A Great Way to Boost Donations in Your Next Appeal…

...And Build Awesome Relationships With Major Donors

I have a little story about Jason Smith, a quiet and unassuming Quebecois guy living in Melbourne, Australia.  He works as the fundraising manager at Burnet Institute.

The Institute is a charity dedicated to researching diseases that cause harm to people in less developed countries.  It is one of my favourite charities, partly because Jason works there and is an easy guy to get behind and support, but also because of it’s unique mission.

However, the Institute’s fundraising is relatively small with a database of just around 7,000 people who donated in the past year or so.

For their mid-year appeal, Jason and his colleague Asther Creo ran a classic direct mail appeal to their donors.

Shortly after the appeal had been mailed Jason met with a ‘mid value’ donor – someone who had, with their partner, donated $4,000 in 2015.  I’ll call the donor Bernadette because it kind of works with the charity name.

Bernadette told him she was keen on ‘stretching’ her (and her partner’s) donation to have more impact.  So Jason and Bernadette agreed that a special communication would go out to donors.

The message was simple ‘One of our supporters has offered to match your gift up to $50,000.’

With time short, the campaign was run as part of the second ‘wave’ of mid-year appeal.  Basically a follow up letter to the original appeal.

Jason told me; “the matched gift offer boosted results and the campaign raised an extraordinary $326,000 (including the $50,000 donation).  About $150,000 came in after we went out with the offer – it definitely got a lot of traction out there.”

Although the matched offer would have done better as a letter earlier, this is still a great study of delivering what a mid value donor wanted – and lifting them into the major donor zone.

By the way, if you're interested in how you can turn your mid level donors into major gift donors - you should join my next webinar, where we'll give you more details and a process on how to do this.

Click here to register for 'The Quickest, Cheapest and Easiest Way to Earn Extra Cash Now, Turn Mid Value Donors into Major Gifts In a Week.'

This webinar will be live on 29th / 30th September (various time zones are available),  however even if you can't make the date the recording and slides will be available for all who register.

Like many fundraisers, Jason is keen to expand his knowledge and understanding of fundraising.  In particular, he has gained lots of good tips and knowledge from Pareto, our blogs and my webinars. 

“Sean’s webinars have given us some much-needed focus, clarity and inspiration to help grow our mid-value donor program at low cost. It’s been great to watch them as a team and learn together. Already, we’ve made practical improvements such as using an effective method for building our mid-value donors portfolios.”

Because Jason is so nice he is also happy for me to share the full copy of the direct mail letter, second wave/reminder (with the matched gift ask) and response coupon.

Just click here for the PDF in un-merged format, showing you all those personalisations.

If you are struggling to find an offer for your mid value donors, but want to try and lift them up then this is always something available to you, and very attractive to many donors.

Let me know of examples of multiplying gift appeals you have seen. You can find me on Twitter @SeanTriner or post a comment below.

Click here if you haven't already registered for 'The Quickest, Cheapest and Easiest Way to Earn Extra Cash Now, Turn Mid Value Donors into Major Gifts In a Week.'

 

Long Fundraising Letters. Why, oh, why!?

Long letters work better.

But don't just take it from me. 

Dr Barnardo wrote a four page appeal letter in London in the 1880s using classic DM techniques. Underlining, urgency, dollar handles, specific ask and a clear reference to what YOU could do to help. The winter had been 'the severest and most arduous, so far as work among the children of the poor is concerned.'   So the good doctor needed to raise £100 a day for food.  He told readers 'unceasing demands upon our resources' were having an unprecedented impact on his charity.

The four page Dr Barnardo letter from the late 19th century.

Years later, another children's charity, Starlight, had a rough year and they had decided to go public about their shortfall. Unceasing demands upon their resources were tough too. They asked for funds but also had a refreshing degree of honesty. The donor learned that part of the shortfall was because Starlight funding strategy relied too much upon events and companies.After reading the press stories about their plight I pulled together an 'emergency' appeal to their donors and met up with them. The emergency appeal was only developed to show how I work, but they decided to mail it immediately anyway. 

The opening paragraphs of the Starlight letter

A full Case Study of this appeal is here, including an entire copy of the mailpack here.

It would never win awards for graphic design beauty. But the appeal raised over target. It more than doubled the amount raised from the same donors the previous year.

At the heart of the appeal was a four page appeal letter.

Despite the rise of other media, direct mail is still the biggest source of new one off donors.  So it is important we maximise revenue from mail donors.  And longer letters will tend to do that for you.

New Cash Recruits - by channel, across Pareto benchmarking charities.

I really don't like long letters, by the way. They are a pain in the butt to write, check copy, get clients approval, print and mail-merge. And someone important in most of our clients doesn't like them. And they don't look great in my portfolio (though the results do).

And I prefer doing digital stuff. And... I think you get the idea.

In focus groups, donors say they dislike them too. In Hong Kong, one client ran focus groups which all concluded that donors would be more likely to respond to a pack with a two-sided letter and tear off coupon than a four-page pack (actually eight pages - English and Chinese) with lots of additional information. The two pager raised HK$1.5m (AUD$220k) - the big pack raised over HK$7.5m (about $1.1m).

But they work.  As you can see from the test results below.  These are from a revolutionary pack National Heart Foundation did more than a decade ago.

I featured it in training I did on writing great direct mail for mid-value donors.  (You can access this training session as part of the mid-value webinar series I have done).

Long letters beat short letters - a defining test by National Heart Foundation

It isn't just me that thinks so.  Jeff Brooks attempts to explain why fundraising letters tend to work better in this 2012 article.  He also tells us in his Fundraising is Beautiful podcasts that in tests, long letters are three times more likely to win than shorter ones!  (He adds long email appeals are twice as likely to win as short email appeals).

I know longer letters tend to work better, but not because they are long. I think it is because, to tell a good story with a beginning, middle and end and ensure the right fundraising tactics, it simply takes more words. These tactics include target, what the target is for, deadline, establishing need, demonstrating solution, demonstrating why that charity is best placed to solve etc). Having said that, a dreadful four pager is worse than a good two pager - if a story can be told more quickly then tell it. As Mal Warwick says 'A fundraising letter should be as long as it needs to be...'

This article is a re-hash of one I wrote seven years ago.  Things have changed since then, but nothing changed in terms of whether long letters work better or now.

See Dr Barnado's 19th century appeal on SOFII here.

Long letters tend to work better with mid value donors too. Maybe it is just about respect - good donor care to take the time to explain why the donors support is so important.