Do you use sales funnels in your fundraising?

I asked a prospective nonprofit client that question.  She replied "what's that?"

In its simplest traditional business sense a sales funnel is a parameter for identifying the customer or target market that is most likely to be interested in what you are selling.

The value of using it is that it produces more sales for less initial investment in marketing.

Here's an example of what happens when you waste time and money on a campaign that doesn't adequately define a market.

Bill, a very well-to-do businessman, was approached by a nonprofit as a part of their major donor development after he was mentioned in an article as being interested in helping to provide food for needy people in his town.

The nonprofit's mission was to send food to starving people in Africa.

He responded politely to the letter by indicating that he had no interest whatsoever in feeding people in Africa while children, the disabled and the elderly in the United States are going hungry every night.

That should have been the end of it. They tried, he refused, end of story.

Instead he began to get letters and even phone calls asking for his support. After a year or so of that, he hopped on his jet, went to their headquarters and deposited a stack of mail and phone messages on the receptionists desk, with a not-so-polite note to take him off their mailing and call lists or face the consequences.

The problem was that the nonprofit qualified him simply because he was, well, rich and had an interest in feeding the needy.

All that did was to cost them a lot of money and time and made an enemy out of him.

The sales funnel, i.e. their parameters for qualifying major donors for further development was both overly broad and poorly maintained.

It doesn't matter if you are selling cars or a mission proposal…it behooves you to target your efforts to people who are likely to buy what you are selling.

In general, if you are sending out general appeals, monitoring your response ratio for both quality AND quantity and distilling your mailing list or media campaigns down to the essentials will serve you far better than just buying a mailing list. It also helps if your staff takes the time to really read any personal responses they get.

Cross referencing the donations against your contact or mailing lists can save you a lot of money and time, not to mention improving your response ratio from the customary 1 to 3% up to 20% or more.

Grant Reporting

Being awarded a grant is not the end of the line for your grant department.

Nearly all major grantors require some form of grant report or funding accountability statement.

Some are primarily narrative-based, while others require some form of  formal financial statement or utilize a grantor-provided spreadsheet in an Excel-based  format.

There is no one-size-fits-all template. Each grantor usually has their own preferred format.

If one is provided or guidelines given via a website or upon request, I like to download or obtain the information at the same time I research the grant application. That way I can be sure that any budget or information categories will correspond to the grantor requirements from the start. Occasionally the report also gives insight into what areas are of particular importance to the grantor.

In general, the larger the grant, the more complex the reporting becomes. Very large, collaborative or multi-year grants may require interim reports  at either quarterly, semi-annual or annual  intervals.

In addition to the obvious need to prove to your funding partners that you are spending the money as required by the terms of the grant, these reports also provide a snapshot in time of your progress for your Board of Directors.

In general, grant reports might require you to restate your organizations legal description, i.e. your EIN, address, responsible party or parties, date of determination and occasionally even a copy of your financial statements for the year immediately prior to and during the grant period. Some reports will require you to attest that you are still in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service.

If requested you will have to  include any identifying information for the grant, such as its CFDA number or grantor specific-identification (similar to a case number).

It is important that your report reflects alignment with the programs that were funded. If you submitted a line-item budget, the report should reference back to that budget. If the grantor placed restrictions on the amounts used for administrative or capital expenditures, they will want to see that you adhered to those restrictions.

In the case of very small grants from local agencies or private foundations, they may not require anything more than an acknowledgment that you actually received the funds. Still, it never hurts to include a short thank you letter or memo acknowledging the uses of and benefits received from the funding.

Holiday fundraising – Planning ahead

Many nonprofit organizations are looking at the end of the year, particularly in terms of revenue raised. Those that met or exceeded their goal have one thing in common – they thought ahead.

Every year about this time the internet blossoms with ads seeking help to "design a holiday appeal" or "boost our end-of-year giving campaign".

If you've waited until now to think about holiday revenue, you are about six months late.

In terms of grants, most foundations have already closed their application window for the year. While it is true that many grantors disburse a lot of their funding at year's end, they already know who is going to receive it.

