queer ideas

Five idea killers and how you beat them

Tom Fishburne, The Marketoonist, has just released a video presentation that looks at some of the problems you might face when trying to turn a great idea into a finished product.

At just over half an hour, the video is a little long, but half of this is a recording of a workshop. The first 30 minutes features the best stuff.

Tom is a great presenter and he includes loads of examples to illustrate his ideas so it's well worth watching. But knowing how busy you are, you'll find the key take aways summarised below.

Watch live streaming video from deutschla at livestream.com

The main focus of the presentation is the impact of criticism. He sees it as an important part of the creative process, but as it is so much easier to be negative than creative, the review process can drive ideas to mediocrity.

And as mediocre ideas often fail, the approval process is constantly 'toughened up' by organisations that want to avoid wasting money.

The result is a process that favours 'safe' ideas rather than great ones.

Which can be very expensive as safe ideas need a significant advertising budget. Something which Robert Stephens describes as the 'tax you pay for unremarkable thinking."

Which leaves us with the five idea killers and how they can be tackled.

Leaving the creativity behind at the brain storm

The best ideas riff off each other. Put the ideas on the wall. Keep on sharing them and allow everyone in the organisation to continue to participate in the process of creation.

Test, test, test and launch big

Get ideas out as quickly as possible and test them in the marketplace. Focus groups are artificial and can only take you so far. Your donors won't ever be able to react if the idea is never put in front of them.

Try to appeal to everyone

You can't afford this. Instead focus on being deeply relevant to a small audience rather than blandly appealing to the many.

Follow the rules of the category

We don't think like customers or donors and tend to package ideas in ways that work for us or our organisation. By focusing on what customers or donors need we answer their problems rather than our own and create more attractive products as a result.

Leave marketing to marketers (or fundraising to fundraisers)

Legal, communications or policy people water down your work because they focus on the key elements in their job description - not yours.

Share your problems and ask them to help develop solutions with you. I've seen this in action and it really does help reduce the conflict between departments.

And if after that, you still struggle, you could always come along to SOFII's celebration of 22 of the best ideas in fundraising, I wish I'd thought of that, and steal one.

The event is in London on Thursday the 31st of May at 1pm. Hopefully I'll see you there. I'll be the one standing at the back furiously scribbling down ideas in a notebook.

How to judge a fundraising letter

One of the many great things on SOFII is Jerry Huntsinger's series of fundraising tutorials.

Jerry started writing fundraising letters in 1962 and over the years has probably written more of them than most people you could think of.

Every single one his tutorials can improve your fundraising, but number 30, might be particularly useful if you work for an organisation that struggles with the approval process, where deadlines slip and costs mount as growing numbers of your colleagues tweak, adjust and re-write copy in an effort to 'improve' your appeals.

Jerry has eight suggestions on how you can improve the process. You can read the complete version on SOFII, but here's a synopsis...

Give yourself some positive reinforcement

Remember, your donors actually like you and value your work. Supporting you makes them feel good. Why deny them that feeling?

Get your mind off the complaint letter that you received this morning

If you are angry when you read a letter, you are going to be on the defensive. The result is that you'll overlook what it should be doing in order to raise most money.

Don't try to edit the letter so it 'sounds like you'

If you write business letters and use jargon you'll come over as 'cold and sterile'. Donors want you to be warm, caring and positive. Let your writer use that style of language.

Trust your writer's technical expertise

If your writer uses short paragraphs, starts sentences with And or But, uses non-technical language and adds human anecdotes you should relax. They know how to raise money, so trust them.

Make sure your writer opens the letter with a strong beginning

The opening of the letter should be dramatic, emotional or personal. If you feel the opening could be stronger, don't comment any more. Send it back. A small change in an opening can have a huge impact on the entire flow of the piece.

Don't get hung up on the length of the letter

Some should be short, some should be long. Though people who really care about your work can't seem to get enough information (as long as it is interesting, accessible and relevant) sometimes a short letter can do particularly well. I've seen some very short reactivation letters that have achieved great results.

Be sure the letter asks for a specific donation amount

What you ask for will vary according to the donor's previous gifts and the work that you feature, but unless you tell the donor what you want, you leave them guessing and those guesses can often be well below what they can afford.

Don't pass the letter around the office for further approval, unless it is absolutely necessary

Keep the number of people who approve the letter to a minimum. And make sure that the people who do approve it are trained in the basics of editing a fundraising letter.

All others should only be allowed to change inaccuracies.

I'd add a few additional tips to Jerry's...

The first time you read it, hold the letter and nothing else

If you start making comments immediately, you are likely to miss the overall impact of the piece and might find yourself forcing 'important' matters into the opening parts of the letter when they are covered off later - this can really destroy the flow. So put down the pen and concentrate on the emotional impact of what you are reading.

Does the letter concentrate on telling the donor what they have done  – not what your charity is doing?

You should say you or your far more often than you say we.

Read the letter in a minimum of 16 point

I was given this advice years ago by a newspaper proof-reader. It really does help you spot typos, mistakes and poor phrasing.

