How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals E-Book

Mal Warwick

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 405

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Contents

Free Professional Content

Preface to the Third Edition

About the Author

Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book

Part One: Motivating Your Audience

Chapter One: Why People Respond to Fundraising Appeals

People Send Money Because You Ask Them to

People Send Money Because They Have Money Available to Give Away

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

People Send Money Because They Support Organizations Like Yours

People Send Money Because Their Gifts Will Make a Difference

People Send Money Because Gifts Will Accomplish Something Right Now

People Send Money Because You Recognize Them for Their Gifts

People Send Money Because You Give Them Something Tangible in Return

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

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

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

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

People Send Money Because You Enable Them to Offer Their Opinions

People Send Money Because You Provide Them with Access to Inside Information

People Send Money Because You Help Them Learn about a Complex and Interesting Problem or Issue

People Send Money Because You Help Them Preserve Their Worldview by Validating Cherished Values and Beliefs

People Send Money Because You Allow Them to Gain Personal Connections with Other Individuals Who Are Passionately Involved in Some Meaningful Dimension of Life

People Send Money Because You Give Them the Chance to Release Emotional Tension Caused by a Life-threatening Situation, a Critical Emergency, or an Ethical Dilemma

People Send Money Because They Are Afraid

People Send Money Because You Allow Them to Relieve Their Guilt about an Ethical, Political, or Personal Transgression, Whether Real or Imagined

People Send Money Because You Give Them Tax Benefits

People Send Money Because They Feel It’s Their Duty

People Send Money Because They Believe It’s a Blessing to Do so

People Send Money Because They Want to “Give Something Back”

People Send Money Because You Offer Them a Choice of Specific Programs or Projects

Chapter Two: How a Fundraising Appeal Is Like a Personal Visit

What Happens in a Personal Fundraising Visit?

How People Decide Whether to Open Fundraising Letters

How a Fundraising Letter Is Like a Face-to-Face Dialogue

Answering Your Reader’s Questions Before They’re Even Asked

The Four Waves of Rejection

A Closer Look at the First Twenty Seconds in Your Letter’s Public Life

Chapter Three: What Donors Really Think about Fundraising Letters

How Ten People Reacted to My Pride and Joy

Why Did We Set Up That Exasperating Focus Group, Anyway?

What Those Ten People Taught Me (All Over Again)

Chapter Four: Characteristics of an Effective Fundraising Appeal

Fundraising Campaigns: One Size Won’t Fit All

Chapter Five: A Leisurely Tour through One Successful Appeal

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music Appeal

What You Can—and Can’t—Learn from This Example

A Shorter Journey through a Letter That Doesn’t Work Well

Part Two: Your Plan of Action

Chapter Six: What to Do Before You Write Any Fundraising Appeal

The Twenty Important Questions You Need to Ask Before You Begin Writing

How to Write a Marketing Concept

Chapter Seven: Eight Steps toward Successful Fundraising Appeals

Step 1: Develop the Marketing Concept

Step 2: Determine the Contents of Package

Step 3: Draft the Reply Device

Step 4: Write the Outer-Envelope and E-mail Subject Lines

Step 5: Write the Lead

Step 6: Write the P.S.

Step 7: Consider Subheads and Underlining

Step 8: Write the Text (at Last!)

Chapter Eight: The Cardinal Rules of Fundraising Letters

The Cardinal Rules

Three More Things to Keep in Mind

Rating Your Writing

Chapter Nine: You’re Writing for Results—Not for a Pulitzer Prize

Rudolf Flesch’s Rules of Effective Writing

How Writing for Results Is Different from Writing to Describe or Report

When Does the Fun Start?

