How to raise more through word of mouth

If people are talking about your organization and your cause, fundraising will go better. It’s like your audience doing half of your job for you, before you even start to ask.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful kind there is. And darn cheap. It’s all an ambitious nonprofit could dream of.

Word-of-mouth is a matter of luck, right? Not quite. There are things you can do to encourage it. The most important is this Be remarkable. That’s what gets people to remark.

Here are some of the things that keep you from being remarkable:

• If you communicate using in-house, professional, self-expressionistic jargon, you aren’t remarkable.
• If you’re trying to educate donors into giving, you aren’t remarkable.
• If you aren’t operating with donors in the center of your thinking, you aren’t remarkable.
• If you aren’t putting exciting opportunities to change the world in front of people, you aren’t remarkable.

Here are some things you can do to be more remarkable:

• Know your audience. Know their language, their hopes, their dreams. Be one of them. Know who they are and what they want. You don’t have to please everyone, but you sure better be exciting to someone.
• Find exciting ways of describing what you do in the form of fundraising offers. Make it clear to donors that they have the opportunity to change the world through you.
• Keep it simple. Even when it’s complicated.
• Keep talking to donors. Don’t go silent on them. They’ll forget to remark if you do that!
• Be fast, take risks, believe in your work.

You can’t buy word of mouth.

But you can influence it!