The oldest fundraising letter in the world

I've just got back from the International Fundraising Conference in Amsterdam. I'd been invited to speak about direct marketing and seeing as it was their 30th anniversary, I decided to look at what fundraisers were doing back in 1981 for some source material.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a real interest in the history of fundraising, as I think that our predecessors could teach us a huge amount about creating great appeals.

As part of my research, I was digging around newspaper archives and the further back in time I went, the more excited I became. I found some really great stuff. I'd soon left the eighties behind and was happily digging through mind-blowing fundraising press ads from as far back as the early 1900s.

I started wishing that charities were as good at archiving as newspaper publishers, as I'd have loved to seen the direct mail produced at the time.

Unfortunately, few organisations have archives that go back more than a decade or two. The YMCA has a pretty good one and I've posted a fundraising letter that Newcastle YMCA wrote in the 1880s but I really wanted to find out if there were any earlier examples of fundraising letters in existence.

So the search continued.

And a little later I found a letter that was written shortly before 1880.

645 years earlier!

The letter in question is on SOFII, the online showcase of some of the best examples of fundraising used anywhere in the world, ever. It was submitted by Mal Warwick.

It was written in 1235 by Eihei Dogen, A Buddhist sage who was looking for funds to build a training monastery. They had already bought the land and needed funds for construction...

"We urgently need a monk's hall right now. We will set up long platforms to reside on, where we will practice day and night without fail."

But as well as asking for funds, the letter demonstrated that almost eight hundred years ago, they knew that fundraising was about more than just asking for help...

"We will acknowledge gifts by installing the donors' names in the centre of the sacred image. The myriad syllables of the seed wisdom will honour the donors and everyone."

Not bad for 1235. And it makes me think that rather than expending so much effort on innovation, perhaps a few hours spent studying tried and tested ideas on SOFII could be a much better use of your time.

You can read the letter and find out more about the appeal by visiting SOFII here.

And If you'd like to see the rest of the materials I found, I'll be posting my presentation on line as soon as I get the time to record a voiceover.

Fundraising 1880s style

Another treat from the archives from Gary Shearin at the YMCA.

This time it's an appeal letter from the 1880's and It's a cracker. The goal is the construction of a new YMCA in Newcastle-on-Tyne.

In effect, it's a very early version of face to face recruitment with a fundraising target of £5 (which is the equivalent of requesting £450 today).

The letter asks the fundraiser to visit a selection of identified prospects along with all their relatives and friends.

They are asked to collect the victorian equivalent of the direct debit - an annual subscription – of at least 5 shillings (25 pence). The advice is that those people who give a single donation are most likely to agree to a regular gift.

To help, they are given a purse to hold the money they collect (which could possibly fall foul of the current IOF codes of fundraising practice!) with the promise that this will be placed on the building's memorial stone to be laid by the Attorney General.

Finally the letter gives a nod to donor needs, pointing out the YMCA will be available for their and their children's use (only the the male ones at that time, unfortunately) before giving an endorsement from the bible.

It's interesting to note that the letter avoids the unnecessary detail that makes so many of today's fundraising materials so turgid. Though I'd probably like a little more on what exactly the fundraiser will be achieving by getting involved.

For good measure, the letter is signed by three upstanding members of the local community.

The result was this fine building.

The rest of Gary's discoveries, will be making their way to SOFII. I'll make sure I let you know when they are up.

And finally, the all-important purse.

How to create a great donation form

The donation form is the last great wilderness in the world of fundraising.

Too often it has been seen as an administrative document that serves little purpose other than ensuring a gift can be added to a database record and thank you letter dispatched with as little work or thought as possible.

That's a mistake.

In that simple DL, A5 or A4 piece of paper lies a great untapped resource that can be used to increase gifts and bring a donor far closer to your charity.

It has always surprised me that the response device receives so little attention, particularly as it is the main interface between the donor and the charity. Of all the components that go into an appeal, this is the only one that someone has to interact with – whether it is ticking boxes, filling in personal details or adding a signature, the humble donation form gets some real donor attention lavished on it.

Sometimes, it is the only part of an appeal that actually gets read.

I remember a friend's mother telling me that she would carefully open envelopes from one animal welfare charity, pull out the donation form and response envelope and discard the rest unread. This was because she found the appeals "too upsetting". The charity was always guaranteed to get a gift. She didn't need any details of particular projects or specific prompts. She trusted the charity and knew the donation form would sum up what they wanted her to do.

And this is the important point.

When a donor finishes reading your appeal and picks up their pen to write you a cheque, they might have decided to help, but haven't necessarily decided how much to give.

Your donation form should sum up just why you need help and what you are asking for. It's an opportunity to make the case for the highest gift you think is appropriate.

So as well as including...

• The donor's name and address (with a space to amend if details are wrong)
• The response address and charity number
• Payment details (who the cheque should be made payable to and decent sized credit card boxes)
• Gift Aid declaration

...it should also include a set of justified prompts for a suggested gift.

