Future Fundraising Now

How to make your appeal more urgent

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by

Jeff Brooks
in

Urgency is the key ingredient in successful fundraising. You can make your cause and persuade a donor to give, but if she doesn’t act now, she almost surely won’t act at all.

Here’s some good advice from Jonathon Grapsas’ blog: Is your appeal urgent?

Jonathon’s suggestions for building urgency are to include these elements:


  • A deadline.
  • Urgent tone and language.
  • Repetition of the ask.

I agree. And I’ll add one more:


  • What are the consequences of failure to respond? Why should the donor care about it?

    Comments

    2 responses to “How to make your appeal more urgent”

    1. Mazarine Avatar
      Mazarine

      Don’t forget that not everyone is a reader. Some of us are visual learners.
      So another way to make an ask urgent is to put in: Pictures. Stats. And stories.
      If I see a picture of suffering, combined with a story of the person, and stats of how the giving has gone down 50% at Nonprofit X, I am triply motivated to give. Now it’s personal and I care.
      Mazarine
      http://wildwomanfundraising.com

    2. Mazarine Avatar
      Mazarine

      Don’t forget that not everyone is a reader. Some of us are visual learners.
      So another way to make an ask urgent is to put in: Pictures. Stats. And stories.
      If I see a picture of suffering, combined with a story of the person, and stats of how the giving has gone down 50% at Nonprofit X, I am triply motivated to give. Now it’s personal and I care.
      Mazarine
      http://wildwomanfundraising.com

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    Jeff BrooksJeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    About the blogger

    Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.