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"What a great resource! I have received a number of similar mailings over the years, and always ended up unsubscribing — mostly because they were too much text. This was short, sweet — and useful! I can't think of someone better qualified to share this kind of advice!"

Josephine Martell
International Fund for Animal Welfare

Giving Back E-Tips

Know Your Limitations

Karen GedneyDear Visitor:

When you’re creating an email or Facebook campaign for your organization, it can be frustrating to hear from your Web staff, “We can’t do that with our system.”

That’s something I often hear when I work with the GetActive fundraising system — and I expect the same will happen when my clients convert to Convio. But I don’t let that stop me. I just learn the rules and come up with alternate ideas that do work.

The same thing happens in direct mail. Try putting a teaser at the very bottom of your envelope — and you’ll quickly learn that the post office will slap a bar code right over it. That just means you have to rethink your layout to accommodate postal regulations.

Working with people who know postal and online parameters — and can creatively work around them — can save you a lot of time and money. It’s like driving. Once you know where the “guard rails” are, you just drive within them.

Meanwhile, I hope you find today’s e-tip on creating a monthly sustainer program for your major donors helpful.

Break It Down for Major Donors

Are your leadership gifts in the $1,000 to $5,000 range declining due to the economic downturn?

While it may have become more difficult for your leadership donors to give a $1,000 annual gift, a monthly gift of $84 could be more palatable.

I first suggested this approach to a nonprofit that partners with a leadership circle of business people and entrepreneurs. The minimum membership level for these business members is $1,000 a year, which is a significant level of financial commitment.

Being a business person myself, I thought, “Well, I don’t know if I could write a $1,000 check during a recession — but I could probably pay $84 a month, especially if it was automatically charged to my credit card.”

And so the idea of creating a monthly contributor option was born — and it helped the organization’s renewals meet revenue forecasts despite the challenging economic environment.

We did learn a few things, though, by trial and error. We found it was best not to introduce the monthly contribution option in the first renewal effort — since it tends to suppress one-time annual gifts. Renewal #1 givers are the people with the means and commitment to renew immediately, so go ahead and let them write the big check they were planning to send anyway.

But when you get down to renewal #3 and #4 — and you need an incentive to get people to stay with you — the monthly gift option can gently nudge the fence-sitters to take action.

A key component to making this monthly gift option work is to send out the email renewal reminders I discussed in last week’s Giving Back in addition to postal letters. The email renewals give the member an easy way to set up regular donations on a special monthly contribution landing page.

One copy phrase that I think really motivates people is, “Your first monthly contribution of $84 will renew/reinstate your membership for the year.” That drives the point home that if you renew today with a monthly gift, there will be no lapse in membership.

If you would like to see samples of successful monthly contribution campaigns for leadership donors, contact Karen at 718-680-1627 or at kg@karengedney.com.