by Iga Lebuda
The following article contains basic and easy fundraising tips that will help you create an effective fundraising appeal. It shows best ways to get the readers attention, tell your story and ask for funds.
It is focused on fundraising newsletters but these tips can be used to improve any kind of fundraising appeals, as the article also presents effective ways of thinking about content.
Use stories to present your cause. Give people a good story they can relate to or engage in. However, be careful with what you are talking about. Make sure your story is about ONE - one animal, one person (e.g. investigator). Talking about ONE brings emotional engagement which results in more donations.
The same rule works for pictures - use pictures with one animal. Studies show that using pictures i.e. with two kids instead of one results in a significant drop in number of donations.
People give you money when they are sad. In order to increase the conversion level make sure your fundraising appeal induces negative emotional states.
Negative emotions are unpleasant for people, so they want to get rid of those feelings as fast as they can and feel good about themselves. The way to reduce negative emotional states is to help your cause - donate.
Be careful! Your story can’t be too bad. It has to seem to be solvable in order to make people act and help you. If you make your story too dramatic and induce despair instead of sadness or anger you won’t get desired results. In such case, people won’t see the point in doing anything, they will have the feeling “the evil is tremendous and nothing can be done”.
A story in your newsletter or appeal, should be constructed in a way that makes people want to do something about the presented issue. You have to provide them a solution - an easy and a quick one. Give them only one option which means use only one CTA. Otherwise, they will choose the easiest one (e.g. signing the petition instead of donating) or won’t react at all (if it seems to be too complicated or difficult or if too many options are provided).
If you want people to do something, you have to directly tell them what you want.
Don’t leave space for interpretations. Don’t say “Help us” or “Support our cause” without specifying what it means. People have to know exactly what you want them to do and how they can help. So say “Donate” or “Donate now”.
Once you asked people for money ad sentence “Every penny matters” to your request. It increases the number of donations.
In my opinion it works as it encourages people to donate what they have, what they can afford, even small amounts.