Support for this show is brought to you by our friends at Bloomerang. Bloomerang offers donor management and online fundraising software that helps small to medium nonprofits, like First Tee of Greater Akron, a nonprofit that empowers kids and teens through the game of golf. After just one year with Bloomerang they doubled their unique donors, improved donor stewardship, and raised more funds. To listen to the full interview with First Tee of Greater Akron visit bloomerang.com/nonprofit-nation .
Are you having trouble growing your fundraising program and expanding your donor base? If your nonprofit's growth has flattened out, it’s most likely a result of a belief - or several - rather than a tactic or a strategy.
I was thrilled to be able to talk to one of the world's most sought-after fundraising expert, Steven Screen, about this common fundraising problem.
Steven is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its must-read industry blog. With over 25 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and always driven by the data.
Topics we cover:
Connect with Steven:
About Julia Campbell, the host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast:
Named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell (she/hers) is an author, coach, and speaker on a mission to make the digital world a better place.
She wrote her book, Storytelling in the Digital Age: A Guide for Nonprofits, as a roadmap for social change agents who want to build movements using engaging digital storytelling techniques. Her second book, How to Build and Mobilize a Social Media Community for Your Nonprofit, was published in 2020 as a call-to-arms for mission-driven organizations to use the power of social media to build movements.
Julia’s online courses, webinars, and keynote talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking and how to do effective marketing in the digital age.
Take Julia’s free nonprofit masterclass, 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media That Converts
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Support for this show is brought to you by our friends at Bloomerang. Bloomerang offers donor management and online fundraising software that helps small to medium nonprofits, like First Tee of Greater Akron, a nonprofit that empowers kids and teens through the game of golf. After just one year with Bloomerang they doubled their unique donors, improved donor stewardship, and raised more funds. To listen to the full interview with First Tee of Greater Akron visit bloomerang.com/nonprofit-nation .
Are you having trouble growing your fundraising program and expanding your donor base? If your nonprofit's growth has flattened out, it’s most likely a result of a belief - or several - rather than a tactic or a strategy.
I was thrilled to be able to talk to one of the world's most sought-after fundraising expert, Steven Screen, about this common fundraising problem.
Steven is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its must-read industry blog. With over 25 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and always driven by the data.
Topics we cover:
Connect with Steven:
About Julia Campbell, the host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast:
Named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell (she/hers) is an author, coach, and speaker on a mission to make the digital world a better place.
She wrote her book, Storytelling in the Digital Age: A Guide for Nonprofits, as a roadmap for social change agents who want to build movements using engaging digital storytelling techniques. Her second book, How to Build and Mobilize a Social Media Community for Your Nonprofit, was published in 2020 as a call-to-arms for mission-driven organizations to use the power of social media to build movements.
Julia’s online courses, webinars, and keynote talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking and how to do effective marketing in the digital age.
Take Julia’s free nonprofit masterclass, 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media That Converts
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Julia Campbell 0:00
Hi everyone. Support for this show is brought to you by our friends at Bloomerang. Bloomerang offers donor management and online fundraising software that helps small to medium nonprofits. Like First Tee of greater Akron, a nonprofit that empowers kids and teens through the game of golf. And after just one year with Bloomerang, they doubled their unique donors, improved donor stewardship and raised more funds. Now to listen to the full interview with First Tee of greater Akron, visit bloomerang.com/nonprofit-nation-bloomerang.com/nonprofit-nation. Or click the link in the show notes. Thanks. And let's get to the show. Hello, and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. And I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently Find Your Voice. Definitively grow your audience and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie, or an experienced professional, who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of nonprofit nation. I am so thrilled that you're joining me today I am your host, Julia Campbell. Today we are going to talk about what to do when your fundraising results fall flat. And why this is most likely a result of beliefs about fundraising rather than something tactical that you're doing. And today, I have a long way to guess people have actually asked me, Steven, when you're going to be on and recommended you several times. So finally today, I have Steven Screen on the podcast. Steven is co founder of the better Fundraising Company and lead author of his blog with over 25 years fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He's a second generation fundraiser, a past winner of the direct mail package of the year, and data driven. So welcome to the podcast Steven.
Steven Screen 2:43
thank you, Julia, it's nice to be here. It's a privilege.
