Direct mail for fundraising: how to write a great letter #1

This is the first of three posts. If you work for a charity, a not-for-profit or any organisation that relies on donors for funds, these posts will be essential reading.

 

Direct mail? Really?

It’s time to rethink direct mail. Yes, GDPR has made a big difference. The regulatory landscape has changed and legal departments are being ultra-cautious. But, as Suzanne Lewis writes in a useful post, people still like direct mail: according to Royal Mail’s MarketReach, 87% of the public trust a letter, compared to 48% for email.

Fundraising letters build relationships – and sustain them. If you rely on donors or members, grant them the privilege of sending a letter. What’s more, letters – and not emails – remain, by far, the biggest single means of recruiting new donors. Surveys reveal that most donors make their first gift after reading a letter that’s arrived on their door mat. And letters are also the best way to retain support. You can only say so much face-to-face; and you may not meet many of your most loyal supporters.  

Direct mail is cost-effective. Sure, writing effective letters is time-consuming and demands an almost fanatical attention to detail. But the rewards come over time. One donor in a hundred may respond to your repeated, thoughtful correspondence with a hefty bequest. That’s worth working for.

Think of direct mail as a strategy: a process, not an event. It’s a virtuous circle. The more you write, the more loyal your supporters will become. The more loyal they are, the more likely it is that they’ll read your letters.

To start, let’s summarise three key features of an effective fundraising letter.

1. The letter is written by you: a named individual. You sign the letter. And you are a real person, with experience, expertise and strongly held convictions. Write about them.
2. You’re writing to one person – the addressee – who has an interest in your cause and wants to know more about it, as well as wanting to contribute to it. Address those interests.
3. The letter should talk about the needs your organisation addresses: practical and emotional, social and concrete.

As you begin, you need to answer two key questions.

• Who’s your reader?
• What’s the Ask?

In this post, we’ll address those two questions. In the next post, we’ll plan the letter in detail. And in the third post, we’ll draft and edit.

 

Thinking about your reader

What’s your reader most interested in?

Themselves.

Everything you say in your letter must relate to the reader: their values, beliefs, feelings, and behaviour. Use whatever information you have to identify those values and behaviours.

(GDPR is of course critically important; you shouldn’t be keeping or using information about your supporters that they haven’t agreed to share with you.)

The key to dealing with your list is to segment it. Segmenting allows you to decide who to include in a particular mailing, and how to treat them.

It’s worth spending time identifying the members of different segments. Personalise! If you keep accurate records, you can exploit all the advantages of direct mail:

• You can vary the copy of your letters – rather than writing dull, standardised copy.
• You can generate more data about your supporters.
• You can measure the results of your campaigns more accurately.

All of which means that your fundraising will improve, steadily, over time.

The main criteria for profiling your readers are probably:

• recency (how recently they last contacted you, or you contacted them);
• frequency (how frequently ditto);
• previous donation amounts; or
• how the donor originally came to you.

Many fundraising campaigns are based on a membership scheme, or on a system of regular giving (Direct Debits, for example). With this segment, fundraising’s major aim is to achieve renewals. You might contact them twice a year, or even more often. If you want to sustain the interest of these loyal donors, you can include:

• news updates;
• new campaigns;
• yearly achievements; or
• external events affecting your organisation.

 

The Ask

The second key question is: what’s the Ask? Donors won’t give unless they’re asked.

There are four steps in writing a great Ask.

1. Identify the need.
2. Ask for help.
3. Justify the Ask emotionally.
4. Show how the donation will make a difference.

And you should be able to state your Ask in no more than 20 words. (It’s what the Greek rhetoricians called a ‘colon’: the length of a sentence that you could utter in one breath.)

 

Identify the need [nine words]

Use the first sentence to identify the Ask. And don't use the words donate or support. Instead, name the person or group that’s in need of assistance. Paint as powerful a picture as you can in nine words.

Our foodbank stops families from going hungry.

Without a transplant, Jenny will die.

Too many organisations include nebulous Asks in their letters. Maybe they feel apologetic, or embarrassed, to ask for money! Hence, perhaps, that bland, vague word ‘support’.  It sounds as if you don’t know the value of a donation. The clearer and more specific your Ask – and the more assertively you ask it – the more likely your donors will be to respond.

What, in fact, are you asking for? Money, probably. How much? Why?

Will you donate £25 to change a child’s life forever?

Maybe the money is actually a commitment to a project. For instance, a local food bank asked for a pledge to feed children during the school holidays.

Join us this summer with a special three-month commitment that will help to give these kids three square meals a day during the school holidays. You can send a gift today and pledge to do the same in July and August. Or you could make a single gift that stretches across the entire summer. Better still, sign up for monthly giving and make a difference all year long!

The Ask is the core reason for writing the letter. Clarify it early. You might develop your Ask into a more sophisticated marketing concept. (We might even make it look even more sophisticated and call it a Marketing Concept.) For example:

As Chief Executive of Home from Home, I’ve often written to you about the challenges faced by homeless people in our city.

You’re one of our most generous and loyal supporters. That’s why I’m telling you now about a wonderful opportunity for you to help us again. We urgently need £40,000 to refit our three shelters, so that more homeless families can find a warm, secure place to sleep.

