Geared Up for Growth
AM: What are your thoughts on how to keep donors involved and do our best on fundraising?
ECC: I’m going to start off with a little appeal here.
“Dear Friend, won’t you please give HPC (highest previous contribution), HPC 1.5 or HPC 2?”
“Dear Organization X, why should I? What did you do with my HPC? What will HPC 1.5 get me? How much better will I feel if I give you HPC 2? When will you fix the problem you want me to help with? How will I make a difference? Where is my money going? Oh, and by the way, I got five letters, three e-mails, two texts and five tweets today. Why should I give to you instead of those other groups I just heard from?”
Make the case to give, to give more, to be connected, to care, to trust, to share our passion, to feel joy, to be fulfilled, to have an experience, to give. Why should a donor make a donation to your organization, and really more specifically, why should they give a larger gift than they did the last time because you know we need to upgrade?
Grab five or 10 random people at your organization tomorrow and just ask them the simple question: Why should anyone give their money to us? You may be surprised at some of the answers, but hopefully you’re going to get some really great, specific ones because your donor needs really great, specific reasons to give.
This kind of goes along with what we were talking about just now about the fundraising letter. I think everyone should sit down and read all of the fundraising communication, large and small, from the year-end appeals to the tweets and the texts that you’ve sent to your donors in the past 12 months and then ask yourself these questions:
