounts of money? Donors will have these questions, and organizations must be able to respond to them. When an organization wants to start an endowment, there will be an added question that no one can really answer: “What will happen when everyone who is currently involved in this organization is gone?” Taking seriously the right (and indeed, the obligation) of donors to raise these questions and doubts and preparing thoughtful and reasonable answers are the marks of organizations ready for capital and endowment projects.