How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals

Mal Warwick

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118543665
• eBook ISBN: 9781118573211
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals

Now in a completely revised third edition, this classic book shows how to create winning appeals that will realize the full potential of direct mail and online fundraising. Written by fundraising guru Mal Warwick, with assistance from Eric Overman, this comprehensive resource gives nonprofit fundraising staff the information needed to write compelling fundraising appeals for any medium. If you follow Warwick's guidelines, your direct mail and online fundraising campaigns will produce better results, year after year.

Written in an easy-to-read style, the book is filled with practical techniques, proven approaches, and illustrative examples of both successful and unsuccessful appeals based on the authors' wealth of experience fundraising for hundreds of nonprofits. Step-by-step and appeal by appeal, the book shows how to navigate the fundraising appeal process with ease. To meet the demands of today's socially connected donors, this new edition explains how to mesh today's online technologies with direct mail to produce optimal fundraising results. You'll learn how to use e-mail, websites, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile technology to recruit more donors and raise more money. The book includes current research on timely topics such as online vs. offline behavior, online giving statistics, demographics, and best practices in integrated fundraising.

If you're a nonprofit professional eager to master the latest methods in fundraising, or simply need to write direct mail appeals for your organization, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals will help you hone your skills and create appeals that will hit the mark every time.

Part One: Motivating Your Audience

To write successful fundraising appeals, it’s essential that you understand the fundamentals of donor motivation and the dynamics of donor response. Those are the themes we’ll cover in this first part of the book. You’ll learn

• Why people respond to fundraising appeals when they’re typically overwhelmed with them
• How a fundraising appeal is like a personal visit by a fundraising canvasser
• What donors really think about those fundraising letters cluttering their mailboxes
• The characteristics of an effective fundraising appeal, whether printed on paper or posted online

And finally, you’ll take a leisurely tour through one successful appeal.

Chapter One:

Why People Respond to Fundraising Appeals

It’s downright unnatural. Your fundraising appeal must persuade the recipient to take an action that much of humanity thinks peculiar: to give away money.

To accomplish this seemingly unlikely objective, your appeal needs to be built on the psychology of giving. Forget your organization’s needs. Instead, focus on the needs, the desires, and the concerns of the people you’re writing to. Your job is to motivate them.

Commercial direct marketers frequently say that there are five great motivators that explain response: fear, exclusivity, guilt, greed, and anger. But I believe the truth is much more complex: that there are at least two dozen and one reasons people might respond to your fundraising appeal. Any one of the twenty-five might suggest a theme or hook for your campaign, and it’s likely that several of these reasons help to motivate each gift.

People Send Money Because You Ask Them to

Public opinion surveys and other research repeatedly confirm this most basic fact of donor motivation. “I was asked” is the most frequently cited reason for giving. And the research confirms that donors want to be asked. Focus group research also reveals that donors typically underestimate the number of appeals they receive from the organizations they support. These facts help explain why responsive donors are repeatedly asked for additional gifts in nearly every successful direct response fundraising program. When you write an appeal, keep these realities in mind. Don’t allow your reticence about asking for money make you sound apologetic in your letter.

People Send Money Because They Have Money Available to Give Away

The overwhelming majority of individual gifts to nonprofit organizations and institutions are small contributions made from disposable (or discretionary) income. This is the money left over in the family checking account after the month’s mortgage, taxes, insurance, credit cards, and grocery bills have been paid. Unless you’re appealing for a major gift, a bequest, or a multiyear pledge, your target is this modest pool of available money.

For most families, dependent on a year-round stream of wage or salary income, the pool of disposable income is replenished every two weeks or every month. That’s why most organizations appeal frequently and for small gifts. If your appeal is persuasive, your organization may join the ranks of that select group of nonprofits that receive gifts from a donor’s household in a given month. If you’re less than persuasive or if competing charities have stronger arguments—or if the family just doesn’t have money to spare that month—you won’t get a gift.

For example, if you write me a letter seeking a charitable gift, you may succeed in tapping into the $100 or $200 I’ll probably have “left over” for charity during the month your letter arrives. If your appeal is persuasive, I might send you $25 or $50—$100 tops—because I decide to add you to the short list of nonprofits I’ll support that month.

Now you may have the mistaken impression that as a businessman, a snappy dresser, and an all-around generous fellow, I have a lot of money. You may even be aware I’ve occasionally made much larger gifts to local charities. But you’re unlikely to receive more than $50 because that’s all I have available right now. Those few larger gifts I gave didn’t come from my disposable income stream. They came from other sources (such as an investment windfall, a tax refund, or an inheritance) and required a lot of planning on my part.

People Send Money Because They’re in the Habit of Sending Money

Charity is habit forming; giving by mail is a special variety of this benign affliction. When I became involved in direct mail fundraising in the late 1970s, I was told that only about one in four adult Americans was mail responsive—that is, susceptible to offers or appeals by mail. By the turn of the century, according to the Simmons Market Research Bureau, two out of every three adults were buying goods or services by mail or phone every year. Many purchases involved telemarketing—but there’s no doubt Americans are now more mail responsive. Surveys also reflect the growing importance of direct mail appeals in the fundraising process. Research shows that fundraising letters are the top source of new gifts to charity in America.

But the charity habit isn’t expressed solely through the mail. These days, with the proliferation of other fundraising channels, some people have gotten into the habit of giving online. Others prefer to respond to telephone calls (yes, telephone calls) or to television appeals. And once the hurdles are removed from giving via text messages on mobile devices, I’m sure people will get into that habit too.

