How to Get Better Fundraising Results with Steven Screen

Hi everyone, support for this show is brought to you by our friends at Blumirang. Blumirang offers donor management and online fundraising software that helps small to medium nonprofits like First Tea of Greater Akron, a nonprofit that empowers kids and teens through the game of golf. And after just one year with Blumirang, they doubled their unique donors, improved donor stewardship, and raised more funds. Now to listen to the full interview with First Tea of Greater Akron, visit blumirang.com slash non-profit dash nation, blumirang.com slash non-profit dash nation, or click the link in the show notes. Thanks and let's get to the show. Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host Julia Campbell and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact than you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Nonprofit Nation. I am so thrilled that you're joining me today. I am your host Julia Campbell. Today we are going to talk about what to do when your fundraising results fall flat and why this is most likely a result of beliefs about fundraising rather than something tactical that you're doing. And today I have a long way to guess. People have actually asked me, Stephen, when you're going to be on and recommended you several times. Finally, today I have Stephen Screen on the podcast. Stephen is co-founder of the Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog with over 25 years fundraising experience. He gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He's a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the direct mail package of the year, and data driven. Welcome to the podcast, even. Thank you, Julia. It's nice to be here. It's a privilege. We were talking a little bit earlier, and I said I was going to ask you about starting your nonprofit journey and how many of my guests say that it was accidental, and they fell into it. You said you have a little bit of a different story, so I'm excited to hear it. I'm lucky to be a second-generation fundraiser. My dad was a professional fundraiser, so I knew growing up that that was a career. His experience was that in the starting in the late 60s, he was at one of the agencies that helped a whole bunch of organizations go national, using mass media effectively for the first time for branding and awareness, and then direct response fundraising in the mail, in TV, in radio. I grew up knowing that all of those things were possible, and there was a bunch of just really good thinking about fundraising in the water that I grew up in that was born out of sending out millions of pieces of mail and knowing which type worked best, and spending million dollars on TV shows and knowing what types of shows work better than others, what time slots worked better than others. I was very fortunate to be raised in this environment where it's really clear that there was a good rigorous science behind what works best in fundraising, especially in a direct response context. Tons and tons and tons of testing. I love that. Tell me about what you do now, and that you do a lot of direct response marketing and fundraising now as well. Yeah, so better fundraising helps small to medium-sized nonprofits do better direct response fundraising and have better overall fundraising strategy. In terms of majors and grants and fundraising comms, that's what we do. It's all born out of testing for what works best versus what is going to work okay, but not as well, and it's a joy to do. I used to work with the big large national organizations and found that I get a lot more pleasure helping an organization sort of increase by 20% as opposed to being part of a team of seven people helping an organization increase by half a percent. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great to have a percent means an additional 10 million bucks. Awesome. But boy, it's fun to watch the transformation of an organization that goes from raising say 300,000 to a million. That's what excites me about this work. Well, I love that. And I have been a huge fan of your newsletter, the Better Fundraising Company newsletter, which is incredibly inspiring. You send it your blog posts and I almost feel about it. I'm going to give you a very high compliment. I feel about it like I feel about Seth Godin's email newsletter, where I always think of something differently. So it's not just a list of how to's and five ways to tweak your copy. Although there is some of that, but it's a lot of thinking differently and examining what's really holding you back rather than just like here's like the shiny new tech tool. So what I really wanted to talk about today is a particular post that you wrote. I want to really break it down and talk about how small nonprofits can start to make movement in this area. But if the growth of fundraising has flattened, so you are known for writing this effective copy, this wonderful, effective compelling fundraising copy for getting your clients these like dramatic transformational results. But sometimes it's not the copy or the tools. And in this post, you wrote, if the growth of your fundraising has flattened out, it's most likely a result of a belief that's holding you back. So what did you what did you mean by that? Well, first of all, this is this is fine to focus on because yes, you know, three edits to make to your next letter are going to help some people raise some more money with their next letter. But ultimately, I think it's changing how people think about fundraising and helping them know what's possible in fundraising that results in the biggest jumps in performance. It's almost always changing a belief that moves an organization to the next level as opposed to changing a tactic. So all that said, if results are flat, you write definition of insanity doing the same thing again and expecting different results that happens all the time in nonprofits, we