I'm a great fan of asking people to give what you need (obviously within an achievable range). A pack created around one central idea with a fixed price is a probably the best route to increase response rates and average gift (there's a great example of a very single-minded donation form here).

But if you aren't so lucky to have a single minded offer, a simple approach that always works is to suggest two gifts. The first should match the previous highest or modal gift (test) and the second should be 25% higher.

Using colour, bolding the font or even circling the amount can help you get the gift you are looking for.

And you should always include an open ask box that allows the donor to contribute the amount that works for them. But rather than just writing other next to it, try using inclusive language. Bernard Ross pointed out this test, where the words Surprise us were used instead. It generated an uplift of 15 to 20% to average gift with response rates staying the same.

The other idea that I'd suggest you test is including a very high value offer. Years ago, when I ran the DM programme at YMCA England, we had a high value donor club called the Fellowship of Patrons. There were no real benefits offered to members apart from the fact that subsequent appeals and feedback were always highly personalised. The minimum value gift for membership was £700.

We simply added an extra tick box with a small description of the Fellowship to the donation form of our recruitment mailings. As a direct result, we would receive a handful of £700 donations every time it went out. This file formed the basis of our high value donor programme that generated many hundreds of thousands of pounds for the YMCA each year.

But there's more...

Donation forms can do far more than simply bring in money. A few well chosen questions can set the tone for the relationship between your charity and the donor for years ahead. One of the best examples of this is provided by Camphill, a charity that works with people with learning difficulties.

Rather than simply look at the donation form as a response device, Camphill used the reverse of their form to empower and involve the donor by offering choice. Headed, Let the Camphill Family help you, it gave donors the chance to opt out of future newsletter and appeal mailings (click on the form to enlarge).

Heresy I hear you exclaim! Surely if we gave donors the chance to not receive appeals, they would grab it with both hands. Our supporter file would be gone overnight.

It just isn't true.

As you'll see on Sofii (registration required but really worth it), Camphill gets great responses to their appeals and newsletters, with an average response rate of 31%. The Christmas only segment regularly generates 50% and the information only cell (who don't receive a response device or reply envelope) consistently perform at 14%. That's higher than many charities achieve from their warm file.

There's a piece from the Wise Marketer (registration required) that has more details on their Christmas 2001 mailing that generated over £1,000,000 from just 78,000 supporters. 

And Damian O'Broin from Irish Fundraising agency, Ask Direct recently posted some results of a mailing for The Irish Hospice Foundation. They used a donation form that offered donors the chance to cancel their direct debits.

Four of them took the opportunity to do so.

And 400 chose to increase their gift, dramatically increasing the charities income.

You can read more about the campaign and see their donation form on Damian's blog.

The approach of Camphill and The Irish Hospice Foundation might sound counter-intuitive, but by remembering that donors give to us because they want to, we can improve our results and increase our income.

We can waste a fortune mailing donors that no longer want to support us. By asking them what they want to do we achieve two important goals...

We reduce waste and, most importantly, we offer donors a different type of relationship – one where their needs are taken into account. By doing so, we remove guesswork from our planning process. And rather than wondering what our donors want to receive, we'll actually know.

If we respond, it seems we'll be well rewarded.

Update: I'd like to highlight a comment from Craig Linton at Fundraising Detective. This is well worth doing...

"Another good tip for a donation form is a space for donors to write in any thoughts, ideas or feedback. You need to be careful with this as there is no point doing it if you ignore what is written, but if you respond appropriately it can be really powerful."

Another lesson from history

I've just come across another ad that shows us how to do it.

Produced by Dr. Barnardo's Homes (or simply Barnardo's as they are now) in 1931, it has a huge amount that today's fundraisers could learn from.

It shows a single child who was "once destitute". 

The picture of a healthy looking boy is great. It might be better if there was more direct eye contact, but it – along with the claim that "Barnardo's are making a man of him!" – powerfully demonstrates success. The emotion in the face overcomes the need to show graphic poverty.

The image is supported by three simple statistics:

108,500 children admitted – showing experience and expertise.

8,000 children being supported – showing need.

5 come in daily – If the preceding numbers could induce feelings of helplessness, this helps overcome them by presenting a number of children that can be comprehended and helped.

Finally, a great call to action:

10/- will feed one child for ten days.

I'd have used a coupon, but in 1931 those donations probably arrived accompanied by a carefully written letter with contact details included.

Even the instructions for the cheque lends to the power of the appeal. It needs to be written to "Dr. Barnardo's Homes Food Fund". There is the basis of a product in that name alone. I'd love to know how it was followed up. I wish some of these old fundraisers wrote their autobiographies. They would make fascinating reading.

The ad is beautifully focussed. It benefits enormously by not being cluttered with descriptions of wider work, mandatory copy statements or disclaimers. It is however powerfully branded.

If you are interested in seeing other examples of great fundraising ideas from history you could have a look here or here or, even better, take a trip to sofii.org. You'll find loads of amazing ideas. if you are a fundraiser it really is required reading. 

Note – 10/- or 50 pence was a huge amount of money in 1931 - it was the equivalent to a widow's pension or almost two days pay for an agricultural worker.