Rolling It Out: My top 10 spring campaign tips!
Welcome back to the spring fundraising series. From Scratch has a multi-week series for you to help you prep, implement, and follow up on your spring campaign. If you have one in the works—or even if you don’t—you can follow along. If you do the homework each week, you should be well on your way to an excellent campaign.
If you’re coming in late, here’s a recap: First, we talked about what goals to aim for. Next, we discussed how to draft a donor persona to guide your campaign. Last week, we talked about how to draft your plan and get to copywriting!
This week, I’m sharing my top 10 spring campaign tips to get you ready to roll it out!
1. Pick The Right Theme
The right theme for your spring campaign should do three things: (1) Showcase the impact of your work, (2) Show a clear need, and (3) Reinforce your values.
Here are a few of my favorites from my clients:
She Will Rise: a campaign showcasing stories of life after domestic abuse.
Save Me a Seat: a campaign raising funds to replace the audience seating in a performing arts venue.
Love. Dignity. Burritos.: a campaign raising funds for an organization providing services (and burritos) to homeless families.
2. Vary The FROM Line
So many organizations write all of their fundraising appeals from the Executive Director, CEO, or Board Chair. Those are great, and you should send at least 1-2 of your appeals from your leadership.
But there are so many other people who can speak on behalf of your organization. Do you have other staff members who are esteemed in your community? Do you have a client who has become a staff member who doesn’t mind sharing their success story (I have SOOO many client nonprofits who hire alumni of their service programs, and they make for amazing storytellers and ambassadors for the mission)? Do you have a public figure in your community (a business leader or news personality) who would be willing to sign their name to an appeal?
We often think donors want to hear from the nonprofit’s highest authority. I believe donors want to hear from the person who best embodies the mission—and there are many people who can do that. Heck, I once wrote an appeal as the ghost that local urban legend said lived in the building a client organization was trying to save.
3. What will you send, and when?
Think about the progression of your campaign. And don’t think about it from your perspective, but from the recipient’s perspective. As yourself:
How does each piece stand alone? (Not everyone will read every email and social media post.)
But if someone does read every piece, how does each piece build the narrative?
Incorporate current events, holidays, and other things if they impact your work. (I read once about a nonprofit shelter that would send out fundraising emails whenever it snowed in their county pointing out how important their services were when snow fell. I thought this was brilliant.)
4. Draft the best copy by hearing from the best storytellers.
At a loss for stories? Just talk to people. Speak with other staff members, board members, volunteers, and clients. Ask them what their most impactful story is from the year before. Record them telling the story, and try to keep it as much as possible in their words when you draft the fundraising material. Then make sure they approve the final copy.
And always, always, always adhere to ethical storytelling standards.
5. You can do a lot with short and sweet.
The best fundraising appeal I ever read had a picture of a family standing around the bed of a sick child. The text read: “Cancer is relentless. So are we. Donate now.”
It hit me really hard in the feels. I donated. You don’t have to tell long stories and make elaborate pitches to get results. You just have to make people feel something.
6. Goals, Giving Levels, and the Story
To the degree that you can, link your fundraising goals, giving levels, and the story you’re telling in a campaign. If you can, pick a fundraising goal for the campaign that relates to some kind of impact you can make. Tell stories about that impact. And then break down that impact into little pieces a donor can fund.
For example, I’m on the board of an organization that trains grassroots organizers. We needed $10,000 to fund a fellowship program that would support 20 new organizers. So we put together a campaign to raise $10,000; we told the story of a past fellowship participant and the impact they’d had after going through our training; and then asked the donor to consider a gift of $500 to fund the next fellowship participant. See how that works so nicely?
Depending on your audience (we have a smaller but wealthier audience at this organization), you might want to break the impact down smaller to $100 or $50 donations…but you get my point. Try to make the numbers meaningful for the stories you’re telling.
7. Branding: Making it visually cohesive
Saying it again for the kids in the back…nonprofits aren’t the corporate sector, nor should we aspire to be. BUT there are some things we can learn from our profit sector colleagues. One of those things is the value of branding.
Make sure that all of the pieces you put together for your campaign work together. It’s partially about being visually appealing, but mostly about not confusing your donors. If they get pieces with different versions of your logo, sending them to different URLs, and with photos and other visuals that don’t create some sense of cohesion, they get turned off. Not because they are expecting slick and highly designed, but just because it doesn’t even look like the same organization communicating with them.
You don’t have to have a design background or hire a graphic designer. Just pick a look and stay with it (I don’t care how polished or not the look is).
8. Reading Three Ways
We know from eye scan studies how people engage with fundraising content content. They are, in order of how common:
They only read the 1st paragraph and the P.S.
They only read text in a special font (bold, underlined, italicized)
They only read the first sentence of each paragraph.
Notice that NONE of the ways people most commonly engage with fundraising content is to read the whole thing. So go back to everything you’ve written and see if what you’ve written reads okay when you read it each of these three ways. (And for the love of all things sweet and chocolatey, do NOT let your first paragraph begin with “I hope this finds you well.”)
9. The (Other) Law of Attraction
You want someone to look at something? Put their name on it. People’s names naturally grab their attention. So if you’re using a system that can use a merge system (email marketing softwares like MailChimp and Constant Contact can all do this), any place you absolutely want your donors to read, put their name.
Where do I put their names? Usually somewhere about mid-way through the appeal where I’m making a really punchy point. “<<Donor Name>>, I think we can agree that child poverty is unacceptable in today’s America.”
Then I absolutely always put it in the ask. “<<Donor Name>>, can you make a gift of $100 today?”
(If you’re watching my emails closely, you’ll see your own name a lot. 😉)
10. Don’t put “support” in the email subject line.
Or “donate” or “campaign” or “help.” Okay, I agree with truth in advertising, but studies show that all of those words suppress open rates. I mean, who really WANTS to open a fundraising email.
Come up with something more creative. When I worked at an arthouse cinema, we used movie lines! “Go ahead, make my day!” (Open it up, it’s a fundraising appeal! Your donation would make my day.) When I worked for a climate change organization, one of our top performers was “Something you can do to fight climate change right now.”
And in the same vein, please be careful using things like “Urgent” and “We’re running out of time.” They work once…and never again.
Your Homework Assignment
Go through the campaign plan you wrote last week. Think about the advice above and see what you can apply to your campaign plan. That will punch everything up about three notches.
Next week we’re talking about how to sweeten up your campaign with a matching gift. Stay tuned!