sort of don't tend to realize that we were perfectly designed to raise the amount of money we raised last year. And if we want to raise a different amount of money, we're going to have to make meaningful changes to something that we're doing. What are the things that can be changed? And specifically, what I was trying to address in that post was, what are the things that organizations sort of have beliefs around that they can't change that they actually can? Okay, so what kinds of beliefs prevent us from fundraising effectively? Yeah, well, let's see, three or four core ones off the top of my head. We can't be asking our donors for support anymore than we currently are. That's down. They're fatigued. Yeah, the mythical donor fatigue. Number two is, our voice is core to who we are, and we cannot change it. Oh, I love that one. Another one would be that we can't share any needs being faced by our beneficiaries or organization. Another one, I could go deeper, but right, these are the first of me I've talked about head is that complaints are bad. And we have to manage our work so that we don't get any complaints. Oh, so we don't get that one email from our 15,000 person email list that says, I disagree with you. But the other or 10,999 people agree with you. Yeah, or two unsubscribes. Yes. Even 15 unsubscribes. If we manage towards everybody being happy, we are managing words having a smaller impact. Oh my gosh. Yes. So there's four. I think we should unpack these four. I absolutely love these four. Let's unpack donor fatigue. So why do organizations think this way and how can we overcome it? Organizations think this way for a whole stew of reasons. Number one, nobody really likes fundraising. So it's already forcing us to be vulnerable and awkward. So anytime you get bad feedback, and that can be a lot of nose, it can be a lot of nothing's, it can be complaints. Anytime you get bad feedback in a position where you're already vulnerable, you think, Oh, well, I'm doing this too much. Another thing is that most smaller nonprofits are only in touch with a small segment of their audience of their donors, but they've got a larger circle of folks who are outside the core who they're not talking with. And they assume that anybody who says anything in the core speaks for everybody on the outer group. Oh my gosh, so true. And that's just not true. Because in the core, for instance, if I send you four pieces of direct mail over the course of the year and your core, you're going to open all four. But if I if you're not core, you're maybe going to open two. And that's still pretty good. So the core is like, Oh my God, we're sending so much fundraising. But the folks outside the core are like, Oh, I almost never hear from those people. You got to be able to do that. Because our sector has explained it so rapidly in the past 30 years, there hasn't been a lot of great fundraising training. So most people, small organizations have no idea that you can send out 16 appeal letters, 10 printed newsletters and 50 fundraising emails a year and be doing great. They don't think that's even possible yet that's happening every day in the top couple percentage of organizations. And those donors are giving to small organizations too. So you put all that together and people are afraid and they're like, Oh, don't have fatigue, it must be happening. All right. Can I say something that's slightly offensive or provocative? Yes. Well, this can be this could be off putting but saying that it's donor fatigue blames the donors. Whereas you could say, you know what, maybe our fundraising isn't resonating. You could say, gosh, we're not we're not even getting their attention. So by calling it donor fatigue, your organization doesn't have to take any responsibility for its fundraising being ineffective. Preach. Absolutely. And I teach marketing. Same thing. Oh, no one's paying attention. Oh, it's because of all the digital clutter or it's because they have attention spans of a gold fish or it's because it's an election or it's because of whatever, whatever. But how about we shine the spotlight on ourselves and say, maybe what we're doing is ineffective. That's so important. At least you got to look at that as a possibility. I love the second belief. I believe it was something around. We don't want to share needs. We don't want to talk about the real need and share these stories. How can we address this? Well, I mean, that's another set of internal beliefs that lead you to that conclusion. And there are some reasons where there are certain certain needs and certain stories we shouldn't be sharing. But as a rule, I think organizations often sort of take it too far. You could look at their fundraising and not know that anybody is in pain or hurting today. You could not know that there are real problems in the world that need to be solved. And donors as a rule respond to problems. One of my core beliefs is that donors give to make change. And so if you say, we're doing good work, will you give to help us continue our good work? That has said to the donor that no change will happen when you give a gift. Because we're doing it now and we're going to continue it. No change. But if you say donor, there is a big problem in the world today and good people like you are needed to solve it, will you give a gift so that one person will no longer have this problem? Then there has been real meaningful change. And more people are willing to say yes and give you money when you say that their gift will cause real meaningful change. So anyway, that's sort of down in the application of this. But the unwillingness to share needs holds many, many organizations back from raising more money. Wow. And by the way, anyone listening, Stephen and his amazing blogger blogging team, they talk a lot about how to reframe the ask in these kinds of ways, specifically on the blog. I know that I've read this framing the problem and not just