Category Archives: Fundraising

Your resolution: Tell a better story next time around

Annual appeals, Fundraising, Storytelling

It’s the last day of the giving year.

By now, the results are in from your year-end direct mail letters. You’ve sent out your New Year’s Eve email appeal (you sent it yesterday or today, right? These are the two highest days for online giving in the year).

How are they performing? Do they meet your expectations?

If not, what will you do differently next time?

Change what you can, know what you can’t

There are probably lots of things you can’t change – your executive director, for instance. Or your budget. With education, perseverance and a bit of moxy, you can change some of the seemingly immovable obstacles to good fundraising. Or not. In that case, please refer to the serenity prayer.)

But you can change how you tell your story.

Always go with emotion

Telling a poignant and emotional story will win out over giving your donors statistics hands down, every time.

Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small researches why people make the decisions they do. The research you care about is the decision whether or not a donor responds to your ask.

Here’s what she says in an interview with the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

“The more vivid the story – through narrative or through imagery – the more emotionally arousing. And emotions are what triggers the impetus to help.”

Lose the statistics

Not only do “emotionally arousing” stories inspire donors to help financially, but they are the ONLY thing that truly does. Mix in some statistics and, poof, you lose your impact.

“Showing statistics can actually blunt this emotional response by causing people to think in a more calculative, albeit uncaring, manner,” Small says. Even if you share both the emotional story and the statistics, donations drop.

People give to people

As much as we want to think our donors are rational, logical, intelligent people who think through every decision, they’re not. At least, that’s not what gets them to give.

According to interviews that CCS conducted with more than 6,200 folks, the top three reasons people give are:

  • People are inherently generous
  • People give to people
  • People respond to a meaningful mission

(You can download the full report, the 2013 Snapshot of Today’s Philanthropic Landscape here.)

So next time, tell a story. Tell one person’s story. Your donors will want to help that one person. Because helping that one person, with that one problem, makes the world a better place. It means they’ve made a difference to one person they’ve identified with or felt something for.

But statistics are cool!

Statistics, however, are for the head. They won’t keep you warm on a cold winter’s night. They certainly won’t warm your donors’ hearts.

Statistics overwhelm. They make the project so big, so huge, that it seems insurmountable. Your donors know they can’t save everyone. They can’t make world hunger go away, or provide free health care to everyone in need, or save every kitten from euthanasia.

But they can feed one person, or provide for one life-saving medical test, or help one, soft, furry, innocent feline ball of fluff.

Making a difference

It’s like the story of the starfish stranded on the beach at high tide, dying in the sun. A man walking along the shore begins throwing them back into the ocean, one by one. He knows he can’t throw every starfish back into the ocean, he can’t save all of them.

A friend walking with him points this out to him. Doesn’t it seem pointless to try and save all of them? How can he make a difference?

The man bends down, picks up another starfish and throws it back into the clear, cool ocean water.

He says, “I made a difference to that one.”

Let your donors make a difference. Give them someone to save.

Religious fundraising, is it really that different?

Fundraising

A Facebook friend recently posed this question: Why are so many churches (New Thought centers in this case) having such a hard time raising enough money to keep their doors open?

In every church I’ve attended – Religious Science, Spiritualist, Unity – it certainly seems to be the case.

What’s so different about fundraising for churches than for, say, schools? Our local public school system has a well-oiled fundraising machine in place. My youngest children’s elementary school raises upwards of $140,000 a year from about 320 students.

According to this study more than 45 percent of all charitable contributions in the U.S. are to organized religion. Folks who identify themselves as being religious in nature give six times the amount of money to non-religious organizations than people who say they don’t have a religious orientation.

Clearly people who go to church are generous. So what is it?

It’s better to ask and to receive

In any charity-based organization, you have to ask for donations in order to receive them. And, at church, it’s true we pass the plate (or the basket) at every service. But is that enough? And is it the right way to do it?

Perhaps stewardship and requests for support need to be a larger part of the culture. Not just saying thanks over the offering plate and asking during the offertory. But letting people know the impact that their donations make.

In Seven Ways to Instantly Increase Church Income, Denis Greene, the executive director of the Church Development Foundation, writes, “When a pastor reminds me that I am sitting in a pew that someone before me paid for, in a building that was funded by people I may not have even met, I am humbled and reminded that I can have that kind of impact on those who will follow me.”

Striking the right tone

People who go to New Thought churches have often been burned by religion. My experience shows that they often take requests for money the wrong way – as if the church should somehow exist on its own without their financial support. Perhaps that is just the lost and the lonely coming back to finding their spiritual selves, needing healing in many areas of their lives.

And hearing about stories of healing may be just what they need. Hearing about how lives have been changed, connections made, loves found, hearts healed. Because isn’t that what keeps us going back for more?

Everyone likes a good story

The case for donating to education almost makes itself. We see our innocent, bright-eyed children and can’t accept they could grow up in a school without art or P.E. or enough teachers – and so we open up our pocket books and give generously.

The case for supporting the place that nourishes your spiritual life and growth can be similarly compelling. Without invoking guilt, fear or shame.

Help your congregants tell their stories. During weekly services, on your Facebook page, in your annual appeal letters. Talk about the transformations your teachings have made, the healings that have happened, the friends who have been there in times of need – all the things that wouldn’t be possible without your church or spiritual center being there to bring people together in worship.

When we tell our stories, we connect people to why they’re there in the first place. We connect people to each other and break down the barriers between us. In a spiritual setting, that also opens up the connection with the divine.  And there isn’t a greater or more generous presence than that.

And, if nothing else, there’s always your youth program – educating the next generation of children and giving them a spiritual home. It works for schools, right?