Part Three: Customizing Your Appeal

Chapter Ten: Recruiting New Donors

How Donor Acquisition Letters Differ from Other Fundraising Appeals

Chapter Eleven: Recruiting New Supporters

Driving Pledge Activity

Using the Web and E-mail

Chapter Twelve: Welcoming New Donors

Case Study: Global Fund for Women

How New Donor Welcome Packages Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Six Reasons You Should Send an E-mail Welcome Series and Direct Mail Welcome Packages

Chapter Thirteen: Appealing for Special Gifts

How Special Appeals Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Chapter Fourteen: Asking for Year-End Contributions

How Year-End Appeals Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Chapter Fifteen: Recruiting Monthly Sustainers

How Sustainer Invitations Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Chapter Sixteen: Soliciting High-Dollar Gifts

How High-Dollar Appeals Are Different from Other Fundraising Letters

Chapter Seventeen: Going for Bigger Gifts

How Donor Upgrade Appeals Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Case Study: AIDS Project Los Angeles Upgrade Appeal

Chapter Eighteen: Seeking Annual Gifts

How Renewal Letters Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Case Study: Corporate Accountability International’s Annual Membership Renewal Series

Chapter Nineteen: Thanking Your Donors

How Thank-You Letters Are Different from Other Fundraising Letters

Why You Need to Write Thank-Yous

How Some of the Country’s Top Fundraising Mailers Thank Their Donors

Case Study: An Example of a Great Thank-You Letter

Chapter Twenty: Promoting Legacy Gifts

How Legacy Promotion Letters Are Different from Other Fundraising Appeals

Case Study: Project Bread Bequest Promotion

Part Four: Reinforcing Your Appeal

Chapter Twenty-One: Rounding Out Your Appeal with Online Media and More

How a Multichannel Fundraising Program Is Like a Turkey Sandwich with All the Trimmings

What You Can (and Can’t) Expect from Online Fundraising

Channel by Channel, the Nuts and Bolts of Multichannel Fundraising

“Whoa, My Head Is Starting to Hurt!”

Chapter Twenty-Two: Writing Online Appeals

Anatomy of an E-mail Appeal

How Writing E-mails Is Different from Putting Words on Paper

The Cardinal Rules of Writing E-mail Appeals

Creating an Effective E-Newsletter

Prepare Your Website for Multichannel Engagement

Driving Dialogue with Social Media

The New Frontier of Mobile Marketing

Even More Techniques to Involve Your Donors Online

Which Comes First—the Chicken or the Egg?

The Immediate Future of Online Appeals

Chapter Twenty-Three: The New Keys to Success in Fundraising Today

Today’s Route to Riches?

Where’s the Yellow Brick Road?

Part Five: The Appeal Writer’s Toolbox

Appendix A: Sample Multichannel Campaign Calendar

Appendix B: Twenty Great E-mail Subject Lines

Appendix C: Sixty Successful Outer-Envelope Teasers

Appendix D: Fifty-Four Strong Leads for Fundraising Appeals

Appendix E: Ninety Ways to Use the Word “You” in a Fundraising Appeal

Appendix F: Sixty-Three Ways to Handle Awkward Copywriting Transitions

Appendix G: Forty-One Powerful Ways to End a Fundraising Appeal

Appendix H: Fifty-Eight Ways to Start a P.S. in a Fundraising Appeal

Appendix I: Fifteen Ways How Not to Get Results

Index

Copyright © 2013 by Mal Warwick. All rights reserved.

Cover design by JPuda

Cover image: © istockphoto

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warwick, Mal.

How to write successful fundraising appeals/Mal Warwick, Eric Overman. — Third edition.

pages cm. — (The Jossey-Bass nonprofit guidebook series)

Revised edition of the author’s How to write successful fundraising letters, 2nd ed.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-54366-5 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-57321-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-57325-9 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-61808-0 (ebk.)

1. Direct-mail fund raising. 2. Nonprofit organizations—Finance. I. Overman, Eric. II. Title.

HV41.2.W378 2013

658.15'224—dc23

2012048511

The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series

The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series provides new to experienced nonprofit professionals and volunteers with the essential tools and practical knowledge they need to make a difference in the world. From hands-on workbooks to step-by-step guides on developing a critical skill or learning how to perform an important task or process, our accomplished expert authors provide readers with the information required to be effective in achieving goals, mission, and impact.