simply, we did great work this year, but what is going to happen next year and why is your support still needed? And hey, this is still a problem. I'm like, yeah, we're doing good work, but we still need people like you to invest in this problem. So that's so important. I also love that other belief that you discussed the something about we don't want to change our voice. We want to stay true to our voice. Can you talk more about that? Sure. What I want people to realize is that all of our voices change when our contexts change. The best way I can think of to illustrate this is sort of like if you're writing a TV show, you write knowing that you have the visual on the TV to be helping you tell the story. Then you take that same writer and that writer is writing for a radio program where there is no picture, there is only the theater of the mind. The writer writes differently because she knows that the context that the message is being received in is different. So what we need to do in non-pop it is remember the different contexts that our messages come in. Our message and our voice can be can and should be different at an event where we have someone's undivided attention for an hour and 15 minutes versus a piece of direct mail where I've got someone's attention for maybe five seconds. You don't have time for all of the things that you like in your voice in the context of direct response fundraising. So rather than trying to figure out how to fit your voice into a context, you want to be trying to figure out what does our voice need to be like to succeed in this context. And that is a different question. It gets a different answer and frankly it ends up with more successful fundraising. This is so powerful. So the fourth belief which is something that I feel like I talk about every single day, we don't want to get any complaints. Now I completely can relate to this because if I send out an email newsletter, I'm sure you get this juiced even and I get one person coming. But although I think I've weeded all those people out by now, anyone that's going to be offended by anything that I say, but someone comes back to me and says something really nasty. Like that really rarely happens or just says, this isn't relevant to me. I'm unsubscribing. You know, you think about it and it really affects you because but you're not listening to all of the people that are saying great things or are just being quiet, you know, just kind of being silent and reading what you're saying. So say I'm a small shop fundraiser and my boss or my board is saying, well, we don't want to get those unsubscribes. We don't want to get any complaints. We don't want to offend anybody. We don't want to turn anybody off. What would you what advice would you give to them? It's hard for me to answer that question because like I've been doing this so long and sort of people pay attention to me differently when I go into a board meeting as opposed to a person who's been doing fundraising for two years and doesn't have sort of the experience to back it up. But as a rule, I would say that, okay, organizations, if we are managing to get no complaints and no unsubscribes, we will be creating vanilla communications that aren't particularly memorable or motivating. That is probably going to mean bad things for our fundraising or at least places a cap on how much we can raise from the people who are willing to pay attention to us. Now, let's look at those really big organizations, one in our backyard here is an organization called World Vision. I think they're raising 1.8 billion a year. They have a whole department to handle complaints and donor issues. And they are thrilled to have that department because the part of the human condition is somebody is going to dislike what you say, no matter who you are, what you say, how nice it is. So as you get bigger, you are going to get complaints. You're going to get pushback. These things are going to happen. And so you need to take that as a good sign that you're getting bigger and affecting more people. Nobody gets big and never gets complaints. Lots of people never get complaints and stay small. The way I think about this is sort of the difference between a fee and a fine. A fine is something that you pay when you've done something wrong. You pay a fine after you get a speeding ticket because you've broken the law. But a fee is something that you pay in order to achieve an outcome. I will pay a fee to go into Disneyland. I will pay a fee to get a new computer. And most nonprofits experience complaints as fines. It is internally taken as something wrong. Whereas I want them to take it as a fee that you gladly pay because you are doing fundraising is interesting and motivating and is out there making change as opposed to vanilla. I love that. The fee versus the fine. It's just the cost of doing business if you're making change. It is the cost of doing what we do. And it's also really good to remember that a lot of people's complaints that come in. It's not about the fundraising. The fundraising revealed something in the donor that the donor doesn't like. I don't like that people are homeless today. But the fundraising did not cause that tension. The fundraising just revealed that tension. And if we are going to have a big impact as organizations in the world, we have to be pointing out tension that exists in the world and saying, great people are needed to solve this. And some people's response to that tension is dislike, complaints, leaving your mailing list. But a lot of people's response to that tension is to generously give gifts of time and attention to help your organization have a greater impact. But it's both and you're going to have both. There's no way about it. There's no way around it. Wow. I feel like I need to pick your brain for the small nonprofit that is listening. That's the majority of my listeners. Now, when you said you gave that sample calendar of