Fundraising From Yourself

Education. Donors in general have above-average levels of education, but you are likely more educated than they are. That has an important impact both on what we know and how we think.

Context. You think about your cause all day, every day. Your donors give it a cursory glance now and then. What's obvious to you may be confusing to them. What they need to know in order to care might seem boring and fluffy to you.

Donors are also more likely to be female and often more religious than people in general. If you aren't one or both of those, that's more opportunity to misunderstand the way they think.

But all those things hardly matter at all compared to the different ways you and your donors approach and perceive the message. You always pay close attention to every word (I hope you do, anyway). You're being paid to read it and think hard about it. This magnifies everything. It can cause clarity to seem like oversimplification and emotion to seem like over-the-top sob stories.

Furthermore, you see all the materials you produce. That can give you the sensation that your messages are numbingly repetitive. This causes many fundraisers to frequently and confusingly vary their messages.

But here's the wild part: Conscious opinions about fundraising are automatically wrong. Even your donors, the ones who make the actual giving decisions, have no clue what's good. Really. If you've ever observed donor focus groups where they are shown direct mail to react to — everyone hates the stuff that works best. It happens every time. They say they'd never respond to the pieces that they most often respond to. They aren't lying. They're giving you an honest accounting of their conscious beliefs. It's just that their opinions and their actions don't line up.