Although many people find it anxiety‐provoking to ask someone for money in person for reasons we discussed earlier, there is one important way in which asking one person for money is much easier than any other strategy: all you have to do is ascertain whether that one person is interested in your cause, and find out (usually by your knowledge of that person or by asking questions) what that person would need to know in order to consider making a gift. This approach is far different from trying to ascertain whether hundreds or even thousands of people are interested in your cause and then what a decent percentage of them might respond to. But because it is unwieldy and unrealistic to build an organization one donor conversation at a time, sending the same appeal to hundreds or thousands of people at once is something we need to do to augment more personal solicitation. Fortunately, there is a science to mass appeals and there are a variety of ways to appeal to many people at once.

First, keep in mind that the response rate from direct mail, email, social media, texting, and even phoning is very low. The response to direct mail and email appeals hovers around .05–1% when appealing to new donors, and between 5–15% when appealing to donors who have given before. Using these two strategies together, however, can boost response to a much more respectable 2–5% for new donors and 10–25% for people who have given before. Because more than 80% of texts are opened, text appeals can have high response rates, but the message has to be easy to read quickly and it must be easy for the donor to give—both of which are not that easy to set up. Direct mail has a lower response rate, but the letter tends to stay around for one or two weeks before being recycled, giving people more than one chance to decide to give.

The simple truth is this: most people who give once do not give again. On average, the number of people who gave for the first time in one year and made a second gift either the same year or the following year (“new donor” retention rate) hovers around 20%. An overall donor retention rate expresses the proportion of all your donors who have contributed in a given year and who give again in the subsequent year. That rate averages about 45–50% of donors, which is a large decline from the 65% standard of 10 years ago. So, although the initial response to a mass appeal can be expected to be low, you can expect to convert about one‐quarter of those donors to be second‐time givers; of those givers, you can expect more than half to give during a second year. These further gifts depend on your treating your donors right.

More than any other strategies, mass appeals demonstrate that you must be willing to get into fundraising all the way to make it work. If you send an appeal that attracts some donors but then don't communicate with them regularly, all the money and time you spent attracting them is wasted. Your focus needs to be on retention and upgrading, which is where you will see a financial return on your investment.

But to retain, you must first acquire.

People new to fundraising often find these response rates demoralizing. But acquiring and keeping donors is a numbers game that will ultimately play out in your favor. If you keep in mind some principles from the field of marketing, you will create a strategy that is built, in part, on repetition of the message and on appealing to as many people as you can manage. We know from marketing research that a person needs to see the name of a product at least three times before they will buy it. But being exposed to a product and actually “seeing” it are not the same. There is a marketing principle that says people must be exposed to the name of a product at least 20 times for sellers to be confident their intended audience has actually “seen” it—that they have actually allowed it into their brains and can recognize it.

As discussed in the previous chapter, a compelling and consistent message, delivered in a variety of ways over many channels, is the only way your organization is going to get on the radar of a potential donor. Unless you are affiliated with an organization whose name is well known, you have a high bar to reach just to be considered. Experienced fundraisers see a challenge in the truism that most people, when invited to give to your organization, are going to decline, so they are eager to promote the mission of their organization as widely as possible to make it more readily recognized and to ensure that the number of people who respond is high enough to raise the money they need.

To do that, keep in mind three things that are common to successful appeals to large numbers of people: a good list, an understanding of the psychology of an appeal, and an evaluation of results (which are then used to improve future appeals).

A GOOD LIST

Whether you are using email, direct mail, texting, or phoning, the key to success will be the quality of your list. There are three kinds of lists, with the highly technical names of HOT, WARM, and COLD. They describe the likelihood of people on that list making a donation.

UNDERSTANDING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AN APPEAL

Although direct mail, email, website, and social media appeals vary a great deal in style, length, use of pictures or text, and a variety of other details, they are all designed around three important truths: people have short attention spans, they love to read about themselves, and they respond to stories.

TEST AND EVALUATE

Evaluation is essential to producing more and more successful appeals, so keep track of your appeals: How many did you send, how many people responded, what amount of money did you raise, and what was the ratio between dollars spent and dollars raised? How could your appeal be improved? Evaluation is particularly critical in multichannel fundraising, where a direct mail appeal can cause a surge in online donations, or a particularly well‐done series of posts on Facebook can drive traffic to your website. Test different subject lines in email appeals and try out different stories and incentives in all appeals. What you are testing and then evaluating will vary depending on the strategy, but gathering data and analyzing the numbers are the only way to really improve results.

To track the results of your appeals, note how many people responded to a particular appeal and how much money each appeal brought in. Tally the responses as they come in from each appeal, using your database program or a spreadsheet. The heaviest response to direct mail will come during the first four weeks after you could reasonably expect most people to have received the mailing (always send one to your organization to get a sense of how long it takes to arrive). Ninety‐five percent of the responses will be in by the end of two months. Email responses are much faster, with 90% of the responses coming within thirty‐six hours. When you think you have 90% of responses, then evaluate the appeal in these categories:

• Total number of gifts received and total amount given.
• Types of gifts: check, online, recurring.
• Number of donors by category (less than $49, $50 to $99, $100 to $249, and so on).
• Percentage of response (divide the number of responses by the number sent).
• The amount donated most often (the mode gift).
• For direct mail, the cost of the mailing (including the cost of printing the materials).
• Cost of staff time to design, write, and execute (generally comparable for both email and direct mail).
• Ratio of income to expense (divide the amount of money you received by the amount you spent). Email is far cheaper here, although it often has a lower response rate.
• Any narrative comments, such as “Send earlier next time.”