Julia Campbell 2:47
And we were talking a little bit earlier and I said I was going to ask you about starting your nonprofit journey. And how many of my guests say that it was accidental, and they fell into it. And you said you have a little bit of a different story. So I'm excited to hear it. I'm lucky
Steven Screen 3:01
I'm lucky to be a second generation fundraiser. My dad was a professional fundraiser. So I knew growing up that that was a career. His experience was that in the starting in the late 60s, he was at one of the agencies that helped a whole bunch of organizations go national, using mass media effectively for the first time for branding and awareness, and then direct response fundraising in the mail, and TV and radio. So I grew up knowing that all of those things were possible. And there was a bunch of, you know, just really good thinking about fundraising in the water that I grew up in that was born out of, you know, sending out millions of pieces of mail and knowing which type worked best and spending million dollars on millions of dollars on TV shows and knowing what types of shows were better than others. What time slots worked better than others. I was very fortunate to sort of be raised in this environment where it's really clear that there was a good, rigorous science behind what works best in fundraising, especially in a direct response context. Tons and tons and tons of testament.
Julia Campbell 4:12
I love that. So tell me about what you do now. And that you're do a lot of direct response, marketing and fundraising now as well.
Steven Screen 4:20
Yeah, so better fundraising, helps small to medium sized nonprofits, do better direct response fundraising and have better overall fundraising strategy in terms of majors and grants and fundraising comms? That's what we do. It's all born at a testing for what works best versus what is going to work okay, but not as well. And it's a joy to do. I used to work with big, large national organizations and found that I get, I get a lot more pleasure helping an organization sort of increased by 20% as opposed to being part of a team of Seven people helping an organization increased by half a percent. There's nothing wrong with that, it's great when a half a percent means an additional 10 million bucks. Awesome. But boy, it's fun to watch the transformation of an organization that goes from raising, say, 300,000 to a million. That's what excites me about this work.
Julia Campbell 5:18
Well, I love that. And I have been a huge fan of your newsletter, the better fundraising company newsletter, which is incredibly inspiring, you send it your blog posts, and I almost feel about it, I'm gonna give you a very high compliment I feel about it, like I feel about Seth Golden's email newsletter, where I always think of something differently. So it's not just a list of how tos, and five ways to tweak your copy, although there is some of that. But it's a lot of thinking differently, and examining what's really holding you back rather than just like, here's like the shiny new tech tool. So what I really wanted to talk about today is a is a particular post that you wrote, I want to really break it down and talk about how small nonprofits can start to make movement in this area. But if the growth of fundraising has flattened, so you are known for writing this effective copy this wonderful, effective, compelling fundraising copy for getting your clients these like dramatic transformational results. But sometimes it's not the copy or the tools. And in this post, you wrote, If the growth of your fundraising has flattened out, it's most likely a result of a belief that's holding you back. So what did you What did you mean by that?
Steven Screen 6:38
Well, first of all, this is this is fun to focus on. Because, yes, you know, three edits to make to your next letter are going to help some people raise some more money with their next letter. But ultimately, I think it's changing how people think about fundraising and helping them know what's possible in fundraising, that results in biggest jumps in performance is almost always changing a belief that moves an organization to the next level, as opposed to changing a tactic. So all that said, if results are flat, you right definition of insanity, doing the same thing again, and expecting different results that happens all the time in nonprofits, we sort of don't tend to realize that we were perfectly designed to raise the amount of money we raised last year. And if we want to raise a different amount of money, we're going to have to make meaningful changes to something that we're doing. What are the things that can be changed? And specifically, what I was trying to address in that post was, what are the things that organizations sort of have beliefs around that they can't change that they actually can?
Julia Campbell 7:45
Okay, so what kinds of beliefs prevent us from fundraising effectively?
Steven Screen 7:50
Yeah, well, let's see, three or four core ones off the top my head, we can't be asking our donors for support any more than we currently are.
Julia Campbell 8:00
They're fatigued.
Steven Screen 8:01
Yeah, the mythical donor fatigue. Number two is, our voice is core to who we are, and we cannot change it. Oh, I love that one. Another one would be that we can't share any needs being faced by our beneficiaries, our organization. Another one, I go deeper, but right, these are workers to me, I've taught my head is that complaints are bad. And we have to manage our work so that we don't get any complaints.
Julia Campbell 8:30
Oh, so we don't get that one email from our 15,000 person email list that says, I disagree with you. But the other 1999 people agree with you.
Steven Screen 8:42
Or two unsubscribes? Yeah, reasons. 15 unsubscribes. If we manage towards everybody being happy, we are managing towards having a smaller impact.
Julia Campbell 8:51
Oh, my gosh, yes. So there's four. I think we should unpack these four. I absolutely love these four. Let's unpack donor fatigue. So why do organizations think this way? And how can we overcome it?
