Your instincts about fundraising lead you astray [COMMANDMENT 9]

A ten-week series on things you should know about fundraising.

Trust knowledge, not instinct.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are — your instinct about how fundraising should be is untrustworthy.

Three main reasons for this:

1. You are not your donor. Demographically (probably), psychographically (almost surely). What works for you is unlikely to work for them.
2. You have the curse of knowledge about your cause. You simply can’t remember what it was like to know only a little about it — as your donors do.
3. You are paying a lot more attention than your donors are. So much more that you have a radically different experience of your materials than donors do.

What may seem like “common sense” to you is often exactly wrong in fundraising. Like this:

“Nobody reads any more; so we should always send short messages.”

Not true. Longer messages work better than short ones. (There are exceptions, but they are rare.)

Or the common belief that statistics are persuasive. They aren’t in fundraising.

Or the also-common belief that stories of past success are the best way to motivate donors to give. Nope. Stories of problems that need to be solved are the way to go.

These things (and hundreds more) are based on knowledge. Not opinions.

Knowledge comes from years of testing and trying things.

If your list is too small for testing, you can get a huge head start by paying attention to knowledge-base of our profession. It’s available in books, blogs, webinars, conferences and more. It takes work on your part to find and use the knowledge — but it’s better than making it up from your instincts.

The rest of the commandments.