Because we need to finish the job before the winter sets in, three members of our Board of Trustees have volunteered to match your gift, pound for pound, if we receive it before 15 September – up to a total of £10,000.

 

Ask For Their Help [five words]

Can you help us out?

Why these words? Because it’s a direct question that demands a direct response.

The word help is also powerful. We’re programmed from infancy to give help when asked; asking for help is a strong emotional trigger.

Which leads us to the next step.

 

Justify the Ask emotionally [one word]

And that one word is:

because

The word ‘because’ satisfies the reader’s (often unconscious) need for a reason to accept your case.

If we’re looking for ways to justify our ask, we can take inspiration from Aristotle.

Yes, really.

In his book Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests that we persuade each other in three ways.

 

 

Credibility

We tend to believe people and organisations that we trust. If your organisation is well respected, people are more likely to listen to you. Respect begins with having a high profile. If your reader has never heard of you, you will have to build that reputation from the bottom up.

Credibility is based on three key elements.

Shared values: if you can demonstrate that you share the reader’s values, they will grant you more authority. The best fundraising letters appeal to their readers’ deepest desires and values: things like faith, their worldview and beliefs about humanity, and so on. (Remember: your reader is most interested in themselves.)

Common sense: otherwise known as practical wisdom. If you can show that you get things done, and that you’re not extremists, your reader will respect you more.

Commitment: demonstrate that you do more, go further, or sacrifice more to achieve your goals.

Find examples that illustrate all three of these elements and add them to your ideas for your letter.

Logic

Argue a case, rationally and reasonably. But remember that all arguments start with assumptions; and the arguments that will persuade your reader must be based on assumptions that they hold. Argue from your reader’s values and beliefs.

Emotion

Everyone knows that giving decisions, like buying decisions, are based hugely on emotion. And we all know that charities and other not-for-profits do everything they can to tug on the heartstrings, in order to pull the reader’s purse-strings.

The danger when you’re writing is that you might use too much emotional language. The mantra here comes from drama and novel-writing:

Show, don’t tell.

Evoke the feelings in your reader using stories, pictures, examples of people doing things. Show the concrete difference your organization is making in the world. Use facts and figures by all means; but make the statistics meaningful by presenting them in concrete terms.

Numbers, by themselves, usually mean very little.

Credibility, logic and emotion are broad modes of appeal. In a specific letter, the trick is to relate those principles to the specific ask we’re making.

 

Show how the donation will make a difference [six words]

Here’s a marketing mantra that will serve you well.

Benefits, not needs. 

This is a variation on the commercial marketing mantra, ‘benefits, not features’. If you’re selling a washing machine, don’t talk about everything it does; tell the customer how their life will be improved by owning it. If you’re fundraising, don’t talk about what you need money for – your projects, your annual strategy, your budget deficits – tell your donor how they will benefit from giving money.

And the benefit will be seeing that their donation is used directly to do something concrete.

So, if you’re talking about donations to help feed people, say '£10 will provide x meals for a family of four.’

Benefits to the donor could be direct or indirect. A direct benefit might be a pair of tickets to an event; an indirect benefit would be the warm glow of knowing that we are saving a life or rescuing an animal.

For as little as £30, you could pay to save a child’s sight right now. That’s a lifetime of glorious sunsets, entirely because of your gift.

By now, you should have lots of ideas to feed into your letter. We’re ready to start planning it!

On to the next blog post.

I run courses for not-for-profit organisations on letter writing, copywriting and a range of other topics. Here are two of my standard courses, which can be adapted to your needs.

Email and Letter Writing focuses on correspondence - our written ambassadors. Make the best impression and get the results you want.

Download Alan_Barker_CO_Email_and_Letter_Writing

Copywriting uncovers the secrets of producing copy that sells. Capture your prospect's attention and convert them into customers.

Download Alan_Barker_CO_Copywriting

This series of posts draws with thanks on material from Suzanne Lewis, Mal Warwick, Jeff Brooks, Alan Sharpe, Andy Maslen, and others.  Here are links to the material I’ve used in my research.

https://www.thebalance.com/writing-a-fundraising-letter-2502087

https://www.guidestar.org/Articles.aspx?path=/rxa/news/articles/2012/why-long-fundraising-letters-outpull-shorter-ones.aspx

https://www.thefundraisingauthority.com/fundraising-by-mail/how-write-fundraising-letter/

https://www.thefundraisingauthority.com/fundraising-by-mail/how-write-fundraising-letter/

https://malwarwick.com/11-cardinal-rules-of-direct-mail-copywriting-and-how-to-break-them/

https://blog.lawrencedirect.com/long-vs.-short-fundraising-copy-length-does-matter

https://www.nonprofitmarketingzone.com/direct-mail/letter/sample/

https://www.neoncrm.com/10-year-end-giving-statistics-every-fundraiser-should-know/

https://ascendmarketingsolutions.com/long-copy-vs-short-copy-which-converts-better/

https://ascendmarketingsolutions.com/the-perfect-sales-letter-part-2/

https://www.fundraiserhelp.com/ideas-for-fundraising.htm