Steven Screen 9:06
Organizations think this way for a whole slew of reasons. Number one, nobody really likes fundraising. So it's already forcing us to be vulnerable and awkward. So anytime you get bad feedback, and that can be a lot of nose. It can be a lot of nothings. It can be complaints. Anytime you get bad feedback in a position where you're already vulnerable, you think, Oh, well, I'm doing this too much. Another thing is that most smaller nonprofits are only in touch with a small segment of their audience of their donors. But they've got a larger circle of folks who are outside the core who they're not talking with. And they assume that anybody who says anything in the core speaks for everybody on the outer group.
Julia Campbell 9:46
Oh my gosh, so true.
Steven Screen 9:48
And that's just not true. Because in the core, for instance, if I send you four pieces of direct mail over the course of the year and your core, you're going to open all four, but if I if you're not core, you're maybe going to open to And that's still pretty good. So the core is like, oh my god, we're sending so much fundraising. But the folks outside the Corps, like, you know, I almost never hear from those people, you got to be able to do that. Because our sector has expanded so rapidly in the past 30 years, there hasn't been a lot of great fundraising training. So most people, small organizations have no idea that you can send out 16 appeal letters, 10 printed newsletters and 50 fundraising emails a year and be doing great. They don't think that's even possible. Yet. That's happening every day in the top couple percentage of organizations and those donors are giving to small organizations, too. So you put all that together, and people are afraid, and they're like, oh, donor fatigue, it must be happening. Also, Can I Can I say something that's slightly
Julia Campbell 10:44
provocative? Yes. This can be controversial.
Steven Screen 10:47
This can be off putting but saying that it's donor fatigue, blames the donors. Whereas you could say, You know what, maybe our fundraising isn't resonating. You could say, gosh, we're not we're not even getting their attention. So by calling it donor fatigue, your organization doesn't have to take any responsibility for his fundraising being ineffective.
Julia Campbell 11:07
Preach. Absolutely. And I teach marketing, same thing. Oh, no one's paying attention. Oh, it's because of all the digital clutter? Or it's because they have attention spans of a goldfish, or it's because it's an election, or it's because of whatever, whatever. But how about we shine the spotlight on ourselves and say, maybe what we're doing is ineffective. That's so important.
Steven Screen 11:33
We should at least you have to look at that as a possibility.
Julia Campbell 11:36
Mm hmm. I love the second belief. I believe it was something around we don't want to share needs, we don't want to talk about the real need, and share these stories. How can we address this?
Steven Screen 11:49
Well, I mean, that's another set of internal beliefs that lead you to that conclusion. And there are some reasons where there are certain certain needs and certain stories we we shouldn't be sharing. But as a rule, I think organizations often sort of take it too far. You could look at their fundraising and not know that anybody is in pain or hurting today, you could not know that there are real problems in the world that need to be solved. And donors, as a rule respond to problems. One of my core beliefs is that donors give to make change. And so if you say we're doing good work, will you give to help us continue our good work, that has said to the donor that no change will happen when you give a gift, because we're doing it now. And we're going to continue it, no change. But if you say donor, there is a big problem in the world today, and good people, like you aren't needed to solve it, will you give a gift so that one person will no longer have this problem, then there has been real, meaningful change. And more people are willing to say yes, and give you money, when you say that their gift will cause real, meaningful change. So anyway, that's sort of data in the application of this. But the unwillingness to share needs, holds many, many organizations back from raising more money.
Julia Campbell 13:07
Wow. And by the way, anyone listening, Steven and his amazing blogger blogging team, they talk a lot about how to reframe the ask in these kinds of ways, specifically, on the blog, I know that I've read this framing the problem, and not just simply we did great work this year. But what is going to happen next year, and why is your support still needed? And hey, this is still a problem. Like, yeah, we're we're doing good work. But we still need people like you to invest in this problem. So that's so important. I also love that other belief that you discussed the something about, we don't want to change our voice. We want to stay true to our voice. Yeah. Can you talk more about that?