Other Titles in the Jossey-Bass Guidebook Series

Powered by Pro Bono, Taproot Foundation

Winning Grants Step by Step, 4th Edition, Tori O’Neal-McElrath

Content Marketing for Nonprofits, Kivi Leroux-Miller

The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause, Kivi Leroux Miller

The Executive Director’s Guide to Thriving as a Nonprofit Leader, 2nd Edition, Mim Carlson, Margaret Donohoe

Strategic Communications for Nonprofits: A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the Media, 2nd Edition, Kathy Bonk, Emily Tynes, Henry Griggs, Phil Sparks

The Budget-Building Book for Nonprofits: A Step-by-Step Guide for Managers and Boards, 2nd Edition, Murray Dropkin, Jim Halpin, Bill La Touche

Preface to the Third Edition

Nearly twenty years ago I set out to develop the first edition of How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters. Measured against a geological timescale, two decades isn’t a long time—but in fundraising terms the world has changed as surely and as dramatically as if the continents had drifted farther apart. Fundraisers today—those who were content to solicit funds by mail twenty years ago—face a multichannel environment, more complex, often baffling, and continuously changing.

The first edition of this book was exclusively about fundraising by direct mail. It represented my best effort to explain how and why the technique works—and how to make the most of it. Using abundant examples of successful and unsuccessful fundraising letters, I explained, step by step, what works and what doesn’t in direct mail fundraising. I described all the different kinds of direct mail fundraising letters—if you’re a beginner, don’t be surprised that there are a lot of them!—and I explained why the differences matter and how to make them clear in your own writing.

For most nonprofits today, direct mail is still the workhorse in the development office, generating the largest number of new donors and raising by far the largest amount of net revenue for operations. But the number of ways that nonprofit organizations are raising money from the public has proliferated with the advent of e-mail, the World Wide Web, mobile computing, and social media, resulting in the multichannel environment that fundraisers confront today. That’s why, from beginning to end, this book is dramatically different from its earlier editions. The changes include:

A new title, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals

(not just

Letters

), to reflect the changed reality that today’s fundraisers confront

Three new chapters

(“Recruiting New Supporters: Beginning the Cultivation Process Online,” “Rounding Out Your Appeal with Online Media and More,” and “The New Keys to Success in Fundraising Today”) and a fourth chapter thoroughly updated and expanded (“Writing Online Appeals”)

New sample fundraising appeals

substituted for nearly all the examples found in the second edition

Revised text throughout

, with every single sentence weighed for its relevance to current conditions

Additions to the resources

at the end of the book

A website

dedicated to this book (

www.josseybass.com/go/fundraisingappeals

), featuring numerous additional sample appeals (all in full color, of course).

If you want to cut to the chase and get a handle on the changes that time has wrought in the fundraising environment, I suggest you turn to the concluding chapter, “The New Keys to Success in Fundraising Today.”

And if you’re now using a previous edition of this book as a reference, you’d be well advised to consult this third edition instead. Yes, things have changed that much.

Three of my colleagues played pivotal roles in preparing this third edition. Eric Overman, vice president of digital strategy at Donordigital, reviewed the text for consistency with the current demands and opportunities of online communications, provided the substance of two of the new chapters, prepared two new resource sections for part 5, and supplied examples of online fundraising appeals from his work with clients. Eric spent a great deal of time on this project, and I’m very grateful to him. And my old friend Bill Rehm, vice president of Mal Warwick Associates, put in the hours too, suggesting substantial changes in the text, identifying out-of-date material to cut, and supplying the new direct mail examples featured in this edition. Finally, Amanda Melton, party planner/wordsmith/office manager/actor, secured most of the permissions for the illustrations used in this book, a truly thankless task for which I thank her anyway.

I couldn’t possibly have produced this book without Eric’s and Bill’s help. They contributed a great deal to its freshness and new insights. Nonetheless, the final decisions about what to include or exclude were mine, so please blame me if you’re unhappy.

I’m also indebted to my editors at Jossey-Bass, who were a pleasure to work with. They caught several potentially embarrassing slips on my part, and I’m grateful. Besides, they’re the ones who actually publish the book!

If your job—or your personal predilection—keeps you engaged full-time in direct mail fundraising or in online fundraising and marketing, you may find what follows in this book a little disquieting. Get used to it. The days are long gone when we could hole up in our specialties and still meet ambitious fundraising targets. The world doesn’t work that way anymore. In any form of direct response fundraising, you’ll find it essential nowadays to work closely with those who manage other aspects of direct response. Otherwise, you won’t be able to maximize your fundraising returns. I hope this greatly revised book will help you on your way.

