Fundraising Letters – 3 Easy Ways To Increase Your Average Donation

A lot of other writers, when I tell them I worked in the fundraising field, imagine that it must be a constant struggle for organizations to pull in the funding they need. For the most part, that’s pretty close to the truth; many nonprofits struggle to find the money to keep their programs going.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
There are also other clients I work with, groups that continue to meet their fundraising goals month after month, year after year – even in a tough economy. While I could write for days just on the things they do differently than the groups that struggle, the one that stands out most consistently is that they always seem to manage to not only find more donors, but bigger ones as well.
In other words, they get people to open their wallets and checkbooks at a bigger rate, which means they can find the cash other nonprofits can’t. Here are three ways you can raise the average donation you find from your fundraising direct mail campaigns:
Ask for more. This one’s the simplest, but the most important. Money is a big part of our lives, and it carries some very deep emotional and psychological associations. That leads to all kinds of interesting things when it comes to sales, economics, negotiation, and almost every other facet of the business world.
But fundraisers aren’t immune to overthinking money, either. Often, they are limited in what they think they can raise, and so they lower the amounts they ask for. Don’t make this mistake. Give your reader the option of giving more if they have the means and desire. Your organization does great work, and people might be more willing to pitch in than you think.
Be specific. Ironically, it’s tough to raise money to “save the world,” since most of us have developed a fairly cynical view about what’s possible in the short term. Ask readers to kick in a few dollars to instruct a new school in Africa, however, or help injured children in a war zone, and you stand to raise a lot more.
The point is that your fundraising letters should be as specific as possible. Tell people exactly how much you need to raise, as well as what you’re going to use it for. As much as they might love your organization, what they really want is to feel like they’ve made a difference, and seeing a concrete need helps them do that.
Send more targeted letters. In a perfect world, every prospective donor would receive a letter that was tailored to his or her personal situation, tastes, likes and dislikes, experience with your cause, and so on. Of course, that’s just not possible. And so, by way of compromise, the best we can do is target our fundraising materials to highly focused groups and make an appeal that’s likely to speak directly to them.
The more donors feel like a fundraising letter has pushed their “hot buttons,” the more likely they are to give in bigger amounts. But the only way to find those buttons in the first place is by making your message as focused as possible.