🌟 From the Weekly Spark, my weekly email with one useful idea for nonprofit fundraisers. Subscribe here.
Think about the last fundraising letter your team wrote.
Draft one was probably pretty focused.
By draft four, it had been through the program team, your ED, and the one board member who has strong feelings about commas (I am team Oxford comma myself!).
Somewhere along the way, it got crowded.
There’s the family you served in March. The volunteer who’s been with you for ten years. The new program. The building update. A thank-you to the corporate sponsor. Three statistics. And a gift ask with five suggested amounts.
Everyone made it in. Every story, every ask. That’s the problem.
I get it. Ask me to write about CharityEngine, and I want to tell you everything at once. But information overload means your message isn’t getting through.
So the next time you write a fundraising letter or email, make sure it’s based on these three elements:
🌟 One person
Pick a story and stay with it – not a highlight reel, but one person and one real moment, told well enough that your donor can picture it. And note the stories you aren’t including, because those are your January email, your February newsletter, and a few social posts.
🌟 One problem
What did that person need, and what was in the way? Keep it small enough for one donor to help with. “Food insecurity in our county” is too big to fix with a gift. “A mom skipping dinner so her kids could eat” is something a donor can do something about.
🌟 One ask
Tell the donor exactly what you’d like them to do and connect it to that problem. Repeat it in the P.S. and on the reply card or form. And if you offer a monthly option (you know how I feel about that 😉), make it a way to answer the same ask, not a second ask competing with the first.
Here’s a quick test. Print your next letter and circle every person, program, and number in it. If you need more than one hand to count them, it’s crowded.
Your annual report can hold everything you did this year. Your fundraising letter only needs one person.
