It’s time for the year-end annual appeal to go out. Things are looking good—you know exactly what you’re raising money for, you’ve got your list segments sorted out, and you’ve interviewed the letter signers and written your best appeal letter yet.
It tells a story, it’s emotional, the P.S. has impact. This is the year the appeal is going to rock it!
Time to get the stamp of approval
And then you show it to your letter signers. And it comes back with edits. The story hit too close to home for them. It reveals too much about them. What will their friends think?
The emotion is gone. It’s a dry and lifeless husk compared to what it was. What now?
Emotion is everything
You know that, in fundraising, emotion is everything. If an appeal doesn’t move the heart, it won’t move the wallet (to open up for your worthy organization).
But your letter signers are a big deal at your non-profit. They’re your board chair, or major donor, or head of an important committee. You don’t want to piss them off. But you want your letter to bring in gifts—not just for you, so you can show the world and your boss what an awesome fundraiser you are, but for your organization, so it can fulfil its mission of doing good in the world.
So now what?
Remember this important rule: people give to people. They respond to emotion.
Take these steps
Pick up the phone and call your letter signer. Apologize for not better setting expectations at the beginning of this process (you’ll set better expectation next time, right?).
Tell them what impact their story had on you. Connect with their emotion about why they are involved in the organization.
Help them understand that it’s OK to be vulnerable. That’s why you’re there, isn’t it? To help the vulnerable, the week, the underserved, those in need of help, folks or animals or ecosystems unable to take care of things themselves?
Explain, as best you can, that emotion is what sells in fundraising. Annual appeal letters are a tried and very well tested method of raising money. Their format, spacing, P.S. (you have a P.S., right?), underlining—all of it—is used simply because it works. The emotional story is part of that. We don’t do it because we like it, we do it because it works.
Tell them why you’re involved in the organization. What’s your emotional connection to the place and its mission?
This step is hard.
Connecting through vulnerability
When I worked at a large health care non-profit, I ran the marketing communications for our annual employee campaign. It raised money for local health care agencies in the community that the organization partnered with.
We relied largely on stories from the patients who had been helped by those agencies to explain the importance of employees giving their hard earned dollars away.
My mum was one of those patients. And this is the story I told a room full of managers and leaders at the health care non-profit.
Colette’s story
Colette was 64 and unemployed, laid-off from her job as a kitchen designer. She took care of my kids after school so I could work. She was a bright, well-educated member of society. But she had no health insurance.
In the spring she thought she’d come down with a cold that didn’t go away. She finally went to see her doctor at a free clinic. Her doctor ordered a chest x-ray to check for pneumonia. Then she ordered an abdominal ultrasound and blood work.
My mum had advanced liver cancer that had spread throughout her lungs. I sat with her as her doctor told her she had 3-6 months to live.
Three weeks later, the Hospice nurses visited for the last time. My mother had passed into spirit.
Because of the donations to that non-profit clinic, we knew what was happening with my mum’s health. Without it, we would have watched her quickly get sicker and sicker, ending up in the Emergency Department late one night out of desperation and in fear.
My brother would have received a shocked phone call, at home in France, to learn his mother had died. Instead, she passed peacefully in my home, with her children at her side.
Opening hearts opens wallets
That was a hard story for me to tell—now as much as then. But when I stood in front of a room full of my peers and shared it, all I received was compassion, understanding, and lots of donations to the clinic that helped my mum (Volunteers in Medicine, should you want to help them out).
And everyone in the room—and the whole non-profit as I also told the story by email—knew where I stood in terms of the importance of the campaign and my connection to our mission as an organization.
Sometimes people just need to be reminded why there in it.
And, if that just doesn’t work out and you’re stuck with your letter, edits and all, there’s always next time. The good thing about annual appeals it that just keep coming around again!