Telling stories is bad for response in fundraising?
How’s that for counterintuitive?
It’s from a recent study by M+R: “What AI “saw” in 3.8 billion nonprofit emails.”
The AI found several interesting things about fundraising and advocacy email results. The finding that really caught my attention:
Emails that included stories had a 29% drop in response rate compared to emails without a personal story.
To which you might be thinking, “What the heck??”
To hear some people talk, you’d think stories have magical power in fundraising to improve results.
But this finding says maybe not. Here’s how the study put it:
… stories can create a disconnect when donors don’t see their role in them. There’s an art and a science to making these stories work — but in aggregate we’re still seeing that fundraising emails featuring personal stories underperform emails that don’t.
In other words, stories are great for fundraising. Except when they aren’t.
And not-so-great stories are distressingly common. Enough so that in aggregate, stories seem to be toxic for fundraising emails.
How do we make stories work?
Big question.
Start here at my recent blog series, Storytelling for Fundraisers.
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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