Bring Back That Loving Feeling

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about declining results for direct mail and flagging e-mail open rates. Our outreach apparently is not sparking the passionate responses we want.

Don’t our donors and prospects love us anymore? Why don’t they take our calls?

If this is starting to sound like an “advice for the lovelorn” column, then that’s appropriate. As fundraisers, we’ve got a lot of the same problems as the people writing Dear Abby. And I think our response-rate heartache is based in the root causes that the advice columnists so often cite. Really. The relationship we have with our donors and prospects is not transactional; it’s deeply human. When it goes wrong, it’s for the same fundamental reasons we might find strain our other relationships, like taking someone for granted, not listening to his or her perspective, and neglecting to show our feelings.