Fundraising is at least half a numbers game. At least, if you want to succeed in a non-random way. But you have to look at the right numbers in the right ways.  Here’s some help from Fundraising Report Card, at Avoid These 8 Common Fundraising Metric Analysis Pitfalls to Make Better Nonprofit Management Decisions: Focusing Solely on Revenue. If all you’re tracking for your fundraising program is net revenue (or worse yet, gross revenue) you could be entirely blind to the fact that your fundraising program is an unsustainable failure. Donor retention, acquisition cost, donor lifetime valu ..read more

Want to know what can happen to your fundraising when you make it more inclusive? Good things. In my experience, revenue jumps 30% to 50% — and sometimes quite a lot more. I give a wide range because improvements in readability are rarely the only improvements being made. And the amount of change varies a lot, from slight to massive. We’ve been looking at some powerful material from the book <I>Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law</I> by Joseph Kimble. It has a large section of examples of the types of things that hap ..read more

I asked it for “sad kitten.” It gave me “demonic kitten.” The right photo can really boost the power of a fundraising message. But photos pose some ethical and logistical challenges. AI-generated images seem to be solutions to some of those challenges: AI images protect the privacy of beneficiaries, because they aren’t really people. AI images can be generated when the expense of a human photographer is too high. (The main downside of AI images is that they often look weird. But we should assume this factor will continue to grow less over time.) So should you consider AI images in your fundr ..read more

What your colleagues are reading: the 5 most-read Future Fundraising Now blog posts in the last month: What you need to know about midlevel donors How to write faster: 6.5 tips How to design your fundraising so it can actually be read 10 bogus reasons for keeping your writing hard to read How (and why) to give donors permission not to donate Looking for some really good (and specific) advice for your fundraising? Book a FREE consultation with Sean Triner of Moceanic. Sean knows his stuff, and can help you find your way forward ..read more

Type & Layout, by Colin Wheildon, is one of those books that helped change the way a lot of people thought about design. I discovered it not long after it was first published in 1995. I worked at The Domain Group, and the book used a print ad we had created as an example — fortunately, a mostly good example. We all read the book, and we quickly realized there was something in it more important than that ego-stroking advertisement: A whole section about reading-comprehension and print design. It reported on a 1990 readability study by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau of Australia (You can ..read more

Midlevel donors — those who give more than “typical” donors, but not enough to warrant one-to-one relationship based fundraising — have been called the “missing middle” because they often fall between the cracks of general donor and major donor fundraising — and end up getting little or no enhanced communication, and sometimes little or no communication. It’s an expensive oversight. There’s a lot of revenue waiting to be raised from this special group of donors. A small but very valuable portion of them have the capacity to become true major donors. They are also especially valuable as prospec ..read more

Give donors “permission” not to donate. I know that may seem odd, because they clearly have that permission whether you give it or not. And most donors, most of the time (including your best donors) exercise their right not to give. Still, when you give that permission, you recognize their autonomy and put a decision in their hands. That shared, out-in-the-open declaration of their autonomy can change the situation: your message can move from fundraising that might be relevant, but probably isn’t to something more like fundraising that deserves my consideration. That’s huge. They can still say ..read more

So far in this series about Inclusive Fundraising, we’ve focused on reading and attention issues that make reading a challenge for many people — by some accounts, about 20% of the population in the US deals with these challenges. There’s another set of issues that make reading difficult for even more people: visual acuity issues. These range from presbyopia (which affects nearly everyone in their 40s or older to complete blindness — and everything in between. Since donors are mostly people in the 60s and up, the percentage who deal with visual challenges approaches 100% If you care about bein ..read more

From Total Annarchy by Ann Handley here are some great and unusual writing tips that can help you move faster through the writing cycle, at 6½ Ways to Write Faster: Start with pen + paper. Writing is slower than typing. That’s why this tip works. I used to do this. I couldn’t write without a handwritten rough draft. After decades of trying, I’m able to skip that step now. But I still go back to the pen and paper method for especially challenging project. Stop trying so hard. It’s okay to write something incomplete or half-baked. As long as you go back later and fix it. It’s so much better to ..read more

If you champion plain language, ease-of-reading writing in your organization, you will run into opposition. The habit of complex writing is deeply embedded in our education and professional cultures. There are a number of typical arguments against communicating clearly. Here are ten of them — and their answers — from Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law by Joseph Kimble. Plain language is anti-literary, anti-intellectual, unsophisticated, drab, ugly, bland, babyish, or base. It isn’t. Those qualities are inherent in the content ..read more