Success in Fundraising = Emotional Fundraising

I wonder if you have noticed the same fundraising communications trend I have. This trend is very ordinary, which clearly is not a good thing.

Many of the fundraising letters I see are so very generic. All one needs to do is exchange a sentence or two about Nonprofit Y and it will be essentially the same as the letter produced by Nonprofit Z.

Some of this is good as more organizations have learned what works and what doesn’t. In that sense, it makes sense that more fundraising letters include the ask in multiple places or use a compelling P.S. Those things do work, after all.

Unfortunately, however, much of what I come across is not good.  Whether it’s driven by inexperience or the poor use of AI to churn out fundraising letters based on “best practices,”  it’s resulting in nonprofit communications that are almost completely lacking in emotion.

Maybe you’ve come across some of these in appeals and newsletters you’ve looked at. They tell you, the reader/donor, what the organization did and what it wants to do, without ever trying to tug on your heartstrings. This is a mistake and its costing organizations (maybe even yours) thousands of dollars.

Truth: you can’t and shouldn’t be afraid to get emotional.

Why Emotions Matter

Remember Fundraising 101? Donors make the decision to give based on their heart, and then use their brain to determine if their decision to give was a smart (good) one – based on what information you send them. To say it another way: people get drawn into an appeal by their emotions, and only after their heart makes the decision to give do they back up that decision with facts and figures.

This is a subtle, yet significant distinction. For donors, the distinction is often subconscious. They get emotional, and feel drawn to give based on these emotions, but they don’t actually make the decision to give to the appeal until they have confirmed that decision with facts such as the number of people their gift will help, the success of your outcomes, etc. But they would never get to that point of caring about facts and figures unless they had already made the emotional decision to give.

Remember, successful fundraising is emotional fundraising. If you would like for Rescigno’s to do an “audit of emotion” of your most recent fundraising letter, email appeal, or donor newsletter or impact report, just reach out to ron@rescignos.com. I’ll let you know how emotional I felt when I read it, if it tugged at my heartstrings, and whether or not it made me feel angry, mad, sad or some other emotion.

Is it time to be more deliberate about adding emotion to your fundraising communications?