In terms of local funding and many of the traditional campaigns such as Giving Tuesday (which occurs  December 2 this year) the participants have already been selected and the advertising, web pages, emails and even snail mail reminders have been delivered.

At best, your choices are social media blasts, and at this point that can throw you into competition with a maelstrom of carefully planned campaigns, many of them coordinated with big-budget marketing strategies.

Social media usually succeeds best with a broader, well-defined base of followers, so if your pages are mainly being visited by a few friends and relatives, social media may not immediately provide the oomph you need for serious fundraising.

One of the things that many organizations fail to account for is other people's budgeting.

Whether it is a huge foundation or your next-door neighbor, most available funding has already been allocated.

There is and will always be a certain type of last-minute donor, just as there are last-minute shoppers, but these tend to be one-time gifts.

Your goal is, or should be building  sustainable donor relationships well in advance of seasonal campaigns.

Seasonal campaigns rely on traditional marketing tactics. Building your contact lists, developing your media kits, lining up success stores or examples of need and tracking your appeal success rate all require implementing a cohesive plan with clearly defined steps and goals.

Any holiday fundraising is likely to  produce some revenue.  If you come up short of your goals, it might be a good time to consider preparing for the spring grant season, and begin developing next year's holiday campaign plans now by broadening your contact list and seeking out partners to help you expand your prospective donor base. 

Do you understand donor retention?

It's funny how blogs work. You post something, people read it that day, and you think OK, that's nice, a bunch of people apparently got something useful from this.

Then out of the blue several weeks or months later you get a comment or email about a post that you had sort of forgotten about.

 So it is with my blog post of April 28, "Marketing Your Mission".

Apparently "Tom" took issue with it. "This is the most stupid thing I've ever read" would tend to indicate that Tom doesn't find the use of the word "marketing" to be congruent with "nonprofit mission".

According to Tom, mission is all about emotional engagement. All that other stuff about being a good "investment" for the donor doesn't matter. People just "know" that you will use their money well, because after all, you're a charity.

In Tom's defense, the emotional characteristic is what drives donors to investigate your charity further. It is the thing that defines the need to give that they want to fill. At some level, they have an interest in helping something or someone. Maybe they Google "animal rescues" or "battered women's shelters" or whatever.

At that point they get thousands, if not millions of returns. So then they add their state or county or town to the search terms, and they get a few to a few dozen more specific returns.

That's still a lot, and it's unlikely they are going to send a check or donate online to all of them. There has to be some way to decide which one to support.

At that point they are probably going to be looking for a website or social media page. Who are you, and what are you all about? What real impact or change are you accomplishing?

That process is exactly the same as it is for someone looking for a product. You want to buy a used car so you search "used cars". At that point you may not know if you want a Chevrolet, or Ford or Toyota or whatever. You get a list of used car dealers that are within your search zone, and then you check to see if they have a website and look at what's for sale. There are dozens of bright, shiny cars that fit your basic criteria to pick from on each site. You don't want to visit, much less drive all of them, so you start looking for a way to zero in on just a few.

What happens next?  Well, I don't know about you, but I start looking for the dealer that is going to give me the best value for my dollar. Is their price lower, do they give you a free gas card if you test drive their car, or do they offer a free oil change for a year? I also look at the general premises if they have a picture of their lot or showroom. Does it look clean, organized and at least somewhat permanent?  Have they been in town for a while? Do they have good online reviews?

In short, why should I  pick one car lot over all the rest?

Why would a donor be any different?  There are lots of charities that all focus on the same problem. Their "bright shiny cars" are the stories they tell about who or what they have helped, and 90% of them are going to have good stories, because they really try to do good work.

At that point, two things happen. Maybe one story connects emotionally with the donor more than others, and they just hit the donate button. Those are the "impulse donors". They drop a few bucks and promptly forget about it. Those are "Tom's" donors.

Other visitors do some digging to see how many people have been helped in total and investigate  how much money it takes to help them in a significant way. These can be your long-term supporters.

The latter are probably the people with more money to donate. Nobody misses a single $5 donation even if it is misspent or the charity goes out of business, but if they want to spend $1000 or $10,000 dollars or more, they are going to look under the hood of that bright shiny car. Or maybe they can't afford that much, but they want to send a small donation every payday. They are looking for a connection, not a moment of satisfaction.

