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Casual Articles - Fundraising Letters Should Raise Donors, Not Donations, When Mailed to Strangers
Running a business can be a lot more than simply crunching numbers or turning a profit. It is an art that can't be learned from books or articles, and rarely will it be learned from experience alone. At least, experience will not teach as quickly as a business coach would, and in the sink or swim world of today's business, that difference
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts i
Can Airbus bring itself back around on a new approach to serve it markets and regain all that lost market share? Do they even have a plan to level the wings and gain some altitude or is it all down hill from here? One thing I have found is that any corporation suffering in the market place like Airbus is today must have customer service a
Acquisition letters (letters designed to acquire new donors) should be a vital part of your development program. Current donors fall away. Some lose interest in your mission. Some lose their jobs. Other leave the country. Some die. You need to be mailing fundraising letters to people who have never supported your cause in order to replace the donors who fall away every year through no fault of yours.
But to be successful at acquiring new donors, you need to ignore one set of numbers and fix your eyes on another. The numbers to “ignore” are the costs of getting your first donation. According to James Greenfield, in his excellent book, Fund Raising (second edition), you can expect to pay anywhere from $1.25 to $1.50 to raise $1 with an acquisition mailing. That doesn’t sound like a wise use of your resources, does it?
But with acquisition fundraising letters, you need to have your eyes fixed on the lifetime value of your donor, not the short-term value of their first gift. You need to remind yourself (along with your board members, key volunteers and inexperienced colleagues) that your goal with acquisition mailings is to acquire friends, not funds.
Let me illustrate.
Let’s say you mail a fundraising letter to a list of 10,000 strangers. These are people who have not supported your organization before but might. Assume that your costs for writing, design, production and postage come to $0.60 a piece. Your mailing costs are thus $6,000. Let’s say you receive a 1 percent response rate. That’s 100 gifts. Further assume that the average gift is $30 Your income is $30 x 100 donors, namely, $3,000.
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts in
Does the thought of marketing your business drive you to chocolate? If “getting the word out” makes you feel overwhelmed, you’re not alone. After coaching over 1,200 men and women the last four years I’ve discovered big differences between the genders and how we handle the challenges marketing throws at all small businesses.
But to be successful at acquiring new donors, you need to ignore one set of numbers and fix your eyes on another. The numbers to “ignore” are the costs of getting your first donation. According to James Greenfield, in his excellent book, Fund Raising (second edition), you can expect to pay anywhere from $1.25 to $1.50 to raise $1 with an acquisition mailing. That doesn’t sound like a wise use of your resources, does it?
But with acquisition fundraising letters, you need to have your eyes fixed on the lifetime value of your donor, not the short-term value of their first gift. You need to remind yourself (along with your board members, key volunteers and inexperienced colleagues) that your goal with acquisition mailings is to acquire friends, not funds.
Let me illustrate.
Let’s say you mail a fundraising letter to a list of 10,000 strangers. These are people who have not supported your organization before but might. Assume that your costs for writing, design, production and postage come to $0.60 a piece. Your mailing costs are thus $6,000. Let’s say you receive a 1 percent response rate. That’s 100 gifts. Further assume that the average gift is $30 Your income is $30 x 100 donors, namely, $3,000.
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts i
If this is the first marketing article you are reading, go find some other more basic articles that I have written and then come back. This data is for the intermediate to advanced marketers.I want to go over a three-step outline for your marketing which are:1) Surveys2) Getting Attention3) PostageMarke
But with acquisition fundraising letters, you need to have your eyes fixed on the lifetime value of your donor, not the short-term value of their first gift. You need to remind yourself (along with your board members, key volunteers and inexperienced colleagues) that your goal with acquisition mailings is to acquire friends, not funds.
Let me illustrate.
Let’s say you mail a fundraising letter to a list of 10,000 strangers. These are people who have not supported your organization before but might. Assume that your costs for writing, design, production and postage come to $0.60 a piece. Your mailing costs are thus $6,000. Let’s say you receive a 1 percent response rate. That’s 100 gifts. Further assume that the average gift is $30 Your income is $30 x 100 donors, namely, $3,000.
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts i
(Say What You Mean and Get What You Want!)Great business communication skills requires learning to say exactly what you mean and saying it in a way to get a desired outcome that is beneficial for both the business contact and your home based business. Many times we send cross signals in our communications
Let me illustrate.
Let’s say you mail a fundraising letter to a list of 10,000 strangers. These are people who have not supported your organization before but might. Assume that your costs for writing, design, production and postage come to $0.60 a piece. Your mailing costs are thus $6,000. Let’s say you receive a 1 percent response rate. That’s 100 gifts. Further assume that the average gift is $30 Your income is $30 x 100 donors, namely, $3,000.
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts i
A warehouse is a place where finished goods and other products are stored. These warehouses are plain buildings with large and enclosed spaces, located in industrial areas to facilitate easy accessibility when the need to use the stored products arises. They harbor a separate opening for trucks and delivery vans to simplify the loading an
Your costs are: $6,000
Your income is: $3,000
Your net loss for the campaign is: $3,000
Are you in trouble? No. Here’s what you tell your executive director. “We gained 100 new donors. And up to 80 percent of them will give again, provided we follow up properly and solicit their gifts in the right way in the future.”
Each of these new donors effectively cost you $30 each (your net loss divided by total new donors). Are you willing to spend $30 today to raise a friend who will likely give your organization hundreds of dollars in gifts in years to come? You should be, provided you can remember that your goal with acquisition letters is to raise a donor, not a donation.
My thanks go to Stanley Weinstein and his book, The Complete Guide to Fundraising Management (second edition), for his insight into the economics of donor acquisition.
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