Why Isn’t Our Fundraising Strategy Working? It Worked for Other Nonprofits!
How the Hidden Barrier of ‘Survivorship Bias’ Leads to Confusing, Frustrating Under-performance
If you’re frustrated or confused about why your fundraising strategy isn’t working even though you read about it in books or articles, saw a webinar, or heard a presentation at a conference and implemented the strategy exactly how they said, you may be about to find the answer.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
The answer is a bit depressing, which is why hardly anyone talks about it. But to not be aware of this hidden, somewhat insidious trick your mind can play on you is to set yourself up for future disappointments.
Here’s the idea:
Everyone loves success stories. This is true in fundraising, just as it’s true in music, fiction writing, medicine, astronomy, business, and dozens of other careers people aspire to that are difficult.
We hear about people who ‘make it’. We read about Bill Gates dropping out of school, so we figure we can do that too and achieve something like what he has. We read about JK Rowling getting rejected over and over for her Harry Potter story before finally being accepted, so we press on with our own book idea, undeterred by failure.
The ‘success culture’ put forth by marketers in almost every category of anything likes to feature people who have made it, and then imply that you can too if you do what they did.
The problem is, most people rarely hear the other kind of story. How many other people have quit school to start a business, but failed? How many other aspiring authors have been rejected over and over, kept working at it, and … still failed, all the way to their deaths?
Thousands.
Perhaps hundreds of thousands.
See why this is a depressing answer?
Survivorship Bias – The Reason You Haven’t Duplicated Someone’s Success
The term for this is ‘survivorship bias,’ and this bias can cause great consternation among fundraisers who see other nonprofits using a particular strategy or fundraising plan, try to replicate it in their context, but still fall far short.
Why isn’t it working for us like it does for them?
Survivorship bias, as Nonprofit Pro puts it, refers to how we focus only on learning from the winners – assuming that because they did it this way, it must be the best – while ignoring all the failed nonprofits who used the exact same strategies and methods.
Image by Simona Robová from Pixabay
Make sense?
How many aspiring football players have toiled away for hours and hours and hours, doing drills, getting coached, doing everything they can to make it to the NFL, but fall short? How many who do that never even make the starting lineup of a college team?
How many aspiring actors have spent years learning their craft, but never seem to land a role or even get an agent?
Thousands. Probably hundreds of thousands.
The uncomfortable reality is, success is never just because of what the person or nonprofit or company does. There is always an element of luck, fortunate timing, meeting the right person at the right time, having the right network, and other factors outside of our control.
Success is hard. A lot harder than the success-story peddlers want to admit.
Don’t Ignore Success Stories Either
This is by no means a call to stop reading success stories. There ARE things those people and organizations are doing and have done that we can learn from. They have figured out something that we have not. They do have habits that are better than ours in many cases, and we can emulate them.
But you must realize that your success isn’t guaranteed even if you do all those things.
In the nonprofit world, Charity: Water is often held up as such a fundraising success story. Countless nonprofits have attempted to apply that successful fundraising strategy to their context. And many of those have come far short of the achievements of Charity: Water.
Why? Because success is hard, and not solely dependent on strategy, execution, and habit.
4 Encouragements for Nonprofits – How to Overcome Survivorship Bias
If you’re frustrated about an underperforming fundraising strategy, if your nonprofit isn’t growing as fast as you would like, or if you’re confused about why doing what other nonprofits are doing isn’t yielding better outcomes, here are four encouragements for how to keep moving forward without getting deluded by success stories.
1. Don’t Do Something Just Because Other Nonprofits Are
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
The herd mentality is so easy to fall into. You’re launching a new website, doing your first Giving Tuesday campaign, entering the direct mail foray, or trying to bolster your fundraising event, so what do you do?
You go look at what other nonprofits are doing. You see something you like, assume it must be working for them, and copy it. If a lot of nonprofits are doing it, then it really must be the right move.
Not necessarily.
Here are some ways we’ve seen this play out:
- Other nonprofit websites have sliders on their home page, so we should too
- Other nonprofits did fine without Giving Tuesday, so we won’t bother with it. It’s just a fad
- Other nonprofits grew big using grants, so we should apply for grants
We could talk about each of these at great length. For example, sliders don’t work. There is testing data to prove it. Yet many persist in using them. (A slider is when you have several images scrolling across the top of your home page, with each having their own call to action button, message, or announcement. It’s a bad move, even though many have used them).
But the main point is – you can’t simply mimic what others are doing, or not doing, just because their organization is bigger than yours.
2. Learn from Success Stories, But Don’t Assume You Can Repeat Their Success
As mentioned earlier, there is a lot to learn from successful organizations and successful people. However, you can probably learn just as much by studying failures.
Know anyone who has closed down their nonprofit? Go interview them for four hours. You’ll probably learn immensely valuable lessons.
See what successful fundraising campaigns are doing. Pay attention to details. How often are they emailing? How quickly do they respond to social media posts? How soon do they send thank you notes, and in what formats? What do they do to maintain a healthy internal culture?
There are powerful lessons to learn about all sorts of things from nonprofits doing things right. But if you copy everything they do, you still might not get the same results.
But there are also some huge nonprofits putting out terrible ads. Stupid nonprofit ads, as Future Fundraising Now calls them.
3. Focus on Data – What Is Working and What Isn’t
There is always more to learn.
Track your email data. Monitor responses from various campaigns. Who is responding? How often?
But also, your data might not be enough. Especially if you’re a small nonprofit, it’s hard to get statistically significant data. So, look at data from other nonprofits. NextAfter has published a number of studies that combine data from hundreds of nonprofits. This data has immense value, because it is based on measured results from direct response fundraising.
ProActive Content uses this data to inform our own fundraising copywriting and consulting that we do for nonprofits.
For example, how much copy is on your donation page? None? A lot? Many, many nonprofits think if it’s too long, no one will read it or give.
But is that true?
Here’s data from a NextAfter study on how much copy should be on your donation page. It’s exceptionally valuable reading… At the end of that post, there are three more analyses of other data.
The reason this kind of data has more value than success stories is because it has been tested, oftentimes repeatedly. When we see the same strategies working over and over in very different times and contexts, we can have more confidence that this really is the best strategy to use.
(In case it wasn’t clear – more copy on your donation page IS better. That’s a fact, based on the data. Not just our opinion because we write donation pages).
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks
Here is the best encouragement of all. Just because Charity: Water doesn’t send out a print newsletter doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. (For the record, we don’t know if they send out a print newsletter).
The point is, just because other nonprofits aren’t using a particular fundraising strategy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Taking risks and trying new things is healthy and can lead to big surprises and discoveries.
The only caveat is, don’t replace what is working with some new risk or unproven fundraising strategy. Because if it doesn’t work, you don’t want to be stuck with a 50% drop in revenue.
Try new things – in moderation. And track them to whatever extent is possible.
For example, suppose your nonprofit sends one email per month and is considering doubling that to two per month. You are hesitant though, because what if a bunch of supporters complain and unsubscribe? But, do you know that will happen? Try it for three months and see what happens. You aren’t going to do irreparable harm.
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