10 Secrets to Blowing Past Your Matching Grant Fundraising Goals – Especially in the Covid Era Tips to Elevate Your Email and Direct Mail Match Campaigns Matching grants are a tried and true fundraising strategy. And for good reason. Whatever you give, the gift is doubled (or tripled, or whatever multiple you have secured). The […]
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Tag: email fundraising
How Long Should Your Nonprofit Emails Be?
How Long Should Your Nonprofit Emails Be? Plus: 5-Step Quick Guide to Structuring Emails so the Length Doesn’t Matter More often than not, if my business or nonprofit clients have a question about emails I’ve written for them, it’s about the length. They think the emails are too long. My response is always the same. […]
GiveBIG 2020 – Everything You Need to Know for this Washington-Only Spring Fundraising Campaign
GiveBIG 2020 – Everything You Need to Know for this Washington-Only Spring Fundraising Campaign See Below for 7 GiveBIG Fundraising Campaign Ideas If you are a Washington-based nonprofit, you are probably eligible to participate in the 10th annual one-day GiveBIG fundraiser on May 6th, 2020. If you haven’t heard of it, GiveBIG began ten years […]
14 Fundraising Writing Tips – How to Raise More Money without Spending More
14 Fundraising Writing Tips – How to Raise More Money without Spending More If you’re doing your own fundraising writing, you probably wonder sometimes if you’re doing it ‘right.’ Or if there even is a ‘right’ way to do it. Perhaps a better way to think of it is, there are more effective ways to […]
How to Motivate People to Read Your Company’s or Nonprofit’s Emails
How to Motivate Customers and Supporters to Read Your Company’s or Nonprofit’s Emails The Opening Sentence: The Most Important Part of Your Email (TONS of examples included!) Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, the subject line seems like the most important part of an email. After all, if they don’t open it, they […]
Off-Season Fundraising Ideas that Deepen Donor Loyalty
Off-Season Fundraising Ideas that Deepen Donor Loyalty 9 Things Mid-size and Small Nonprofits Can Do the Rest of the Year If you’re like most nonprofits, your best months for fundraising come at the end of the year. Other times of the year could be called the off-season for fundraising – times when fewer people give, […]
Help! Our Nonprofit Is Too Small to Write Emails Consistently
Help! Our Nonprofit Is Too Small to Write Emails Consistently Your Guide to Steady Donor Communication and Fundraising Through Email Email remains the single best media to frequently communicate with your donors and supporters. It costs nothing to send them. You can vary the length, content, purpose, and interactive features with relative ease. You can […]
16 Places You Can (and Should) Be Thanking Donors
16 Places You Can (and Should) Be Thanking Donors 6 Ways Donors Give, and How to Thank Them in Each Situation The data is clear: Thanking your donors early, often, and continuously pays you back many times over. Guidestar reports donor research that found that first-time donors who receive a personal thank you within 2 […]
Why You Should Rarely Use Jargon in Your Fundraising
Why You Should Rarely Use Jargon in Your Fundraising Don’t Let the Jargonasaur Scare Away Your Donors Maybe it’s my background in education, but I can’t stand jargon. I’ll never forget reading about the school board candidates in my voter’s pamphlet one year. One of their descriptions was so packed with industry jargon, buzzwords, and […]
Fundraising Tip: Aim for the Heart, Not the Head
Fundraising Tip: Aim for the Heart, Not the Head Behavior Research Confirms: Donors Don’t Care About Your Facts and Figures A more fun headline for this article might be this: Research confirms that donors don’t care about research. An article in The Guardian examines several research studies of donor behavior and concludes that donors respond […]
Is Giving Tuesday Worth All the Trouble and the Hype?
Is Giving Tuesday Worth All the Trouble and the Hype? 5 Keys to a Successful Giving Tuesday Campaign Is Giving Tuesday worth it? Does it really work? Or is it just another fad that, even though now several years strong, will eventually fade into the online dustbin of history next to Myspace, Aereo, and every […]
8 Clever Ways to Increase Your Nonprofit’s Email Open Rates
8 Clever Ways to Increase Your Nonprofit’s Email Open Rates How to Beat Typical (and Declining) Industry Open Rates According to an annual study from M&R Benchmarks, 13% of all online fundraising revenue in 2018 was driven by email. So the importance of keeping your email open rates as high as possible needs no convincing. […]
Are Your Emails Overdesigned? Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 2
Are Your Fundraising Emails Over-Designed? See How Email Design Affects Donations Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 2 In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content will be reporting on some online fundraising experiments from NextAfter for the next four weeks. See Part 1 – How Much Donation Page Copy Should We […]
How to Create the Perfect Donate Button
How to Create the Perfect Donate Button A Quick Analysis of Color, Size, Placement, and Text for Nonprofit Call to Action Buttons, Plus a Free Button Evaluation The smallest parts of your website can produce the biggest change. Namely, the donate button. One of the missions of ProActive Content is to find ways to boost […]
How Nonprofits Can Increase Open Rates in 7 Seconds
How Nonprofits Can Increase Email Open Rates in 7 Seconds Changing Who Your Email is From Can Increase Opens by 18% Want to increase open rates for your nonprofit’s emails? There are three ways to do it that aren’t overly technical: 1) Write better subject lines 2) Add good pre-headers 3) Change your sender […]
Donors Who Don’t Get It & That You Can Afford to Lose
Donors Who Don’t Get It & That You Can Afford to Lose Don’t Let the Fear of Losing a Few Donors Cause You to Lose Many There’s a lot of fear in fundraising. If we send out too many emails, people will unsubscribe. If we ask for money too often, people will get angry. If […]
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs Part 2: Fundraising Copywriting Smackdown: Verbs vs Adjectives See Part 1: 4 Copywriting Tips on How to Lasso Your Reader’s Attention with Verbs What language best engages readers and motivates them to give your cause How do you tell fundraising stories well enough to evoke a […]
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs Part 1: 4 Fundraising Copywriting Tips on How to Use Verbs to Lasso Your Reader’s Attention “The little boy went far from home to look for food.” “The little boy traveled far from home to search for food.” Great fundraising copywriting shouldn’t be complicated. In fact, if […]
ProActive Content Is Speaking at the 2019 AFP NW Forum on Strategic Fundraising
ProActive Content Is Speaking at the 2019 AFP NW Forum on Strategic Fundraising Come Visit My Booth and Supercharge Your Fundraising Skills I’m pleased to announce that Dan Magill from ProActive Content has been chosen as a speaker at the upcoming Association of Fundraising Professionals Northwest’s annual Forum on Strategic Fundraising. The 2-day event happens […]
How to Write ‘Can’t Look Away’ Headlines for Nonprofits
How to Write ‘Can’t Look Away’ Headlines for Nonprofits 6-Step Guide Reveals How to Engage and Inspire Your Readers to Action In this media-saturated age, getting anyone to read your nonprofit’s content and fundraising appeals presents an unending challenge. Each new piece of content you send out requires a fresh motivation to be read by […]
