The Better Fundraising Company

Here’s another reason to keep a fundraising campaign going even if you reach your goal: not all of your pledges will be fulfilled.

If you’re counting pledges towards your goal, you’re operating on faith that they will all be fulfilled – which doesn’t alwa...

Say you’re running a campaign to raise a specific amount of money, and you reach your goal before the end of the campaign.

Should you stop the campaign, or slightly change your messaging and keep going?

My vote: update your messaging and KEEP GOING!

Here’s why:

Your campaign is working.  Every donor that has given you a g...

If you look at the detailed results of a lot of fundraising campaigns, a simple pattern emerges:

If you make it easier, more people will donate.

Look at these data-driven examples:

If you remove links to your social media feeds from your website’s donation page, more people will give. Why? It’s easier

About 20 years ago, I hired a freelance designer to design an appeal letter for a nonprofit I was serving. The nonprofit wanted the letter to feel personal, and we decided that the entire letter would appear handwritten, instead of typed or printed.

The Designer went to work. And a few days later I opened a PDF with the coolest looking letter I’d ever seen… that was...

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago where someone said the following:

“I like what you’re proposing for this appeal, but we need to include more information about our organization and its programs.”

I replied that, in my experience, if we spend more time educating donors about the organization that we would raise less money.

Their response w...