Environmental donors generally look like this
I cut a deal with one of your peers — I’ll give them a free critique of their forthcoming fundraising appeals if they let me blog about it (without naming them). Click here to review one of the drafts. Here goes!
First, let’s all get oriented. On the left: Meet Dorothy Donor, a typical donor to a nature protection or pollution control organization. You need to mail to a lot of people like this to raise meaningful amounts of money.
Whenever I think about direct mail fundraising, I often think of my grandmother. She had a drawer where she would put the fundraising letters as they arrived. At some point during the holiday season, she’d pull them all out and sit down with my grandfather (who good spirited about the whole exercise, but not nearly as into as she was) and the grandkids (if we were around) and pick which ones to support and for how much.
She quite literally thought she was making choice between saving an acre of rainforest, providing beds for 10 homeless women and their children, preventing 50 puppies with big brown eyes from being put to sleep, paying the stipends for 2 Catholic missionaries, or building a school in some unfortunate corner of the world.
Market research suggests that my grandmother’s charitable habits were pretty typical for her generation. To be successful, you have to accept that you’re competing for Dorothy’s attention and generosity: She’ll pick 3-7 causes for the year out of dozens of appeals than arrive in her mailbox in November and December. You must convince her that her $50 (or whatever) gift to you will make a bigger difference and do more good in the world than the other charities seeking her support. And if you never thanked her for her last gift she gave you, she’ll remember that.
So now that we’re oriented, here’s my first piece of advice. When Dorothy opens your letter, you want her to reach for her checkbook — not a magnifying glass. So bump up the text size from 12 point to 14. Break those long paragraphs up into shorter ones.
More critiques tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m curious if my experience with my own grandmother is familiar to any of you? Can you think of anyone who took the holiday giving tradition so seriously?
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Oh, Lord yes! My grandmother takes every piece of mail she gets very seriously, and actually calls me every time she doesn’t respond to one of the 5 yearly asks she gets from our organization. She actually had sort of a stressful time deciding to stop giving to “The Indians” and start giving to “The Rivers” when I started working here, and wrote “The Indians” an apology letter, explaining why she would no longer be giving to them.