The power of a one-sentence fundraising offer

A quick way to turn a good offer into a bad one is to over-complicate it.

The quick way to make a bad offer good is to make it simpler. To state your fundraising offer in one sentence.

One sentence that contains no professional jargon. One sentence of simple, colloquial language. One sentence that focuses on the outcome of the activity, not the process.

That means your statement of the offer will fail to express all of the information and nuance that your staff want to see in it.

Here’s an offer as some organizations might put it:

Yes! I want to assist local communities in the achievement of food security. Use my donation to improve infrastructure, bolster civil society, and encourage community-based economic development,

Accurate, I suppose. But it won’t mean much outside the offices of the professionals. Instead, it should be:

Yes! I want to help hungry families feed themselves.

Or, better yet:

Yes! I want to help feed hungry families.

The simpler the better. Here’s another example:

Yes! I want to make your holistic approach to recovery and self-sufficiency available to all in need.

One sentence, but full of abstraction and jargon. The organization’s holistic approach is no doubt a superb thing, part of the reason they’re effective. But it’s not the way donors think about it. They’re more likely to respond to:

Yes! I want to help young people get off drugs and back into good jobs.

Simplistic? Sure. But that’s how you move donors to yes.

This can be a difficult issue. One-sentence offers are likely to annoy the professionals on your program staff. They’ll complain that they aren’t fully explaining how the donor’s gifts will go to work.

They may even claim that this over-simplification will depress response. Ask them to show you the (lack of) money. They can’t.

But simplicity doesn’t hurt response. Really, it doesn’t. Never has, never will.

Making your offers pleasing to your professional staff is like burning down the money factory. Donors, not professionals, are your audience. Stay in their world, and they’ll be far more responsive.

Excerpted from The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving by Jeff Brooks

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