Even if you think you’re raising all your money through traditional offline channels, your website is an important part of your fundraising. Donors and would-be donors routinely check you out online. Does your website build trust and give them what they need to say yes?
Here are some ways to do that, from the GuideStar Blog, at Using Your Nonprofit’s Website to Build Trust with Visitors:
- Make financial data easy to find.
- Make reaching out easy. (Anyone who wants to connect with a human being should easily be able to.)
- Give specifics.
- Stay true to your word. (Deliver what you promise.)
- Give concrete examples of past success.
- Send progress reports regularly.
- Include thoughts from past supporters.
- Include thoughts from the community you serve.
- Include endorsements from experts.
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on Apr 6th, 2013. Comment. 
If your organization is bad at direct mail fundraising, you are in a tough spot, as you probably know. But it’s worse than you might have thought, because you don’t have a lot of options. If you’re bad at direct mail, don’t think you’ll find a refuge from your shortcomings by focusing on social media marketing.
Both are about being interesting. Both are about putting your audience first. Both are about give and take. If you aren’t getting those things right in direct mail fundraising, you won’t be magically good at it in a new medium.
In fact, if your direct mail is ineffective, your social media will likely fail even more spectacularly than your mail does.
Let me show you how not to do social media marketing with this tweet that came up in my Twitter feed recently (revised to protect the tweeter’s identity):
It’s 50 years since we were founded, and we’re tweeting 50 of our top achievements.
(There was a goofy #hashtag that no human will ever search, even if we continue to exist for the next trillion years.)
Then, over the course of a couple days, they actually tweeted fifty accomplishments. None of them had anything to do with donors. All of them were about the heroism of the organization and its insiders.
That’s crappy, boring, self-centered, and tone-deaf. It would fail badly in the mail, and it will fail on Twitter.
Social media can’t rescue that organization from its inability to connect meaningfully with donors. It won’t rescue you either.
The smart way to learn social media marketing is to learn traditional marketing first. Then transfer what you know to the new situation.
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on Dec 15th, 2012. Comment.
I could use your help marketing my new book, The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communications: Real-World, Field-Tested Strategies for Raising More Money.
I’m looking for a marketing tagline: A succinct, powerful, persuasive sentence that will help people decide this book is something they need — that this book will help them meaningfully and immediately improve their fundraising, and that it’s easy to read, practical, and based on experience. (In fact, it is all those things. Not everyone knows that yet.)
Here are some tagline choices. Please vote for your favorite. If you have a different suggestion, leave it as a comment.
Thanks for your help!
The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communications is available at Amazon, Amazon.co.uk, or from the publisher (best bet if you need multiple copies)
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on Sep 25th, 2012. Comment.
From time to time, someone asks me, What do I need to know to effectively raise funds?
I generally stammer out something that I hope will be helpful — something like Make it all about your donors or Don’t forget to ask.
Of course, one-sentence advice won’t take you very far.
But being asked the question is what got me started writing The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communications.
This book is exactly for you. If you read this blog, if you read any fundraising blogs at all, you are clearly someone who wants to do fundraising right. You want to work with knowledge, not hunch and superstition.
Based on decades of hand-on fundraising with dozens of great nonprofits, this book zeroes in on the hard stuff, the surprising, counterintuitive things that most often trip up fundraisers.
You won’t find wild-eyed, speculative theories in this book. Just the solid, experiential practices. Nothing controversial — unless you’re in one of those marketing departments that makes it a practice of ignoring what works.
This is the book you can show that meddling, know-it-all executive director or board member who insists on taking all the life and effectiveness out of our fundraising. See? An actual printed book says it should be like this!
Here’s what some excellent people who’ve read the book are saying:
Tom Ahern, author of How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money and Seeing Through a Donor’s Eyes:
“An instant classic that will be read and reread obsessively by the fundraisers of this world.”
Roger M. Craver, Editor of The Agitator and Founder, DonorTrends:
“This simple, smart, and fun-to-read book is for those aspiring to a black belt in fundraising. If you’re in fundraising and this book isn’t on your bookshelf, dog-eared, underlined, and well-worn, you’ve been shortchanging yourself and the organization you serve.”
Katya Andresen, Network for Good and author of Robin Hood Marketing:
“A fundraiser’s breakfast of champions — bread-and-butter fundraising wisdom based on years of experience.”
Stephen Hitchcock,
Bread for the World and author of Open Immediately: Straight Talk on Direct Mail Fundraising:
“This brief book is packed with practical advice and research to back it up. It’s a delight to read as well. Give this book to everyone in your organization — and to your best board members.”
Or at Amazon.co.uk
Or from the publisher (best bet if you’re ordering lots of copies — which, of course, you need to do!)
Filed under Future Fund Raising Now by on Sep 5th, 2012. Comment.
If you make a significant investment decision and plan on participating in events and exhibitions you ought to be certain that you’re going to produce the right impression. You may commit a great deal of time and effort in protecting and developing your brand imagery and plainly need to be sure that your professionalism comes across appropriately when you are committed to these types of events and exhibitions.
If you’d prefer, you could term these options as creative marketing environments and this is when CME shifts in to its own element. This organisation stands out as the market expert in developing and presenting actual physical environments that are meant to “amaze” potential prospects at these exhibitions. The creative people engaged here completely understand how to translate thoughts into actuality and work with whatever is available to make certain that the best effect can be provided.
CME can provide a number of options to clientele as a way for them to pick the best route forward or can become a fundamental element of the team right from the start while you prepare for that upcoming exhibition or event. The organisation is absolutely aware precisely how cut-throat the work environment could be and exactly how important it really is to make a first-class impression anytime exhibiting in trade events and shows. In a nutshell, you only have one chance to make sure this is suitable and CME is devoted to ensuring that they use all their experience and knowledge to greatest effect.
An average exhibition or event today can be a cornucopia of imagery and it is really not hard for exhibitors to end up feeling “lost” within a maze of imagery unless a lot of effort is put into making sure that the stand is unforgettable, interesting and unmissable. Although some may say that the project is not possible, CME prides itself on being capable of going a lot further than that and also making what is considered impossible, a reality.
Remember that the first impression is important and it can generally result in the difference between an engaged prospective client and just a passer-by in the highly charged and emotive environment of an exhibition or event.
Filed under Chris Stoddard by on Apr 21st, 2012. Comment.