People Send Money Because They Support Organizations Like Yours

Your donors aren’t yours alone, no matter what you think. Because they have special interests, hobbies, and distinctive beliefs, they may support several similar organizations. A dog owner, for example, may contribute to half a dozen organizations that have some connection to dogs: a humane society, an animal rights group, an organization that trains Seeing Eye™ dogs, or even a wildlife protection group. A person who sees himself as an environmentalist might be found on the membership rolls of five or six ecology-related groups: one dedicated to land conservation, another to protecting the wilderness, a third to saving endangered species or the rain forest, and so on. There are patterns in people’s lives. Your appeal is most likely to bear fruit when it fits squarely into one of those patterns.

People Send Money Because Their Gifts Will Make a Difference

Donors want to be convinced that their investment in your enterprise—their charitable gifts—will achieve some worthy aim. That’s why many donors express concern about high fundraising and administrative costs. It’s also why successful appeals for funds often quantify the impact of a gift: $35 to buy a school uniform, $40 for a stethoscope, $7 to feed a child for a day. Donors want to feel good about their gifts. Linking a donor’s gift to something specific and tangible is always a plus.

Your donors are striving to be effective human beings. You help them by demonstrating just how effective they really are.

People Send Money Because Gifts Will Accomplish Something Right Now

Urgency is a necessary element in a fundraising letter, and even more so in an online appeal. Implicitly or explicitly, every successful appeal has a deadline: the end of the year, the opening of the school, the deadline for the matching grant, the limited pressrun on the book available as a premium. But the strong attraction in circumstances such as these becomes even clearer when no such urgent conditions apply. If the money I send you this week won’t make a difference right away, shouldn’t I send money to some other charity that has asked for my support and urgently needs it?

People Send Money Because You Recognize Them for Their Gifts

You appeal to donors’ egos—or to their desire to heighten their public image—when you offer to recognize their gifts in an open and tangible way: a listing in your newsletter; a plaque, certificate, lapel pin, or house sign; a screen credit in a video production; a press release. If your fundraising program can provide appropriate and tasteful recognition, you’re likely to boost response to your appeals by highlighting the opportunities for recognition in your letter or newsletter. Even if donors choose not to be listed in print or mentioned in public, they may be gratified to learn that you value their contributions enough to make the offer.

People Send Money Because You Give Them Something Tangible in Return

Premiums come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors: bumper strips, gold tie tacks, coffee-table books, membership cards, even (in one case I know) a pint of ice cream.

Sometimes, premiums (such as name stickers or bookmarks) are enclosed with the appeal; these so-called front-end premiums (or freemiums) boost response more often than not and are frequently cost effective, at least in the short run. In other cases, back-end premiums are promised in an appeal “as a token of our deep appreciation” when donors respond by sending gifts of at least a certain amount. Either way, premiums appeal to the innate acquisitiveness that persists in the human race.

People Send Money Because You Enable Them to “Do Something” about a Critical Problem, if Only to Protest or Take a Stand

Today we are bombarded by information about the world’s problems through a wide variety of channels. Although we may isolate ourselves inside triple-locked homes, build walls around suburbs, and post guards at gateposts, we can’t escape from knowing about misery, injustice, and wasted human potential. Often we feel powerless in the face of this grim reality. Charity offers us a way to respond—by helping to heal the sick or offer balm for troubled souls, imprint our values on a new generation, or feed the hungry. Your appeal will trigger a gift if it brings to life the feelings that move us to act, even knowing that action is never enough.

If you offer hope in a world drowning in troubles, your donors will seize it like the life jacket it really is.

People Send Money Because You Give Them a Chance to Associate with a Famous or Worthy Person

There are numerous ways that the identity, personality, or achievements of an individual might be highlighted in a fundraising appeal. For example, that person may be the celebrity signer, the organization’s founder or executive director, the honorary chair of a fundraising drive, a patron saint, a political candidate, an honoree at a special event—or simply one of the organization’s members or clients. If the signer’s character or accomplishments evoke admiration or even simply a past personal connection, your donors may be moved to send gifts in response. The opportunity to associate with someone who is well known or highly esteemed may offer donors a way to affirm their noblest inclinations—or compensate for what they believe to be their shortcomings.

People Send Money Because You Allow Them to Get Back at the Corrupt or the Unjust

There are too few outlets for the anger and frustration we feel on witnessing injustice and corruption in society. Both our moral sense and the secular law hold most of us in check, preventing expressions of violence or vocal fury that might allow us to let off steam. For many, contributing to nonprofit causes or institutions is a socially acceptable way to strike back. Whether your organization is a public interest group committed to fighting corruption in government or a religious charity devoted to revealing divine justice, it may help donors channel their most sordid feelings into a demonstration of their best instincts.

People Send Money Because You Give Them the Opportunity to “Belong”—as a Member, Friend, or Supporter—and Thus You Help Them Fight Loneliness

Your most fundamental task as a fundraiser is to build relationships with your donors. That’s why so many o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Free Professional Content
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface to the Third Edition
• About the Author
• Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book
• Part One: Motivating Your Audience
• Part Two: Your Plan of Action
• Part Three: Customizing Your Appeal
• Part Four: Reinforcing Your Appeal
• Part Five: The Appeal Writer’s Toolbox
• Index