Steven Screen 13:47
Sure. What I want people to realize is that all of our voices change when our contexts change. The best way I can think of to illustrate this is sort of like if you're writing a TV show, you write knowing that you have the visual on the TV to be helping you tell the story, then you take that same writer and that writer is writing for a radio program, where there is no picture, there is only the theater of the mind. The writer writes differently, because she knows that the context that the message is being received in is different. So what we need to do at nonprofits is remember the different contexts that our messages come in our message and our voice can be can and should be different at an event where we have someone's undivided attention for an hour and 15 minutes, versus a piece of direct mail where I've got someone's attention for maybe five seconds. You don't have time for all of the things that you like in your voice in the context of direct response fundraising. So rather than trying to figure out how to fit your voice into a context, you want to be trying to figure out what does our voices need to be like to succeed in this con text? And that is a different question, it gets a different answer. And frankly, it ends up with more successful fundraising.
Julia Campbell 15:06
This is so powerful. So the fourth belief, which is something that I feel like I talk about every single day, we don't want to get any complaints. Now, I completely can relate to this. Because if I send out an email newsletter, I'm sure you get this to Steven, and I get one person coming by, although I think I've weeded all those people out by now, anyone that's going to be offended by anything that I say. But someone comes back to me and says something really nasty, like that really rarely happens, or just says, This isn't relevant to me, I'm unsubscribing. You know, you think about it, and it really affects you. Because you're not listening to all of the people that are saying great things or are just being quiet, you know, or just kind of being silent and reading what you're saying. So say I'm a small shop fundraiser. And my boss, or my board is saying, well, we don't want to get those unsubscribes. We don't want to get any complaints. We don't want to offend anybody, we don't turn anybody off, what would you what advice would you give to them?
Steven Screen 16:06
It's hard for me to answer that question. Because like, I've been doing this so long. And so people pay attention to me differently when I go into a board meeting. And as opposed to a person who has been doing fundraising for two years, and doesn't have sort of the experience to back it up. But as a rule, I would say that, okay, organizations, if we are managing to get no complaints, and no unsubscribes, we will be creating vanilla communications that are paying attention, that aren't particularly memorable or motivating. That is probably going to mean bad things for fundraising, or at least places a cap on how much we can raise from the people who are willing to pay attention to us. Now, let's look at those really big organizations. One in our backyard here is an organization called Worldvision. I think they're raising 1.8 billion a year, they have a whole department to handle complaints and donor issues. And they are thrilled to have that department. Because the part of the human condition is somebody is going to dislike what you say, no matter who you are, what you say how nice it is. So as you get bigger, you're going to get complaints, you're going to get pushback, these things aren't going to happen. And so you need to take that as a good sign that you're getting bigger and affecting more people. Nobody gets big and never gets complaints. Lots of people never get complaints and stay small. The way I think about this is sort of the difference between a fee and a fine. A fine is something that you pay, when you've done something wrong, you pay a fine after you get a speeding ticket because you've broken the law. But a fee is something that you pay, in order to achieve an outcome, I will pay a fee to go into Disneyland, I will pay a fee to get a new computer. And most nonprofits experienced complaints as find it is internally taken as something wrong. Whereas I want them to take it as a fee that you gladly pay, because you're doing fundraising is interesting and motivating, and is out there making change as opposed to vanilla.
Julia Campbell 18:10
I love that the fee versus the fine. It's just the cost of doing business. If you're making change, yes, the cost of doing what we do.
Steven Screen 18:21
And it's Oh, it's also really good to remember that a lot of people's complaints that come in, it's not about the fundraising. The fundraising revealed something in the donor that the donor doesn't like, I don't like that people are homeless today. But the fundraising did not cause that tension. The fundraising just revealed that tension. And if we are going to have a big impact as organizations in the world, we have to be pointing out tension that exists in the world, and saying what great people are needed to solve this. And some people's response to that tension is dislike complaints, leaving your mailing list, but a lot of people's response to that tension is to generously give gifts of time and attention to help your organization have a greater impact. But it's both and you're gonna have both. There's no way around it.
Julia Campbell 19:09
There's no way around it. Wow, I feel like I need to pick your brain for the small nonprofit that is listening. That's the majority of my my listeners. Now when you said you gave that sample calendar of communications and in a previous answer, and I'm sure a lot of people listening or just thinking like blew their mind. What was it 55 email communications 10 email newsletters and 15 Mail appeals five mailings?
Steven Screen 19:39
52 fundraising emails, 16 printed appeal letters and 10 printed newsletters,
Julia Campbell 19:47
Yes. How can we convince the small nonprofits listening to communicate more and ask more often?
