Lori Jacobwith’s blog reports on a comment Seth Godin made about fundraising: Feeling good is what nonprofits sell.
His comment was helpful. Here’s part of it:
Transactions pull people apart. Gifts pull people together. What may hold a staff back is the inability to relate authentically to the person who gets asked for money every day. The act of giving adds meaning to our work. And many social profit CEOs don’t often GIVE the investor or potential investor a way to feel good.
In fact, a lot of people in nonprofits assume giving feels bad! So they make one of two errors:
- They create fundraising messages that artificially (and pointlessly) try to make people feel good by never mentioning there’s a problem or need or urgency of any kind. This, of course, doesn’t work. Donors just don’t respond to being told they aren’t needed.
- They just go for the bad feeling. They help create the impression that everything sucks all the time. All is dark, and you’d better give right now. You can raise money with this approach. But you tend to pay for it in lower retention as donors get the impression that giving doesn’t really make a difference.
If you remember what Seth says — giving brings us together, makes us feel good — you’re free to do fundraising right:
- You respect donors enough to let them know when things are tough, when their giving could make the difference between failure and success.
- You also remember to give the donors hope. You tell them their investments in you pay off in a better world.
- When the news is bad, you share the bad news. But you also share the good news.
- And you never forget that fundraising is not about you: It’s about 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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