And that's where the marketing mindset comes in. The sooner you step out in front and say "We helped change the lives of 100 people for a day at a cost per person of just $10.00/day" the easier it is for the donor to see that $1000 will help one person for more than three months, or all 100 for a day.

Contrast that with the group that says, "You can help more people like Jane. Please give generously". How many more people? What do they really need to help another Jane?  Exactly what is a generous donation? They don't say.

Yes, it does reduce the giving to a dollars-and-cents equation. And yes, the emotional appeal was the catalyst between the donors desire to give and solving your money problem. But the donation was assured by the concrete statement showing the value delivered for the donation. It gives the donor a reason to select your charity to support at a much higher level than just an impulse donation.

Of course, you have to continue to connect with that donor to retain their interest. Maybe through a website, a blog, a newsletter or just by keeping fresh stories on your social media page. But first you have to cultivate the desire for an ongoing relationship.

In the retail world, they call that building brand loyalty. In the nonprofit world, it's donor retention. Whatever you call it, it is all a form of marketing. With all due respect to "Tom" I think you ignore that at your peril.

Need help with your messaging?  Check out my website at http://www.cloudlancerwriting.com

Why should your nonprofit have a blog?

I look at a lot of nonprofit websites, Facebook pages and other online communication mediums while working on messaging or developing a grant narrative for clients. About half of them have a blog. After reading them, I sometimes wonder if they truly understand their audience, or the purpose of the blog

.

Business-related blogs today are not about posting a note about an up-coming event or a notice of a sale. There are too many short-form ways to communicate to use a blog for that reason.

Blogs today are a way to provide a way to keep customers or in the case of nonprofits, donors and supporters, interested in supporting your organization and recruit new supporters.

To do that you need to provide something that takes more than three seconds to read, and while there is an SEO (search engine optimization) element, good blogs are more than that.

    

Savvy for-profit businesses know that a good blog engages, educates and informs as well as selling something. The blog should integrate with another facet of the business.

For instance, a business selling safety equipment for homes might link to their blog from their product description page like this:

"Item Description: Home fire alarm. Do you know how long you have to escape a residential  fire?  Check out our blog(link here) to see how long you can safely stay in your house when a fire starts."

The blog post then goes into detail about how long you can safely stay in a burning room, why and how to escape and offers a link back to the product ordering page.

The blog post does two things. First it provides factual information that makes the purchase of the item they are selling seem imperative.  Second, it keeps the business name connected to the customer in a very personal way.

Nonprofit blogs usually don't seem to be written for the right reasons or the right audience.

I recently checked out a nonprofit blog for an organization that provides a type of monetary assistance for medical needs. The last few posts were all about how this or that legislation affected this organization, and it contained a lot of industry jargon and acronyms that only a health care-savvy insider would understand. Yet, on their SM page they were complaining that they were having trouble getting their message out. Other than the URL, the nonprofit name, mission and  program title wasn't mentioned in the blog.

The audience I would think they would be interested in is one that can use their help or support their mission, but they seemed to be writing to effect some sort of political change at best, or just complaining to the world in general at worst.

Perhaps a more useful approach would be to engage donors by explaining how their support could provide X dollars for Y medicines or medical devices.  Or, they could engage their potential beneficiaries by offering information on support groups that they work with to reduce medical costs, or show how much their help had increased access to care or equipment. Even better, they could have done the occasional in-depth feature post about a person they had helped.

The point is, there was no reason for someone to engage with them vs.some other nonprofit.

If I was a donor looking for background on them, I might worry that my contribution would be used to lobby for something, or that the organization was about to go under because of the legislative pitfalls they described. That's not a good message to send.

Good blogs bring good results. Think about what outcome you want your blog to have, and write it for the right audience. Don't assume that they know all about you. Offer them some reason to remember you, and to connect with you regularly.

 Don't be afraid to have some length to the posting if the topic warrants it. Most of the blog posts I write for clients are from 350 to 800 words.  If you'd like a free review of your blog, send me an email.  Let's make your blog a truly effective outreach medium.