It's not that hard to get decent fundraising help. There are capable consultants and freelancers everywhere who can turn out competent fundraising. If you want to do it yourself, they are dozens of books, hundreds of blogs, and all kinds of online and in-person training.
Yet really terrible fundraising is all around us anyway. I'm going to show you part of it because we need to stamp out this kind of work. I'll tell you how you can do that in a bit.
Here's a piece I got in the mail. It's a donor acquisition piece, seemingly sent to all households in a selected area.
Here's the first paragraph of the letter:
We believe food and hope is a basic human right. But here in [City], our neighbors are experiencing a crisis of living affordability. Over the past 5 years, our city has had the largest increase in rent of any other in the country, has the third-largest homeless population and 1 in 8 neighbors in [County] are food insecure. Many families are forced to make tough financial decisions between food, healthcare, and housing. The thousands of people we serve deserve better. They need a place where they can access emergency food and hygiene items for their families and access other services they qualify for like heating assistance, referrals to medical care, and veterans' benefits -- all under one roof.
That one paragraph can pack in so many bad fundraising practices is pretty astounding. Sure, it's a long paragraph, but the badness-per-word ratio is amazing:
- It's written at a horrific grade 13 reading level (about half of the sentences are categorized as "very hard to read" by the Hemingway App). Its virtually unreadable.
- It's one page long, though it's about 3 pages worth, crammed in with tiny type and narrow margins.
- It opens with an abstraction, and stays mostly abstract throughout.
- It relies on statistics to describe the issue. (There is no story later on in the letter.)
- It majors in large numbers, which we know to be ineffective.
- The entire letter is about the organization's processes, not the donor's impact.
- There's only one ask, and it's indirect.
- The I-to-You ratio is 25:5. This letter is the equivalent of that bore who corners you at a party and won't stop talking about himself.
If fundraising like this were rare, I wouldn't bother sharing it with you. But it's not rare at all. I see amateurish stumbles like this all the time. So you do.
I don't know anything about the people who sent this fundraising letter. What caused them to produce such a mess?
It might be pure ignorance about what works in fundraising. But why would anyone embark on an expensive and difficult project like direct mail donor acquisition without finding out a thing or two about how to make it succeed?
Maybe it's worse than that. Maybe the ignorance is willful. They dislike the conventions of fundraising and simply choose to do it their own way.
I see that attitude frequently. It doesn't hold up to real-life experience, unless you build an elaborate structure of tunnel-vision and denial.
Who suffers for it? Mostly the people and causes that need the services an organization like this exists to help. Their ineffective and wasteful fundraising directly hurts those who can least afford it.
When you work to improve your skills as a fundraiser, you are fighting this disease of ignorance and arrogance in the best way possible. Keep up the good work, and let's help stamp it out!
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from Future Fundraising Now https://ift.tt/34LbhuC
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