Creative

Remember that you're sending engagement communications to donors. Your most important job is to keep them motivated to donate.

Connecting with your audience is harder than ever. How do you cut through the noise? How do you get donors to donate and supporters to take action? You make your messages relevant. Empathy Maps are powerful tools that help you reframe how you can connect with your audience.

The Empathy Map, developed by information design consultancy EXPLANE, helps you develop a better understanding of the environment, behavior, concerns and aspirations that affect your supporters. This understanding helps shape your communications with them so you can drive them to take the action.

What is it about your organization that sets it apart from all the others? How can you show donors and potential donors that you are unique — even irreplaceable because you are doing something that no one else is doing? If you can’t show why you are different from everyone else, you’re going to have a hard time proving that someone should donate to you instead of another organization that does what seems to be the same thing.

Nancy Schwartz, publisher of Getting Attention, shared "5 Ways to Get Relevant and Get Personal" with donors and supporters in the October 2013 issue of FundRaising Success.

The only grammar rule that matters in fundraising copy is to make your message unambiguous and moving. Communicating information is only part of our goal. We must communicate emotions. Anytime you have to choose between an informational word and an emotional one, don't aim for the head — aim for the heart. That's where the real decisions are made.

After the call to action, the element of a direct-mail piece that matters most for response is the outer envelope. If you want to move the needle in direct-mail response, test changes to the envelope.

Here's something to consider when you're thinking about that envelope: copy and design are not the only elements you can work with. The envelope is a physical object, and you can change the physical properties of it, and that can be a very effective way to improve your fundraising results.

In the July 2008 issue of FundRaising Success, Katya Andresen, then with Network for Good and now CEO at ePals, spoke with Kivi Leroux Miller, president of Nonprofit Marketing Guide, about how to take nonprofit and fundraising newsletters "From Snoring to Soaring."

Here are a few things in fundraising I see that (it seems to me) started out as optimism but are now sliding swiftly down the slope toward stupidity. If you identify with any of them, try to throw yourself in their paths and stop the looming disaster before it’s too late.

What’s the factor that will have more impact on the success of your fundraising campaigns than anything else? It's not your brand. It's not your campaign creative. And it's not your budget either. So, what is it then — this secret ingredient for success?

It’s what marketers call "the audience": the donors and potential donors that contribute from their own pockets to help your charity achieve its mission. Or, putting it another way: People.

I gave a workshop on newsletters. People from Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare in St. Paul, Minn., attended. Their donor newsletter, mailed quarterly to 20,000 people at that point, racked up an annual net loss of $40,000. Was there a better way, they wondered?

Something amazing happened post-workshop: Giving to Gillette's newsletter increased 1,000 percent (not a misprint), after a few changes.

The old way, the foundation received about $5,000 in gifts per issue.

The new way, the foundation received about $50,000 in gifts per issue.