communications in a previous answer, and I'm sure a lot of people listening were just, they like blew their mind. What was it? 55 email communications, 10 email newsletters and 15 mail appeals, five mail accounts. Yeah, 52 fundraising email, 16 printed appeal letters and 10 printed newsletters. How can we convince the small nonprofits listening to communicate more and ask more often? Let's see. All I think we can do is encourage them to try and make it easy for them to do so. So the encourage to try is that, hey, you're perfectly designed to raise how much you used, you've been raising, try some new stuff. The easiest way to raise more money is to send another appeal, whether it's an email or a stamp mail, that is the easiest, simplest way. We live in a fundraising friendly world and your appeals don't have to be perfect. They don't have to take six weeks to write and design. Your donors know that there are problems in the world and love to help solve them and often times they just need to be reminded. That's the thing number one, is to sort of lower the emotional stakes and say, just try it because any negative consequences that you fear from trying something that doesn't work are usually so tiny and then try to make it easy. For a lot of organizations, I have them for small organizations with super minimal resources, I have them sent take last year's year end letter and send that out again. Don't change anything, just send it out again. And then write another year end letter for this year that's a little shorter and send that too. And so now with the effort of writing one more letter, you've sent two letters and you're going to raise about one and a third as much. So all of a sudden now you've got a year end campaign with two letters, you're raising more money and you didn't have to do any more effort. Okay, that's a good deal. And then to the work less raise more thing that I started, that is designed to make it really, really easy for small nonprofits to end usually an hour or two to create a powerful piece of fundraising. That is the whole reason that product exists. Work less raise more and lower the emotional stakes. I can't tell you how much I love that. And I've worked on several year end campaigns and the amount of edits and the amount of literally tweaking one word and one image and one subject line and one this where there's no real magic formula unless you test it, unless you see what happens, unless you are actively sending out more communications because how else will you know what people are going to respond to. If you're only sending one I've had clients that come to me, they send one newsletter recorder, one email newsletter recorder. And I think if someone deletes that, they don't hear from you for half a year. And then you're wondering why they've forgotten about you. I mean, I know this is hard for small shop organizations, but one of my planning principles is I help organizations create annual plans is to never go dark, just never go dark at least once a month be in front of your donors. And that can seem like a lot. But think of it instead as a generous choice on behalf of your beneficiaries to always be showing up in your donors lives, as opposed to being the friend who shows up every six months and wants the same level of intimacy that you have when you're spending every weekend together. And the same thing is true in our fundraising communications. It's not exactly true, but the principal holds. And that's a very important mindset shift too. For people that think they're bothering their donors, the way you're framing it is generous communication, showing up generously for someone that wants to be involved with you that has raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you. And yeah, you think target doesn't email me all the time because I've raised my hand and said, I want to hear from you. You think that there's other businesses that they don't take advantage of that relationship? But I think for nonprofits, we're so worried about we're just so worried about overplaying our hand that we don't play anything at all. And we end up going dark when we shouldn't go dark. And then all goes back to fears around asking, fears around being vulnerable, and then sort of not doing the math on things like, hey, I know we emailed our donors last week, but actually our open rate is 25%. So we, 75% of our donors did not hear from us last week. People think they post on social media, and they send an email and all of their donors saw it. And then I have to break into them that it's 2% of people on social media side and maybe 25% of your donors actually opened it. So that's a reality. That gets towards the other thing I want small shops to know. And again, this is again advice tuned to help them be more comfortable with not having to feel like, OMG, I have to do so much more work. And that is the biggest loss lesson from marketing to fund raising is the power of repetition. When I used to buy radio ads all over the country, the goal was to have a person hear the same ad three times in a week. And the board never complained when they heard the second ad on Tuesday after hearing it once on Monday. But that happens for some raising all the time in nonprofits. Again, all because of vulnerability and fears around asking too much on that stuff. But a lot of people don't ask until they've seen your message three or four times. So sending it once that's opened by a quarter of your email file, 75% of the people didn't get the message in of those 25. A whole big group of them weren't convinced because you didn't talk to them often enough. So send the same message multiple times, send the same appeal two months in a row. Jeff Brooks is a great story about accidentally sending the same appeal in April that the organization sent in March to print shop, grab the wrong file. And so they sent the exact same letter with no changes had the wrong date on it, right? It