3 things you need to know about fundraising design

Somebody says your design is dated and ineffective. So you’re looking into changing everything.

Before you do that, read this post on the Infinity Concepts blog: When Good Design Fails to Inspire.

You could save your organization from a lot of pain and shrinking revenue. Here are the main points:

1. Design Should Serve the Mission. Design is not supposed to make you and your board feel good. It is meant to communicate, mostly with outsiders. It needs to be clear, readable, and carry the right emotions. There’s a strong chance that effective design will not resonate with insiders. Get used to it!
2. Authenticity Drives Response. This can be hard, because cool, polished, modern design that you and your colleagues admire is probably wrong for your donors. What works in most cases, is raw, simple, old-fashioned design. Boring or even clunky fonts. A strong but limited color palette. This probably won’t sing for you. Though the revenue it helps bring in should make up for that!
3. Test Before You Transform. What does and does not work can surprise us. Instinct and hunches are of little value. When you are contemplating wholesale design changes, test first! If you don’t have the quantities to run statistically valid tests (which the large majority of nonprofits don’t) do a combination of research what others are doing successfully, and simply fielding new ideas and watching the results. That’s not as good as testing, but it’s better than not doing it at all.