Does Your Fundraising Depend Upon Urgency?
How many people will die, be imprisoned or tortured, sleep on the street, go without water or food, be denied (something, anything) … if you don’t RESPOND TODAY?
Most fundraisers have been brought up to stress urgency, urgency, more urgency.
In the old days of printed newspapers, weekly newsmagazines and network nightly news, ‘urgency’ might actually been something reserved for special events and rare occasions. Remember the ‘Special Bulletin’ that rarely crawled along the bottom of your TV screen during your favorite entertainment show, along with ‘Details at 11’!
But now we live in a constantly agitated state. In fact, urgency is our default state of mind. Is anything especially ‘urgent’ anymore?
Seth Godin argues this point in a recent post, Cable News:
“What if ubiquitous video accompanied by frightening and freaked out talking heads is actually, finally, changing our culture? … They want urgency more than importance.
There’s always front page news because there’s always a front page.”
I wonder … By now, hasn’t ‘urgency’ been completely devalued as a fundraising motivator? If not, what constitutes truly urgent in the minds of today’s donors?
Thoughts?
Tom
9 responses to “Does Your Fundraising Depend Upon Urgency?”
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I agree, Tom, with the state of urgency in the world. Everything is urgent – so nothing is. There’s the yellow/red terroist urgency…as if terrorists lurk around every corner. And who is making everything urgent? We the consumer / citizenry? The talking heads?
So urgency in fundraising…hmmm… Donors (and prospective donors) want to be needed. I won’t respond to your request if it’s just kinda well sorta important maybe today or next month, no worries.
However, I do expect honesty when I’m asked for a gift. So the “urgency” better be carefully true and or….
I’m tired of the urgent too. What I think we under-rate as a virtue is impatience. It’s not the urgent here-and-now that gets me going, it’s that we’re still bloody doing the same old stuff and not making the headway we need to make to close down the cause-problem we exist to end. Not enough, not soon enough. Seeing organisations with limited ambition and business-as-usual planning does my head in. Come on people! There’s work to do!
This chimes with a lot of work that’s been done recently on communicating international development (funded by Gates) that shows that people are seeing the same old need, without getting any sense of the progress made – extreme poverty halved in the last 25 years. In the rush to project the urgent here-and-now, we do not communicate progress.
So – less urgency, more impatience to get to the finishing line.
Yep, I’ll be writing that up as a blog.
I encourage organizations to communicate urgency, but not desperation… the difference between finding a cure for cancer (or poverty, or cleaning the environment, etc.) and not being able to make payroll. I think organizations often confuse the two, especially when they are desperate for funds.
The question is, how can our critically important organizations and the people we serve continue to be seen as an urgent need when the problem is so large and has existed forever?
It likely comes down to story telling and communication. Donors can relate to one individual … they want to (and can) help Anne Frank, one little girl, but can’t wrap their mind around 6 Million people.
Therefore, we need to tell stories of how donors can help one individual at a time, instead of tackling the entire problem. There can be a true sense of urgency in that.
Do any of our messages deeply resonate with 55% donor attrition across the nonprofit sector?
Like most things, there’s effective urgency and ineffective urgency. And even when effective, there needs to be more than just that if you want to create a compelling fundraising message. Things like hopeful stories with problems the donor cares about and can help solve by contributing. But I don’t think dropping urgency as a key component of our fundraising formula is going to have a positive outcome, even if more and more is feeling urgent. It just makes those other factors that much more important.
People do need a reason to respond. Now. To you. Everyone has to make choices between many compelling causes. Urgency doesn’t need to take the form of the type of Sturm and Drang of which Seth speaks. It can’t be fabricated urgency. Truth is important. And if your doors are about to close, it’s fair to say so. But a challenge grant also establishes urgency. As does the end of the tax year. As does the fact that the holidays are fast approaching, and food is needed to serve holiday meals. I wouldn’t abandon using urgency in fundraising appeals. Maybe just abandon the screaming. That’s what people are tired of.
Two things coming out of comments so far – particularly out of Matthew’s – urgency and goal proximity. We know goal proximity is powerful too; I’ve seen it time and again where a response curve goes vertical as a deadline is looming and the goal looks achievable. People want wins, and want to be part of wins, and do we do enough as fundraisers to give them enough wins with us to keep giving? Or are we the disappointing home team that the dedicated fans will stick with, but the ‘glory supporters’ will turn away from? (Nothing wrong with being a glory supporter, btw, in this analogy – it’s just about differing types of motivation).
It’s in the message. If all you do is “Give or the kitten gets it” fundraising, you fail on two fronts: 1.) by creating a disconnect with your donors, who stop listening, stop giving, stop believing; 2.) in losing donors, your beneficiaries lose too. Quality and content mix are key: sometimes things really are urgent, and urgency is a good thing. As Matthew and Adrian and Claire point out, goals, challenge/matching grants, deadlines, all good. And Amy’s not being able to make payroll is a brilliant example of donor-irrelevant (and donor-destructive) urgency: e.g., the end of your fiscal year. (Fiscal years confuse the hell out of everyone anyway.) If it’s truly urgent, or if from time to time you have a match that adds urgency, fantastic. However, Chicken Little syndrome serves no one. Sometimes you are simply telling an emotional story and asking people to give: if it resonates, and you tell it right, they get the urgency without you sledgehammering them in the face with it. Then when something really is on fire, they’ll trust you an awful lot more.
Agree with Lisa (of course). You can only hold so many “fire sales” before your organization is seen as incompetent and untrustworthy.
Does your cause really matter? Then it’s probably urgent in some way to someone – just not a way involving dead kittens.