Fundraising is just hard. Not only are you trying to persuade strangers to give you money for almost nothing in return — but you’re asking all that of people who are being asked by dozens of other fundraisers at the…
Long letters work better. But don’t just take it from me. Dr Barnardo wrote a four-page appeal letter in London in the 1880s using classic direct mail techniques: Underlining, urgency, dollar handles, specific ask and a clear reference to what…
Or: How Not to Look Like an Idiot to Your Donors In this blog, I refer to the gift ask chart. You can get your own gift ask chart to download as an excel file. Just click here. What’s worse…
As I was working on some articles about story-telling, copywriting for your website and making your direct mail great I found I had to come back to the absolute fundamentals about why we in charities write anything at all. It…
I have read many a post, article or heard words of wisdom that people who partake in religious activities tend to be slightly more generous than those that don’t. It is hard to get concrete data to back that up in…
…And Build Awesome Relationships With Major Donors I have a little story about Jason Smith, a quiet and unassuming Quebecois guy living in Melbourne, Australia. He works as the fundraising manager at Burnet Institute. The Institute is a charity dedicated…
Bas, a new fundraiser at a Dutch charity decided he needed to get out and meet some donors. He looked at those donors who had given by direct mail since that was most of them. The third donor he…
It is great to see that the techniques we learned in direct mail seem to apply in the digital space too. I reckon that in direct marketing, nothing has actually changed in how the ‘offer’ works. Just we deliver it…
There are lots of good tips on landing pages when you search the web but it seems not enough. Lots of people are wanting specific tips on fundraising landing pages. So here is a six-minute short video for you… …