had a March date, even though it was being mailed to people. And the letter did better the second time than the first. So to bring the conversation full circle, right? We have all these beliefs about how fundraising work is what we can and can't say what we can and can't do how often we can ask. And if we can take those core beliefs and start to question them, I mean, I can go a little deeper than that if you want. But yes, that's where the big that's where the big growth is. Yes, let's please let's go deeper. Okay, so I use the I'm sure you know, Brene Brown. Yes. Her books are not about fundraising, but they're totally about fundraising. I've always thought that I've always said about vulnerability. That's exactly right. If vulnerable, she says vulnerability is the glue that keeps human relationships together. And so think about that from a point of view of a nonprofit that is never vulnerable, right? The nonprofit is things are going great. Thanks so much for your previous support. We helped so many people. Would you help us continue our good work? There is zero vulnerability there. Nobody needs any help. It's all going great. So there is no glue keeping the donor and the organization together. So when you inject some vulnerability, hey, some of our beneficiaries need help right now actually. Hey, our organization is $30,000 short at the end of this month. Could you help? Works like crazy because there's vulnerability. Now the donor feels needed. Anyway, her whole thing around the stories that we tell ourselves. Have you ever talked about that on the podcast or how to hang out with them? I have not talked about it on the podcast, but I'm very excited too. So I love this. Go ahead. Great. Well, so the way she illustrates the switch, I think is brilliant is she and her husband are at home on a Friday night and her husband goes over to the fridge and opens up the fridge, looks around for a second sort of size, resigningly closes the door and slumps next to the fridge. And she starts to get all fired up. Right? Because it's it's it's pretty. There's going to be a little anger and defensiveness in the in her reaction to this, which was he's disappointed. She's not the kind of wife that keeps the whole fridge. Oh, she hasn't done a good job of getting the milk and stuff and taking care of her husband this week. And so she shares this with her husband and her husband's like, what are you talking about? We decided I was going to the grocery store this week. I drove by it twice. That side that I had was me going, I didn't do it this week. So Renee talks about the story she was telling herself was this one thing. That's when that's when the real story was not at all. And so in nonprofits, the stories that we tell ourselves really affect how we fundraise. And so first, we have to become aware of the stories that we tell ourselves. One is, you know what, if we ask one more time, our donors are going to leave in a thundering herd because don't have fatigue. Or the oh, if we have more than two unsubscribes per email, that means everybody is about to be as opposed to going, hold on, we have 10,000 people on the email list and we can afford to lose to every email for the next 37 years, right? They like they don't do the math. There's there's all this care base. So anyway, figure out what your stories are, find some alternative stories. Hey, maybe we could ask more. There are organizations that send 10 appeals a year. Why are we worried about three? Let's explore that. And then third step is to try the new story out in a low stakes environment and try an email that is vulnerable. Try one conversation with a lapsed major donor. Where are the places where the stakes are low that we can try these new stories and see how they work. Thank you so much, Steven. This has been fantastic. I wish that I could have seen you speak at the storytelling conference. Are you speaking anywhere coming up? I have nothing on the calendar right now, which is sort of like, I'm a little sad, but you know what, that's great. I don't. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. I feel like when I don't have things on the calendar, I get sad, but then I also get happy thinking, oh, I can be home and making a bigger impact doing, you know, writing or doing something else. But I hope that we get to meet in person. I would love to have more of these conversations. I just think they're so important. Where can people connect with you and learn more about working with you? Better fundraising.com. If you go there and you can subscribe to our blog, which we publish almost every Tuesday and Thursday. And then we also have a free resource Friday where we try to give away some resource every Friday. I'm on Twitter at Stephen Screen. And then find me for small organizations, go to worklessraisemore.com. We have a membership program there where for $40 a month, you get access to tons and tons and tons of training. It's video-based training with first drafts already written for you to help you make really helpful customized fundraising for your organization. It's priced so that anybody can do it for a month and take the trainings and make the stuff. And then I do a live Q&A every Friday. So people are able to come up on and ask questions and get good feedback. Those are the main ways, Julia. Okay, I will put all the links in the show notes for everyone. And just thank you so much for being here, for being vulnerable, for sharing all of your wonderful advice. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Stephen. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for doing a great podcast that's inclusive and bringing a lot of voices. I love it. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to. And then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode. But until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell, seven, seven, keep changing the world. You non-profit unicorn. You. . .