If you produce a newsletter for your nonprofit, I urge you to read The 8 Most Common Mistakes Made in Nonprofit Newsletters by Sandy Rees. (If you don’t produce a newsletter, read the article, then start producing a newsletter.
Here are the eight mistakes Sandy points out:
- Not donor focused.
- Long letter from the Executive Director on the front page.
- Text is too small or hard to read.
- Absent or poorly written headlines.
- Poorly written text.
- Too much text.
- Not enough or bad photos.
- No contact information for the organization.
I can vouch for each of these. And I’ll add some more that can really kill your response:
- Send your newsletter as a self-mailer instead of in an envelope. That can knock down response by about half.
- Strictly follow the rules of objective journalism.
- Make sure your goal is to “educate” donors, rather than thank them.
Jeff 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.
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