Steven Screen 19:55
Let's see. All I think we can do is encourage them to try and make it easy for them to do so. So the encouraged to try is that, hey, you're perfectly designed to raise how much you used, you've been raising, try some new stuff, the easiest way to raise more money is to send another appeal, whether it's an email or snail mail, that is the easiest, simplest way. The we live in a fundraising friendly world. And your appeals don't have to be perfect. They don't have to take six weeks to you know, write and design, your donors know that there are problems in the world and would love to help solve them. And oftentimes, they just need to be reminded that step number one is to sort of lower the emotional stakes and say, just try it. Because any negative consequences that you fear from trying something that doesn't work are usually so tiny. And then try to make it easy. Like for a lot of organizations, I have them for small organizations with super minimal resources, I have them set take last year's year end letter and send that out again, don't change anything, just send it out again, and then write another year and letter for this year that's a little shorter, and send that to. And so now with the effort of writing one more letter, you've sent two letters, and you're gonna raise about one and a third as much. So you're all of a sudden, now you've got a urine campaign with two letters, you're raising more money, and you didn't have to do any more effort. Okay, that's a good deal. And then to the worthless raise more thing that I started, that is designed to make it really, really easy for small nonprofits to in usually an hour or two, to create a powerful piece of fundraising. That's the whole reason that product exists,
Julia Campbell 21:43
work less, raise more and lower the emotional stakes. I can't tell you how much I love that. And I've worked on several urine campaigns and the amount of edits and the amount of literally tweaking one word and one image and one subject line and one this where there's no real magic formula unless you test it unless you see what happens unless you are actively sending out more communications, because how else will you know what people are going to respond to? If you're only sending one? I've had clients that come to me, they said one newsletter recorder, one email newsletter recorder. And I think if someone deletes that they don't hear from you for half a year. Yep. And then you're wondering why they've forgotten about you.
Steven Screen 22:36
I mean, I know this is hard for a small shop organizations. But one of my planning principles is I help organizations great annual plans is to never go dark. Just never go dark, at least once a month be in front of your donors. And that can seem like a lot. But think of it instead as a generous choice on behalf of your beneficiaries to always be showing up in your donors lives, as opposed to being the friend who shows up every six months, and wants the same level of intimacy that you have when you're you know, you're spending every weekend together. And the same thing is true in our in our fundraising communications. It's not exactly true. But the principle holds.
Julia Campbell 23:13
And that's a very important mindset shift too. For people that think they're bothering their donors. The way you're framing it is generous communication, showing up generously for someone that wants to be involved with you that has raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you. And yeah, you know, you think target doesn't, you know, email me all the time, because I've raised my hand and said, I want to hear from you. You think that you know, there's other businesses that they don't take advantage of that relationship. But I think for nonprofits who are so worried about, we're just so worried about overplaying our hand that we don't play anything at all. And we end up going dark when we shouldn't go dark.
Steven Screen 23:55
And that all goes back to fears around asking fears around being vulnerable. And then sort of not doing the math on things like, hey, you know, I know we emailed our donors last week, but actually, our open rate is 25%. So we is 75% of our donors did not hear from us last week.
Julia Campbell 24:16
People think they post on social media, and they send an email and all of their donor saw it. And then I have to break into them that, you know, it's 2% of people on social media side and maybe 25% of your donors actually opened it and well, that's funny.
Steven Screen 24:31
That gets towards the other thing I want small shops to know and again, this is this is again, advice tuned to help them be more comfortable with not having to feel like oh mg I have to do so much more work. And that is the biggest loss lesson from marketing to fundraising is the power of repetition. When I used to buy radio ads all over the country, the goal was to have a person hear the same ads three times in a week. And the board never complain. And when they heard the second ad on Tuesday after hearing it once on on Monday, but we that happens for some reason all the time in nonprofits, again, all because of vulnerability and fears around asking too much and all that stuff. But a lot of people don't ask until they've seen your message three or four times. So sending it once that's opened by a quarter of your email file, 75% said that people didn't get the message. And of those 25 a whole big group of them weren't convinced because you didn't talk to them often enough. So send the same message multiple times send the same appeal two months in a row, Jeff Brooks has a great story about accidentally sending the same appeal in April that the organization sent in March, the print shop grabbed the wrong file. And so they sent the exact same letter with no changes had the wrong date on it, right? It had a March date, even though it was being mailed in April. And the letter did better the second time than the first. So to bring the conversation full circle right there. We have all these beliefs about how fundraising work and what we can and can't say what we can and can't do how often we can ask. And if we can take those core beliefs and start to question them. I mean, I can go a little deeper than that if you want. But yes, that's where the big that's where the big growth is.
Julia Campbell 26:09
Yes, let's please let's go deeper.
