Hot Lists

A hot list consists of people who have already made some kind of commitment to your organization. The hottest list of people for any organization is its list of current donors. The second-hottest list includes friends of current donors, because most people’s friends share their values and commitments. Remind donors to pass their paper newsletter on to friends, and have campaigns in which donors are asked to forward e-mail solicitations to people they think would be interested.

Another source of hot prospects is your board members, volunteers, and staff. On a yearly basis, these people should also be asked to provide a list of names, which can be compared to the current mailing list; anyone who is not already a donor can be solicited. Of course, any board member, staff person, or volunteer who isn’t already a donor is a hot prospect as well.

A word about asking volunteers for money: I meet many people who are hesitant to do this but when I remind them that more adults in the United States give away money than volunteer, and that almost all volunteers give away money, they realize that their volunteers are giving money somewhere, just not to them. And the reason the volunteers are giving money elsewhere is because someone is asking them.

Warm Lists

A warm list consists of people who have either used or heard of your services or your work, people who are donors to organizations similar to yours but probably have not heard of your organization, or people who have come to your special events. In other words, these are people who either know about your organization or they care about your cause, but you cannot say for sure that they do both.

People who attend special events who are not donors should receive an appeal soon after the event. Pass out a sign-up sheet or conduct a door prize drawing to get names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. People who previously gave your organization money but no longer do also constitute a warm list if you have correct addresses for them.

If your organization gives people advice, referrals, or other service by phone, mail, or online, create a system to gather the names of people served, unless that information is confidential or obtaining an address would be inappropriate in some other way. This list is the least warm because not all the people using your organization donate to anything, you don’t know whether they were satisfied with what they received from you, and they may feel they deserve to get the information you are giving out for free. However, some will be grateful and want to help, and some will prefer to pay for the information rather than accept it for free.

Keep a log of these types of contacts in a database for later use with a mail or e-mail appeal. When people call, respond to their requests and encourage them to visit your website, having already made sure your website encourages giving. People who don’t want an appeal will decline to give their e-mail address. Remember that even in the United States, about 15 percent of people do not use the Internet, or they have intermittent access to it. Lack of Internet access can be a function of poverty, age, or geography. Many people live in rural communities where Wi-Fi and cell signals are spotty or nonexistent. Getting snail mail addresses for these prospects will be your only way of being in touch with them.

The other kind of warm lists are lists of people who belong to organizations that are similar to yours. To get these names requires renting or trading mailing lists. No one actually buys a mailing list outright. By renting it—either from a list broker or from other organizations—they acquire the right to use the list one time. Many organizations with large or specialized mailing lists rent their lists to other organizations as an income stream. You may have noticed that if you give to one organization you will receive appeals from several similar organizations within a few weeks. Your name has been rented because you are a proven “buyer” through whatever medium your name is being delivered.

Cold Lists

A cold list is any list that is more than a year old or any list of people about whom you know little or nothing. The telephone book is an example of a cold list. There is no point in using cold lists.

Finally, do not use mailing lists that are marked “members only” or “do not use for solicitation.” Because mailing lists are fairly easy to compile and acquire, once you have the systems in place there is no need to be underhanded with others’ lists.

People Have Short Attention Spans

A person should be able to read each sentence in your appeal in six to eight seconds. Each sentence must be informative or provocative enough to merit the reader devoting the next six to eight seconds to reading the next sentence.

People Love to Read About Themselves

The reader of the appeal wonders: “Do you know or care anything about me?” “Will giving your group money make me happier, give me status, or relieve my guilt?” “Did you notice that I helped before?” Therefore, the appeal should refer to the reader at least twice as often and up to four times as often as it refers to the organization sending it. To do this requires drawing the reader into the cause with such phrases as “You may have read . . .,” “I’m sure you join me in feeling . . .,” “If you are like me, you care deeply about . . . .” When writing to solicit another gift or a renewal from someone who is already a donor, use even more references to what the person has done: “You have helped us in the past,” “Your gift of $50 meant a great deal last year,” “I want you to know that we rely on people like you.” Using the word you makes your letter speak to the readers rather than at them.

People Respond to Stories

There is a saying in fundraising: “People buy with their hearts first and then their heads.” This is nowhere more true than in mass appeals. Your appeal needs to open with a story either about someone your program has helped, some situation your organization has been instrumental in changing, or something about the reader of the letter. Programs and accomplishments need to be described in people terms (or animals, if that is your constituency). Remember that people have read or seen a lot of stories. They are used to being entertained by stories at the same time as they are skeptical of their authenticity, so make sure that your story is true (even if facts have been changed to protect someone) and that it is credible and typical. (You don’t want someone saying, “What a sad story, but that could only happen once, so I’m not going to give.”) Finally, the story should resolve positively because of the work of your organization. In the next few chapters, I provide examples of good stories.

A big difference between direct mail and e-mail appeals is that a direct mail appeal generally does better when it is longer—two pages do better than one, and sometimes three or four pages will do better than two pages. E-mail never does better when it is longer. With e-mail, you have very little space to get your story and your request out.

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 have gifts made by check or credit card, 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 seventy-two 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, “Thank Before You Bank”). The gift must also be recorded in your database, and you need to cash the check or run the credit card as soon as possible. People wonder if an organization really needs money when their check is not deposited quickly or if their gift does not show up on their next credit card statement.

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 every time they are asked, and others will give less automatically but more than once a year, and that donor renewal rates are higher for all donors (even those who do not respond to extra appeals) when they receive several appeals a year.

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 eight to twelve times a year, 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 four appeals a year will raise significantly more money and increase renewal rates without irritating your donors.

Repeated appeals are successful for a number of reasons. First, a person’s cash flow can vary greatly from month to month. A person receiving an appeal from an agency he or she supports may have just paid car insurance, so the appeal is thrown away or deleted. If the organization were to ask again after two months, the person might have more money available and make a donation.

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 $25 a year will give $50, $100, 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, a new building.

We rarely know why people don’t respond to appeals. Despite this lack of knowledge, many people are willing to make the assumption that the donor doesn’t want to give, when any of the following circumstances might be true:

• 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 having personal problems and cannot think of anything else right now, even though he or she might be quite committed to your group.
• The appeal gets lost.
• The donor meant to give but the appeal was accidently deleted or thrown away before it could be acted on.

Donors do not feel “dunned to death” by two to four appeals 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 me about “donor fatigue.” First of all, 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. To mitigate against that overload is difficult, but one important tip is not to focus so much energy on months during which everyone else is asking, particularly December. Spread your appeals out over the year and take advantage of current events that apply to your issue whenever they occur. 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.