How to evaluate your charity's communications

Before designing the communications strategy for next year take some time to evaluate the marketing and fundraising communications your charity sent out this year. Here is a hands-on, simple evaluation framework that can reap great dividends.
 
Step One: Gather the various mailing packages, and other related online fundraising and marketing materials that your charity has prepared and sent to donors and contacts on the last 18 months. What you have in front of you and on your computer screen is likely to represent the sum total of intentional messages received by your charity's constituents.

 

Step Two: Take a highlighter and mark every purpose statement, expression of your charity's mission and fundraising asks you find embedded in your communications pieces.
 
What do you think? Can you see message consistency? Clearly stated fundraising asks?
 
Are you speechless? Stunned? Pleased? Alarmed?

 

Step Three: Ask yourself and - get your colleagues to ask themselves too - the following questions as you evaluate your charity's communications. Remember to be honest, otherwise there is no point in undertaking this exercise.
 
1. Does every communications' piece contain a clear statement of your charity's vision and mission? - Your goal should be to have bite-size version of our mission and vision in all communications so that donors are reminded of what you do and why their participation in your wok is important.

2. Do your printed and online materials communicate your charity’s brand? - Examine the language, style, design, use of images, headlines, colour schemes - do they adhere to your charity's style guide? Do they express your charity's unique personality and style? - Donors should be able to recongnise your materials and your messages in a crowded marketplace.  

If a donor visits your website, facebook page, or reads one of your promotional mailings, they should be able to easily identify elements (both copy and design) that set your charity apart from others involved in similar work.  

3. How are you telling your charity's stories? - People connect with a cause through compelling stories. How are you telling your stories in words and images? Are they inspiring? Memorable? Captured in headlines, copy as well as powerful authentic images?

4. How are you communicating the impact that the donors are making through their giving? - Today's donors want to know how the money they give is being spent. Openness and transparency helps to build donor trust in charities. So, have a look at your communications? How often do you let donors know how the money is being used? Do you report back on how much was raised through various appeals? Do you let them know what your administration costs are and how much money goes to the project in the field? Is there consistency in these messages or do they contradict each other?

5. How do you thank your donors? - Saying 'thank you' is a way of strengthening relationships with donors and assuring them that their gifts will be used as intended. It is also a way of securing future gifts. How do you say 'thank you'? Are there any thank you messages incorporated in your newsletters, emails, etc as well as personalised letters? Are the thank you messages dry and formal or warm and encouraging?

6. Do you encourage donors to engage with your charity? - How many of your charity's communications give donors opportunities to offer feedback, ask questions, share their views about your work, or even tell you why they support your charity? Do you give donor's a voice through your printed materials, your website or online forums? Do you act on their suggestions and offer them feedback? - In a connected world one way communications are becoming extinct and collaboration is the name of the game. 

These might seem like simple questions but you would be surprised as to how many time charities get them wrong .... so take your time with this exercise, evaluate the findings and improve the effectiveness of your communications in 2012.

 

How to write effective e-newsletters that get read

Well, here are a few tips for creating newsletters that will attract and retain your charity’s supporters.

Ideas about creating great content

Offer news items that are interesting to your charity’s donors. Note here that I said news items that are interesting to donors not to you! What you find fascinating is not likely what donors might find fascinating. So, the first step is to make sure that you are listening to your donors and you are discovering what they find interesting.

For example, donors to a charity helping teachers in Africa might be interested to know what happened at the training days for local teachers in Sierra Leone. How many teachers attended? What did they learn? How are they planning to use that knowledge in their schools etc? – This is the project you told donors about a couple of months ago and asked for their support – this a news item you might want to include in your e-newsletter to offer feedback on how this project impacted lives.

You might also want to share some news or statistics that highlight the types of problems you are trying to tackle, stories and comments from the people you are helping, a photo album featuring one of your projects etc.

Do some research, see how other charities in your field are sharing news and relating to donors online and work out how you can do the same. Bookmark or monitor RSS feeds from useful websites to receive information to help you craft better e-newsletters.

Use case studies. Most of your charity’s supporters don’t really understand the complex problems or issues you might be trying to tackle. What’s more they are not likely to give money to an abstract cause. So, if you want more people to engage with your cause use real life stories about how your charity is helping people.

Build e-newsletters around one of your real life stories and make sure you let your field workers or beneficiaries tell the story in their own words. You can position the story in such a way that your donors are included too – by reminding them that they helped make the change happen through their gifts and prayers.

Offer some spiritual insights or advice to your readers. A Christian charity can use an e-newsletter to bless its supporters by offering them some spiritual encouragement in the form of short Bible based reflections. These could be spiritual lessons that the leaders of the charity or missionaries have learnt during field trips, answers to prayers and much more.

Charities that are working in areas of education or healthcare too can offer their e-newsletter readers and supporters some specific advice or, ideas about issues that might concern them.

Make e-newsletters interactive. There is nothing more boring than being bombarded with information and not given a chance to participate. The growth of social media has broken the power of monologue and has given readers a voice. So rather than shunning this trend you should use it for your charity’s benefit.

You can do this by including a quick poll relating to a specific topic that your charity is addressing or to get donor’s opinions on specific initiatives. Many people love to have their voice heard, even if only through a quick vote, and they love to hear how others view an issue.