The two most important data points of the evaluation are the percentage of response and the mode gift. The percentage of response tells you much more important information than the total amount you earned from the mailing. For example, one organization's appeal to 1,000 names generated only two responses (0.002%); but while one response brought in $10, the other was a gift of $1,500! The board was told that the mail appeal had generated $1,510, but not the percentage of response, so they authorized more mailings to similar lists. They quickly spent all their profit because the lists were virtually worthless and their original response (which was extremely poor) only appeared successful because of the chance response of one major gift.

After several mailings, pull up all the evaluation forms and see what they have in common. Do some types of lists seem to respond better than others? Did the mailing offering a special benefit do better than the one without? Does one set of facts or one particular story seem to stir more people to give?

Remember to test only one variable at a time. You can't test whether the offer of a free T‐shirt did better than no T‐shirt if you are also testing whether the subject line “Save the Wolves” did better than “Wolves need you to act now.” With a big enough list, you can use portions of the same list to test responses to different variables.

If you have mailed to fewer than 2,000 names, the results of your evaluation will not be statistically significant. However, using your instinct and what information you can garner, you should be able to make some educated guesses about what is working well with your mass appeals. And above all, don't neglect the people who do respond: thank your donors and, after a bit, ask them to repeat their gifts.

HANDLING RESPONSES TO YOUR APPEALS

There are few things as thrilling as receiving gifts from a successful mail appeal. When you go to your mailbox and pull out all the return envelopes that you know contain gifts, or when you receive a report from your online provider with a list of donations, it is tempting to just deposit the money and go home early. But receiving the gifts brings on a whole new set of tasks.

All donors must be thanked, preferably within 72 hours of their gift arriving, and certainly within seven days. Sometimes you will not be able to meet this time frame, so remember that a late thank‐you is always better than no thank‐you (see Chapter Seven, “The Very Human Need for Appreciation”). The gift must also be recorded in your database, and you need to cash the check as soon as possible. People wonder if an organization really needs money when their check is not deposited quickly.

ASK DONORS SEVERAL TIMES A YEAR

Finally, to make the best use of your mass appeals, you must appeal to the donors you have acquired several times a year. Do not shy away from sending subsequent appeals to current donors. Years of testing have proven that some donors will respond almost every time they are asked, others will give less automatically but more than once a year, and donor renewal rates are higher for all donors (even those who do not respond to extra appeals) when they receive several appeals a year (because the appeals keep your organization in front of the donor). There are also “episodic” donors—people who give in response to big events and do not give otherwise. They may give several times in one year and not again for two or three years. The response to the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 was so profound that the expression the “Trump Bump” arose to describe the jump in donations that followed it. It is often hard to distinguish an episodic donor from one who has simply lapsed, but every effort should be made to invite them to be regular donors.

Many organizations have discovered that they can raise enough money from their current donors with repeated appeals to enable them to scale down their recruitment of new donors. Many large organizations appeal to their donors 8–12 times a year by paper mail and/or weekly by email, which tends to have a saturating, and in the case of many donors, alienating effect. Experience with hundreds of grassroots social change organizations shows that two to six appeals a year will raise significantly more money and increase renewal rates without irritating your donors. Common sense must prevail here: write to your donors when you have something to say. Sometimes you will write more often and other times less often.

Repeat appeals are successful for several reasons. First, a person's cash flow can vary greatly from month to month. A couple receiving an appeal from an agency they support may have just paid car insurance, so the appeal is deleted or thrown away. If the organization were to ask again after two months, the couple might have more money available and donate.

Second, different people respond to different types of appeals. Sending only one or two appeals a year does not allow for the variety of choices donors want. Organizations often discover that donors who regularly give $35 a year will give $100, $250, or more when appealed to for a special project. People who respond to specific project appeals are often called bricks‐and‐mortar people. They “buy” things for an organization: media spots, food for someone for a week, a job training program for a participant, a new building.

We rarely know why people don't respond to appeals. Despite this lack of knowledge, many people are willing to assume that the donor doesn't want to give, even though other circumstances might be true, such as:

• The donor has been on vacation and is behind on correspondence. Anything that is not a bill or personal is deleted or tossed.
• The donor is committed to your organization but is having personal problems and cannot think of anything else right now.
• The appeal got caught in a spam filter or buried in a deluge of email that they never read.
• The donor meant to give but the appeal was accidently deleted or thrown away before they could act on it.

Donors do not feel “dunned to death” by two to six appeals in a year. On the contrary, they get a sense that a lot is happening in the organization. Their loyalty is developed when they know that their continuing donations are needed. Most important, they have an opportunity to express their own interests when a particular appeal matches their concerns.

People often ask about “donor fatigue.” First, don't confuse your fatigue with donor fatigue. You will get tired of asking far more quickly than donors will get tired of being asked. Second, donor fatigue comes about in large part because of the volume of requests the donor is getting from everywhere and from the scale of problems the donor is being asked to help solve. Third, donors get tired of only being asked—in other words, you have to be in touch when you don't want money and you have to appreciate what the donor has done so far.

As you can see, all roads lead back to creating a strong case for support, which you put in front of people with whom you are building closer and closer relationships.