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Your busiest giving season is right around the corner. Are you prepared? In this roundup, I compiled the best year-end fundraising advice from several nonprofit consultants in my network. Use these best practices to get a jumpstart on your year-end planning.

1. What is the biggest mistake you see nonprofits make at end of year?

From Sabrina Walker Hernandez, Founder of Supporting World Hope  and consultant, coach, facilitator, and bestselling author.

The biggest mistake that nonprofits make at the end of year is not building relationships throughout the year with donors. You can do this through face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, volunteer opportunities, seeking feedback, and other communications like social media and events such as roundtables, mixers, and house parties (*not* just fundraising events).

A mistake nonprofits make is jumping in your mailbox or inbox at year end asking for money. Not cool. As a donor it doesn’t inspire me to give. I want to hear from you throughout the year. Share your impact and build that relationship.  Relationship + Results = Recurring Revenue.

2. If you had one piece of advice for successful end-of-year fundraising what would it be?

From Tom Ahern, professional copywriter, coach, author of 8 fundraising books, and town crier for donor love.

Start earlier.

I’ll take Giving Tuesday as my test case. The nonprofit I know that rakes in the most on Giving Tuesday starts prepping its target audience of potential supporters in September — months before the event.

In advertising (the category under which fundraising falls), repetition is your best friend. More repetition produces more response.

3. What is your biggest end-of-year fundraising pet peeve?

From Alice Ferris, CFRE, ACFRE, Founding Partner of GoalBusters, consultant, speaker, trainer and recognized nation-wide for her on-air presence on public television and radio pledge drives.

My biggest end-of-year pet peeve is the number of organizations that title their year-end fundraising as their “year-end appeal.”

I’m mortified by the number of solicitations I receive via email and by post that have in the subject line or on the outer envelope, “It’s our year-end appeal!” Just because you call it that internally doesn’t mean it should be called that publicly.

Tell me why I’m important to why you’re important. Don’t tell me, “Hey, I’m asking you for money!”

Even better, once I received an email that said, “we know you’re getting a lot of year-end appeals, so we’re not going to ask you for money. Instead, we’ll send you a new and improved SPRING appeal!”

My second pet peeve is the number of organizations that feel like their year-end fundraising has to be really heavily designed. Just write me a letter or send me a short email. It’s okay if it’s simple if you’re telling the right story.

4. Are there low hanging fruit strategies that nonprofits tend to ignore or not maximize when it comes to year-end fundraising?

From Julie Cooper, fundraising copywriter, strategist, coach, and trainer at FundraisingWriting.com

When a donor reads your year-end appeal, their brain is working fast to answer this question: “Is this for me?” Your job is to make sure that answer is a resounding “YES!” You can get to “yes” by using personalization in your letters and emails. Here are three tips to help you get started:

1. Use Their Name. Using the donor’s name in your year-end appeal is perhaps the easiest thing you can do to build the relationship. Stay away from “Dear Friend.” After all, you know their name. Just be sure to merge it into your appeal.
2. Vary Donor Segments. While your appeal is essentially the same for all donors, some of the copy should be specific to their giving behavior. So, pick a 3 or 4-line paragraph in your appeal where you can adjust the language to speak to your donor segments – such as active, lapsed, major, and monthly.
3. Vary Gift Amounts. The suggested gift amounts listed in your appeal should be based on the donor’s last gift. Putting the appropriate ask amounts in front of each donor will impact your revenue — now and for years to come!

The more personalized your year-end appeal is, the better chance you’ll keep the donor’s mind and heart engaged. And an engaged donor is a loyal donor! 

5. If you were giving a stressed-out fundraiser a pep talk about end-of-year fundraising what would you tell them?

From Julia Campbell, Speaker, Author, Nonprofit Consultant, creator of the podcast Nonprofit Nation

Just say no to perfectionism.