Steven Screen 26:11
Okay, so I use the, I'm sure you know, Brene Brown?
Julia Campbell 26:14
Yes.
Steven Screen 26:15
Her books are not about fundraising, but they're totally about fundraising.
Julia Campbell 26:20
I've always thought that I've always talked about vulnerability.
Steven Screen 26:24
That's exactly right. vulnerability. She says vulnerability is the glue that keeps human relationships together. And so think about that, from a point of view of a nonprofit that is never vulnerable. Right? The nonprofit is things are going great. Thanks so much for your previous support. We helped so many people, would you help us continue our good work? There's zero vulnerability there. Nobody needs any help. It's all going great. So there is no glue, keeping the donor and the organization together. So when you inject some vulnerability, hey, some of our beneficiaries need help right now, actually, hey, our organization is $30,000. Short at the end of this month, could you help works like crazy, because there's vulnerability now the donor feels needed. Anyway, her whole thing around the stories that we tell ourselves? Have you ever talked about that on the podcast? Or I haven't
Julia Campbell 27:09
I have not talked about it on the podcast, but I'm very excited to so I love this. Go ahead.
Steven Screen 27:15
Great. Well, so the way she illustrates this, which I think is brilliant is she and her husband are at home on a Friday night. And her husband goes over to the fridge and opens up the fridge, looks around for a second sort of size, resign idli closes the door and sort of slumped next to the fridge. And she starts to get all fired up. Right? Because I mean, right? That's it's it's Brene, there's going to be a little anger and defensiveness in the, in her reaction to this, which was these disappointed. She's not the kind of wife that keeps a full fridge. Oh, she he hasn't done a good job of getting the milk and stuff and taking care of her husband this week. And so she shares this with her husband and her husband's like, What are you talking about? We decided I was going to the grocery store this week, I drove by it twice. That size that I had was me going. I didn't do it this week. So Brene talks about the story she was telling herself was this one. That's when that's when the real story was not at all. And so nonprofits, the stories that we tell ourselves, really affect how we fundraise. And so first, we have to become aware of the stories that we tell ourselves. One is, you know what, if we asked one more time, our donors are going to leave in a thundering herd because donor fatigue, or the oh, if we have more than two unsubscribes per email, that means everybody is about to leave, as opposed to going hold on. We have 10,000 people on the email list and we can afford to lose to every email for the next 37 years. Right. Like they don't do the math. There's there's all this fear base. So anyway, let's figure out what your stories are. Find some alternative stories. Hey, maybe we could ask more. There are organizations that send 10 appeals a year. Why are we worried about three? Let's explore that. And then third step is to try the new story out in a low stakes environment. And try an email that is vulnerable. Try one conversation with a last major donor. Where are the places where the stakes are low? That we can try these new stories and see how they work.
Julia Campbell 29:23
Thank you so much, Steven, this it's been fantastic. I wish that I could have seen you speak at the storytelling conference. Are you speaking anywhere coming up?
Steven Screen 29:33
I have nothing on the calendar right now. Which is sort of like a little sad. But you know what? That's great. I don't I don't
Julia Campbell 29:39
Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. I feel like when I don't have things on the calendar, I get sad, but then I also get happy thinking, Oh, I can be home and making bigger impact doing, you know, writing or doing something else. But I hope that we get to meet in person. I would love to have more of these conversations. I just think they're so important. Where can people connect with you and learn more about working with you?
Steven Screen 30:00
Better fundraising.com If you go there, and you can subscribe to our blog, which we publish almost every Tuesday and Thursday. And then we also have a free resource Friday where we try to give away some resource every Friday, I'm on Twitter at Stephen screen, and then find me. For small organizations, it's go to work less raise more.com. We have a membership program there, where for $40 a month, you get access to tons and tons and tons of training. It's video based training with first drafts already written for you to help you make really helpful, customize fundraising for your organization. It's priced so that anybody can do it for a month, and take the trainings and make the stuff. And then I do a live q&a Every Friday. So people are able to come on and ask questions and get good feedback. Those are the main ways, Julia.
Julia Campbell 30:52
Okay, I will put the all the links in the shownotes for everyone. And just thank you so much for being here for being vulnerable for sharing all of your wonderful advice. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Steven.
Steven Screen 31:04
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for doing a great podcast that's inclusive and bringing a lot of voices I love it.
Julia Campbell 31:16
Well, hey there, I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show, and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to. And then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode. But until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell seven, seven. Keep changing the world your nonprofit unicorn
Transcribed by https://otter.ai