The real limited resource isn’t money.  Sure, budgets are tight for most.  But if you found a magic box where you put one dollar in and got two dollars out immediately, I’ll wager phrases like “hiring freeze,” “unbudgeted expense,” and “budgeting cycle” would be thrown out the window pretty quickly.

(Also, you’d have to decide whether that was a business-use magic box or a personal-use magic box…)

So budgets are always available for the right effort.  How about on the donor side?  Yes, the #1 reason donors say they lapse is that they could no longer afford to give (per Adrian  Sargeant’s research).

But what does that mean?  One of the great pleasures of reading through tens of thousands of pieces of donor feedback each year is you get great stories.  One comment was from a woman who said she was eating her cat’s cat food to save money because God had called on her to give generously to this charity.

Thankfully, this charity did the right thing, calling this donor to persuade her that they could do with a smaller monthly gift from her so she could eat food intended for humans.

But the point stands – most of us have trade-offs we could make if we wanted to give more to charity or to more charities.  The limitation isn’t usually money.

The real limited resource isn’t communications.  A bit behind on your fundraising goal?  Write another email or mail piece; if it’s quantity you are after, it’s very easy to do.  You can use our Year-End Mad Libs email generator if you need.  Or, if it’s not year-end, forward the last email you did with a short intro:

Dear [first name],

I wanted to make sure you saw my last email, because things are really super duper urgent.  You see, Timmy’s trapped under the combine harvester again.  We need your support to help Timmy and boys like him.  Can you chip in $5 today?

Thank you in advance for your support,
June Lockhart
President, Lassie International

Granted, the long-term impact of a reminder email is negative and most of the revenues from a new mail piece will be cannibalized from your existing pieces.  But the pop in immediate revenue should give you enough time to update your resume and flee.

The limited resource is time and attention: yours and your donors’.  With apologies to Elvis and Willie Nelson, other than our cat-food consumer above, we are not always on our donors’ minds.  Most of their time is spent on things other than charities; even of the time spent thinking about charities, only a portion is spent on you.

There are only two ways to deal with this limited resources: capture more of your donors’ attention or do more with the attention you have.  For the former, on Monday, we talked about increasing your value proposition as necessary to increasing giving.  The same for using our donor’s most precious resource – their time.  They need to know you will be relevant to them and worth spending time with.  For the latter, to do more with the attention you have, you are working to reduce friction.  Part of the take-off of monthly giving is because of an implied contract between you and the donor: we will make it very easy for you to do even more of the good you seek to do in the world.

The challenge is that all of this takes its toll on your limited time and attention resources.  It’s harder to do different pitches for different donor identities, set up  processes to capture feedback and donor knowledge, and do the testing that assures your communications are maximizing their chance of getting a donation.

So what are you doing that isn’t making things either easier or better for your donors?  And can you get rid of that so your donors don’t have to get rid of you?

Nick