Missy is one of four cats that live here with us. We adopted her from a local shelter about 10 years ago and she’s a sweetie. She’s the oldest and the smallest of the pack and to help her keep weight on, we feed her canned cat food every afternoon about 4 pm.  She LOVES her “tuna” as we call it and eats every last bite.

Lately, I’ve been watching her and thinking that Missy might have something to teach us about fundraising.

She knows what her goal is. Missy knows what she wants and every afternoon, she waits in her usual spot for her dinner.

She’s hopeful. When anyone walks to the kitchen at any time in the afternoon, Missy goes too, just to see if she might get fed early.

She builds relationship. She gives out lots of love during the day to those who feed her.

She expresses appreciation. She purrs and gives out love to those who help her reach her goal.

This is all good, but sometimes she’s a pest.  In fact, we’ve started calling her “Pesty Cat” because she ALWAYS wants to be fed.  This is a danger for many nonprofit fundraising folks – always showing up with their hand out for money.

If that’s how you approach fundraising, your donors will likely get tired of it.  Make sure that you ask often enough for a gift, but not too often.  It’s a fine line to walk, but one your donors will appreciate if you can get it right. If you want to take it a step further, ask your donors how often and when they’d like to be asked for a gift.  It puts your donor in charge of the relationship and they’ll be much happier.  You’ll likely see your results go up and your expenses go down.  Wondering how to do that?  Survey your donors and simply ask them what they want.

Gotta go – Missy is ready for her dinner!

It’s fundraising season!  And I bet you’re busy thinking about all kinds of things from fundraising letters to end-of-year activities.

If you really want to set yourself up for success for fundraising in the last quarter of 2010, take some time to plan your activities.  This will move you from being reactive to being proactive, and you’ll be much more likely to hit your goals.

Since most nonprofits send a fundraising letter during this time of year, I thought I’d share a tool I use and recommend to make it easier. (We’re all interested in easier, right?).

Create a production schedule for getting your letter ready and in the mail.  Start with the date you want the letters to arrive in your readers’ mailboxes, then work backward.  Allow time for stuffing the envelopes, time for printing, time for proofing, time for editing, and time for writing.  You’ll find that you need to start anywhere from several days to several weeks ahead depending on the number of letters you plan to send.  Here’s a more graphical way to create a production schedule:

(This particular schedule works for a nonprofit with a small list and they plan to print and mail the letters themselves)

I got a couple more email appeals yesterday from local organizations.  One made a big mistake that I wanted to share with you so you can avoid it.

Overall, it was a good email appeal – photo, update on a couple of accomplishments for the year, reminder that year-end gifts are due this week, link to the website for the Donate Now button… then they also asked for me to participate in an event.

It’s a huge mistake to ask for multiple things in an appeal.  You run the risk of people being torn about which thing to respond to.  Ask for one thing and one thing only.  Make it very simple and very clear what action you want the donor to take.  Otherwise, you may be disappointed with the response you get.

A small nonprofit serving children recently sent out their first direct mail appeal using a rented list.  Now they want to know if their results are good or not.

In May, they sent out 1492 pieces.  In April, they had been in the local news several times promoting Child Abuse Prevention Month.  So far, they’ve received 1o gifts totalling $322 dollars.  It cost them $427 to send the mailing, and their Board is concerned that they’ve lost money.

Now they’ve asked me how they’ve done.  Here’s what I said:

It sounds like you picked the best possible time to mail.  Good going on that – not everyone puts that much thought into the timing of their mailings.  The publicity before the mailing will help the performance of the mailing.

If you mailed 1492 pieces and got 10 gifts back, that’s a response rate of 0.7%.  1% is average on a mailing like this.  Your average gift size of $32 is about average for small organizations.

Overall, you did fine on this mailing compared to what other nonprofits receive on this kind of mailing.  At first blush, the response can seem dismal- after all, you lost money.  But you gained 10 new donors.  If you can keep those 10 new donors giving for the next three or four years, you will more than make your money back.

Do you have a question about direct mail?  Click on the comment link below and ask.  And don’t forget that my “Secrets of Direct Mail Mentoring Course” starts on Tuesday.  Click here to learn more or to sign up: http://www.getfullyfunded.com/directmailseries.html.

Secrets of Direct Mail Mentoring Course

Give me 4 weeks and I’ll show you how to raise gobs of money through the mail!

I’m proud to announce a new teleseminar series that I’ll be starting July 14th.  It’s my “Secrets of Direct Mail Mentoring Course” and in it you will learn everything you need to know to raise money like the big nonprofits do.

I’m a self-proclaimed direct mail geek and proud of it!  This is my favorite technique for raising money and building relationships.  Unfortunately, so many small nonprofits try to do it without knowing how to do it well, and they are disappointed with the results they get.  So, I created this Mentoring Course to help.

In this 4-week course, you’ll learn how to:

• Choose the absolute best time to mail your fundraising letters
• Accurately estimate expenses and revenues
• Craft a compelling, effective appeal
• Choose the best mailing list
• Have a proven system for raising money through the mail that you can duplicate again and again

I’ll be sharing with you what I learned through trial and error over many years of raising money through the mail.

Here are all the details:

The course kicks off July 14 and the size is limited (so I can keep it small and give everyone some individual attention).

The cost is just $249.  Learn more at http://www.getfullyfunded.com/directmailseries.html

I hope to see you in class on July 14th!

“How long should I leave people on my mailing list?”

This question came up today on a listserv I’m on and I thought I’d share my answer here with you, my favorite readers!

It’s great that you are thinking about cleaning up your database!  Too many times, people never take folks off their lists and they wind up wasting a lot of money on postage and printing.

Here’s what I recommend.

Develop a strategy to get a first gift from the 1100 prospects and a separate strategy to renew the lapsed donors.  You may have to take very different approaches with these two groups. Give them plenty of opportunities to make a gift and make sure your appeals are well-crafted and donor-centric. 

After a year to 15 months, if you’ve mailed to them about 4 or 5 times and they haven’t responded, I’d take them out of eTapestry   (to reduce your cost there) but keep them in an Excel file.  This lets you refer to the list again if you need to and you can use the lapsed donors list when you are mailing an acquisition package.  Sometimes deeply lapsed donors will come back around with an acquisition mailing. 

I would watch this list closely during acquisition to see what the response looks like before I made a decision to stop mailing to the list altogether.

Do you have something to add?  Post a comment and share!

If you’ve ever dipped your toe into the pool of raising money through the mail, you know it’s not as easy as it first appears.  It’s actually a complex strategy for fundraising with lots of details to think through.

There’s a new book available to help you navigate your way through a successful direct mail campaign.  Written by me and Sandra Sims, it’s called 7 Essential Steps to Raising Money by Mail.  It features an easy, step-by-step formula for crafting a successful fundraising letter, plus a swipe file of dozens of sentence starters for those times when you can’t find the right words.  It also contains over 25 real sample letters from real organizations.

The book is available as an ebook for $24 and as a paperback for $27.  Order yours here.

When it comes time to write an appeal letter, you want to do your best to be personal. Write in a conversational tone. Keep your writing simple and easy to understand (this is NOT the time to use all the big, fancy words you know!) Tell a story about someone your organization has helped. Paint a picture for your reader of how your organization is ready to make a difference in the lives of many more if their support is given.

There are some great tips in a recent post at the Bad Language Blog. Here are a few of them: Write like you speak. Use short words and short sentences.