A simple recipe for sucessful fundraising

Key ingredients:

Reduce the amounts of what your fundraising team finds fascinating
Add a dollop of listening to your donors
Add large amounts of donor input from observing and understanding your donors
Mix it well for breakthrough fundraising inovations

Here is a basic explanations for those looking to make the most of this basic recipe.

Reduce the amounts of what your fundraising team finds fascinating
Having attended my fair share of fundraising team meetings I have come to realise that the most dangerous words in fundraising are: 'Here is something interesting we can use for our next appeal.' Interesting to whom? To us or to donors?

Many of us in fundraising somehow get locked in our charity's world and slowly become fascinated with our charity's work. And we wrongly assume that donors will find a charity's programmes fascinating too.

When we take a long hard look at why so many donors are not responding to our appeals you might be forced to accept the fact that we have not made that leap from thinking like we do to thinking like the donors do.

Add a dollop of listening to your donors
How can we think like a donor? Well, first of all by listening to donors to discover what motivates them and what makes them tick.

I am not talking here simply about data analysis or evaluation of different campaigns and appeal packages. But, about stepping out of our world to connect with real donors... to do interviews with major donors and regular givers alike asking them why do they support our cause? what prompted them to support our work in the first place? why do they keep giving to us? ....what are they trying to acomplish with their gifts to our work?

Listening to donors can help us focus our fundraising messages to what they find interesting and fascinating about our charity's work.

Add large amounts of donor input from observing and understanding your donors Listening to donors is jut not enough to help you do sucessful fundraising .... An excellent fundraiser does more than listening ... he or she tries to understand the core needs, motivations and desires of our donors.

Such understanding according to an excellent blog entry by Bruce Temkin (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/dont-listen-to-customers-understand-them/) can be achieved by engaging donors in conversations with charities and by observing the current trends that might impact a charity's future fundraising offerings...

In short a recipe for sucessful fundraising requires us to step out of our world of charity employees and step into the shoes of our donors; to engage donors in conversations leaving our assumptions about them at the door of the focus group meeting room and to tap into donors interest and desires giving them a chance to do something they have not dreamt about doing before...

How to craft email headers that get your emails opened

Pokes and Tags and Tweets – do they annoy you or catch your attention?

It seems that if a statement or opening line has more than 140 characters then it is destined to go unread. In today’s world where people’s attention spans seem to be diminishing constantly what can you do to get your messages across to your charity’s supporters?

Since I am no expert in tweeting or tagging I shall stick to a subject I know one about – the email. Email headers to be more specific. Note here that by email header I mean the subject line and From name line.

Today, many charities use email to update their supporters about their work, to fundraise, to campaign and much more. And, while weekly or monthly emails are carefully crafted the email header is often a last minute job.

What is the first thing a recipient sees when an email drops into their inbox? – It is the subject line and the sender’s name. These two statements have to be motivating enough to make that person open the email rather than delete it.

Here are some things you might want to consider when crafting email headers for successful campaigns:

• Inform or engage? – Before writing an email header consider this question: what’s the main reason for sending this email? Do you simply want to share some success stories? Or, are you trying to get donations/ volunteers, etc?

• Be personal – Include the name of the recipient or the sender in the email header or some other kind of personalized message. A personalized header like: ‘Redina, here's a unique opportunity for you to help homeless Haitians directly’ is better than ‘Latest news from work in Haiti’.

Or, for example an email with a header like ‘Hello from Rob Parsons’ is more likely to be opened than an email whose header is: ‘Important news from Care for the Family.’

• Interest triggers. Since the words on the email subject line are the primary bait to hook the recipient into opening the email, you need to learn how to identify and write interest triggers.

Read through the content of the message, think about the purpose of the email and try to identify any interest triggers. Look at newspapers and magazines, what headlines and triggers pull your attention and how are they constructed.

You can try and use similar constructs of words for your charity’s headlines… Make sure you keep testing them though so that you can discover which ones might work best for you. Here are some examples of good triggers:

1. STOP THE TRAFFIC: Don’t be oblivious
2. Premier Christian Media: Is your freedom to vote a privilege?
3. Kyria.com: Leading your enemies


• Asking questions or making statements? - An engaging email campaign like a direct appeal or a meeting should be a two-way conversation, so you might want to consider starting with a question in your subject line.

You might want to use a question as a subject line for email fundraising campaigns or petitions.

• Going for long or short subject lines? – That depends on what you want to say but generally speaking a good length subject line should have about 35 characters. This doesn’t mean that you can’t experiment with longer subject lines – as always keep testing them to discover what works best with your constituency.

• Who is the email from? – You might have already set up your From name as the charity. If that is the case experiment with a different From name – that of leader in your charity or a well known field staff member. Do an A B test to see which From name performs best.

Also you might want to use different From names for your fundraising campaigns, e-updates or event invitations always using the name of a staff member who has the most relevant relationship with the recipients.

Like with anything else in fundraising and development the key is to test new approaches continuously. Use different email headers for different groups of the database and compare the opening rates, try to determine how the header or the From name is connecting with recipients. Knowing how to capture the attention of your email recipients will give your message a better chance of being read.