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Giving Back E-Tips

Your Success File

Karen GedneyDear Visitor:

Writing a weekly e-newsletter is a demanding challenge, but luckily, I have a steady source of ideas. I keep a “Success” file on my desktop — and each time I help a client achieve an improvement in their fundraising or advocacy efforts, I jot a quick note about it and pop it in the file.

I encourage you to do the same to remind yourself of your own achievements. Not only will it help lift your morale to see all the good you’re doing, but it will also give you ideas to build on for future campaigns. Want to share your successes with your colleagues? Send along your best fundraising campaigns for a future issue of Giving Back.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy today’s e-tip, Pass the Hat & Get Low-Dollar Donors to Chip In.

Pass the Hat & Get Low-Dollar Donors to Chip In

Wallets are getting thinner, and belts are tightening. But you can still get online donors to give by asking them to just chip in a few bucks. Chances are, they’ll give twice as much as you ask — and you might tap into a whole new pool of online donors!

That’s just what happened for one of my clients last summer. I wrote an email campaign to raise money to run a newspaper ad about an upcoming Congressional vote on an environmental issue. In the past, we had found it difficult to get the public to rally around this particular topic, so we knew raising money for the ad would be a major challenge.

Luckily, the campaign’s first few emails brought us close to our goal — but we weren’t quite there yet. And so I suggested we send out one more email asking, “Please chip in what you can. Even $10 will make a huge difference.”

Well, that did the trick. The $10 ask brought in twice the number of new givers we usually get from an email — 1,400 in all. It also generated more income than the first email in the series, usually a campaign’s top-performer. And although we only asked for $10, the email brought in a $20 average gift.

This huge lift in online revenues also allowed us to run the ad one more time — in an even more influential and expensive newspaper. And the client said, “That $10 ask was pure genius. We should definitely do it again.”

The moral of the story? Ask for a little, and you can gain a lot.

If you’d like to see samples of successful low-dollar fundraising campaigns, contact Karen at 718-680-1627 or at kg@karengedney.com.