Berkeley, California

April 2013

Mal Warwick

About the Author

For more than thirty years, Mal Warwick has been widely known in the nonprofit sector as an author, consultant, and public speaker on marketing and fundraising for nonprofit organizations and in the private sector as an advocate for socially and environmentally responsible business policies and practices.

Mal is the founder and chairman of Mal Warwick | Donordigital (www.malwarwick.com), a full-service fundraising agency with offices in Berkeley, California, and Washington, DC. The firm specializes in integrated, multichannel fundraising and marketing, serving nonprofit organizations nationwide since 1979. It is a Founding B Corporation and is now employee owned.

Mal has written, coauthored, or edited a total of twenty books, including Fundraising When Money Is Tight, Revolution in the Mailbox, and several other standard fundraising texts. For twenty-five years, until February 2011, he also edited the free, monthly, electronic newsletter, Mal Warwick’s Newsletter: Successful Direct Mail, Telephone & Online Fundraising™, which had more than ten thousand subscribers in sixty-nine countries. Over the course of his fundraising career, he has been widely in demand as a speaker and workshop leader throughout the world. Mal has taught fundraising on six continents to nonprofit executives from more than one hundred countries.

Among the hundreds of nonprofits Mal and his colleagues served over the years are many of the nation’s largest and most distinguished charities as well as six Democratic presidential candidates and scores of small, local, and regional organizations. Collectively, Mal and his associates have been responsible for raising close to one billion dollars—largely in the form of small gifts from individuals.

Mal has played a leadership role in the fundraising and direct marketing fields both nationally and internationally. In 2009 and 2010, he cofounded and chaired the International Fundraising Congress Online, the world’s first virtual fundraising conference, involving more than four hundred sites in forty-two countries, and he chaired its successor, Fundraising Online 2011. Previously, in 2007–2008, he served as chair of that event’s sponsor, the international organization Resource Alliance (London, UK). The Resource Alliance is the organizer of the annual International Fundraising Congress in The Netherlands and a leading force globally in developing the fundraising capacity of nongovernmental organizations, increasing their ability to build civil society. Having helped to establish one of its two predecessor organizations in the early 1980s, he was also an active member of the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation (Washington, DC). In addition, he served for ten years on the board of the Association of Direct Response Fundraising Counsel (Washington, DC), two of those years as board president.

In 2004, Mal received the Hank Rosso Outstanding Fundraising Executive Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Golden Gate Chapter, and Northern California Grantmakers. In 2009, he was granted the Max L. Hart Nonprofit Leadership Award by the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation, in recognition of his lifetime contributions to direct marketing.

Mal chairs the board of GreatNonprofits (based in San Francisco), which is partnering with major institutions to bring the voices of donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries to the forefront in evaluating the impact of nonprofit organizations.

A serial entrepreneur and impact investor, Mal has been active in promoting social and environmental responsibility in the business community nationwide for more than two decades. He is the coauthor of The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers (with Paul Polak), and of Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun (with Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s). Along with Ben Cohen and others, Mal was a cofounder of Business for Social Responsibility in 1992, and he served on its board during its inaugural year. In 2001, after more than a decade as an active member of Social Venture Network, he began a six-year stretch (2001 to 2007) on its board, serving as chair for four of those years and as vice-chair for two.

Mal was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador for more than three years in the 1960s. Since 1969, he has lived in Berkeley, California, where he is deeply involved in local community affairs. In 2006, he was awarded the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Medal by the Berkeley Community Fund as “Berkeley’s most useful citizen,” in recognition of his lifetime contributions to the community.

Mal is the grandfather of Dayna, Iain, Matthew, Gwen, Andrew, Kaleb, and Benjamin.

Introduction:

Why You Should Read This Book

I immodestly recommend that you read this book for a number of reasons:

If you write fundraising appeals for a hospital, a college or university, a museum, a health agency, a human service organization, a public interest advocacy group, or any other nonprofit that needs funds

If you want to write appeals that raise more money for your organization

If you serve in a leadership role in a nonprofit organization as executive director, development director, or marketing director

If you are a member of a nonprofit’s board of directors and you want to assess the effectiveness of your organization’s fundraising appeals

If you’re involved in public relations, advertising, or marketing for a nonprofit organization or institution

If you want to understand better how fundraising works

If you want to understand how combining direct mail and online appeals can help you raise much more money