9 ways to pump up the power of your fundraising

Most of the best work for an effective fundraising message happens before you start writing.

Here’s a guideline for your preparation documents, from Frank OBrien’s On Message newsletter, at Nine Questions for Your Next Creative Memo:

1. What are you trying to achieve in this moment? Not the big picture of your cause and mission, but the smaller picture of the change you want to help bring about right now. Answer the questions, Why this? and Why now?
2. What obstacles are in your way? What problems are in the way of solving the problem you’re describing. Keep it focused on the one problem and its solution.
3. How do you want your audience to intervene? Yes, it’s “donate,” but describe it as the action their donation will make possible. Make the donor the potential protagonist in the story.
4. In this context, what hopes, frustrations and tensions is your audience bringing to the table? You need to enter the donor’s world to move the donor to action. Think about what you know about them, their knowledge, their values, their connection with the cause. Write into that context. Not into what you know and think.
5. How do you want your audience to feel at the moment you describe the challenge? Giving comes from the heart. What do you hope will be going on in donors’ hearts? Sadness, fear, anger? Aim at those emotional states.
6. How do your want your audience to feel at the moments they take action?. Now think about what they’ll feel after they donate. What will giving change in them? Joy, warmth, excitement? Tell them what it will feel like when they give.
7. What barriers to action are you facing and how will you avoid them? List the things you know stand as barriers to donating: Lack of connection. Perceived lack of enough funds. Fear that it’s a scam. Show how these things are not actual barriers.
8. How are you going to get peoples’ attention? If you don’t get their attention, you have no chance of getting their donation. Put some thought into how you’ll break through the noise in donors’ lives.
9. What’s the key story, surprising fact or vivid image that can bring your message to life? You need to give donors something that they can’t turn away from or forget. That takes great storytelling and positioning. You can’t educate them into giving — you have to grab them!