Fundraising is Beautiful

Here's an excerpt from the new book The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving.

Find out what branding can and should do for your fundraising, and why it often doesn't. Learn how fundraisers are like forklift drivers, and what you can do to build a money-raising brand for your nonprofit.

The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand is available at:

• Amazon
• Amazon UK
• Wiley (best bet if you're outside North America or Europe)

Everyone knows that direct-response testing is the path to the truth in fundraising. There's just one problem: The large majority of nonprofit organizations cannot do direct-response testing. Their quantities are too small and/or they don't have the budget to pay for testing.

Here are three ways to learn the right things to do when you can't test:

1. Read books about fundraising.
2. Read blogs about fundraising. (See our blogroll over there to the right for some of the best fundraising blogs.)
3. Donate to larger national organizations so you can observe how they do it.

Survey research can lead your fundraising badly astray. Focus groups can kill the strongest fundraising programs. If you use them wrongly. There are great ways to use qualitative research to best your knowledge and inform your strategies. Find out some of the pitfalls as well as the gold nuggets of surveys and focus groups.

In this ear-opening interview with radio veteran Scott Wilder of TrueSense Marketing, you'll learn what it takes to find donors and raise funds using the radio. In some ways, it's just like fundraising in any other medium. In others, it's a whole new world! But chances are good you can make this powerful medium work for you.

Understanding the problem can lead us to the solution. Here are four of the most important causes of donor attrition:

1. Increased competition -- more organizations are asking.
2. Donors are consolidating their giving -- more money going to fewer organizations.
3. Generational change: Boomers are rapidly replacing the WWII Generation as donors, and their needs are different -- more difficult for fundraisers to meet.
4. Professional dilution. Not enough experienced, well-trained professional fundraisers to meet the growing demand.

Keeping your donors means developing relationships -- two-way "conversations" with each donor about your cause. Follow this simple framework, and you'll keep more donors for longer:

1. Ask often and well.
2. Thank promptly and well.
3. Report back on the impact of the donor's giving.
4. Repeat the first three steps over and over again.

This is your path out of the recession and the retention problems that are plaguing fundraisers everywhere.

Donor retention is down across the fundraising industry. Here are five of the most common causes of donor attrition -- and what you can do to overcome them:

1. Poor receipting
2. Not enough communication
3. Not enough reporting back
4. Online and offline communications out of sync
5. Acquisition and cultivation out of sync

The good news: You can change each of these attrition-driving things!

How much fundraising is too much? How much is too little? There's no single right answer to these questions, but we can help you move toward what's best for your organization.

If you increase your number of appeals, you will see more net revenue, and improved donor retention. Really! Embrace this truth, and throw off your limited-revenue shackles. It works.

Five quick, easy-to-understand, easy-to-implement pieces of advice that have transformed our work over the years:

1. Donors fund outcomes, not processes.
2. If you like it, it probably won't work.
3. There are many best practices in fundraising that will probably work for you.
4. Sell the sizzle, not the steak.
5. Fundraising is good for donors.

Learn how these short bits of wisdom can transform your fundraising. Plus at least one bonus piece of advice!

A lively and useful interview with Jeff Schreifels of Veritus Group and co-author of the excellent Veritus Group Blog.

We talk about the differences between raising funds from major donors and raising funds in general (there aren't many differences). Also, the "secrets" of major-donor fundraising are hardly secret at all.