Content is never going to be perfect, and your social media to do list will never be fully complete. We have to be okay with done and imperfect, as it’s better than simply not done at all!

I don’t mean allowing lazy mistakes and awful content to take over. But you shouldn’t be spending hours designing and tweaking one single Instagram post, or spending hours editing a smartphone video that is going to be 30 seconds long.

Attention to detail is great but perfectionism is a killer. Get that post up. Edit it later if you find a drastic mistake. Test, see what’s working, and do more of that.

6. What’s the most important thing nonprofits should do with new donors they welcome at end of year? 

From the Donor Relations Guru, Lynne Wester renowned international speaker, author, trainer and founder of the Donor Relations Group.

Before they obtain these donors they should build a donor relations plan to retain them!

I see all the time that they’re willing to spend money in acquisition but not retention which is why we have a 23% donor retention rate industry wide.

Put a pause on asking for more money and spend the time and money building the relationship. A donor expects to be thanked and told what their money did WITHOUT another ask smacking them in the face.

We need to be just as strategic thanking and reporting impact as we are asking!

7. How important are matches to end-of-year fundraising? If a nonprofit wants to use a match what’s a realistic deadline to have it nailed down?  

From Rachel Muir, CFRE nonprofit founder, speaker, trainer, coach and founder of The League of Extraordinary Fundraisers.

Matches typically create a 15 – 50 % jump in giving (even if you do them every year) so you’d be nuts to say no to a match for end of year. Moreover, matches often boost average gift size.

If you’re going to mention your match in your direct mail appeal, you need to have it locked down before you go to print.

The most important thing I would stress about matches is always do the math for the donor, no matter how easy. For example: “Your gift of $100 will become $200!” Never say “Double your donation” or “Double your gift.”

After the match is over thank the funder who did the match. They need to know how well you did and that their gift made a difference. And of course, thank your donors! 

8. What’s new this year that should make nonprofits plan and budget for appropriately?

From Sarah Masterson, copywriter, author, and donor communications expert specializing in strategy and copywriting.

It’s a new world! We can’t get away with year-end procrastination anymore. We can no longer be successful with last-minute, patchwork end-of-year campaigns. And that’s good news! The old way was bananas. It was panic, exhaustion, and scarcity. Successful teams are wise and disciplined enough to start NOW.

Yes, right now. Put your goals, priorities, and budget in writing today. Book your year-end consultants, creatives, and vendors before August ends. (The best copywriters and designers have a full dance card by September.) Bring your year-end crew together long before the leaves start to turn — defining your strategy, roles and timeline. Give your creatives the time they really need to serve you well.

Start poolside with a margarita. Just start now with this year-end fundraising advice. It’s how you’ll make beautiful things happen in November and December, without losing your mind or leaving money on the table.

The post Roundup: The Best Year-End Fundraising Advice From Nonprofit Consultants appeared first on Bloomerang.

This article originally appeared in Bloomerang. See the original article here.

When was the last time you received a handwritten letter? Not an invitation or thank you card, I’m talking about a hand­written, personal letter written on paper. If you’re like most Americans, it’s probably been a while.

The art of writing letters, and writing in general, has fallen by the way­side. We live in a world of smart phones, emails, text messages, Zoom, and LinkedIn. Handwriting feels foreign to most of us. When we do write, our sentences are chock-full of acronyms and errors, and our penman­ship is atrocious. We dodge opportunities to write whenever we can, though we never cease to smile when we open our mailboxes and dis­cover a handwritten letter addressed to us.

Writing is a skill learned early in life, and most of us disliked writing and grammar classes as much as we disliked eating vegetables. Our distaste for writing followed us into adulthood because we still suffer from the same writing inadequacies we had in childhood. We suffer writer’s block. We struggle to organize thoughts. We spell poorly, and we know less grammar and sentence structure now than when we played tetherball. It’s all very humbling.

Why is good writing important?

Good writing, and I mean good writing, should be a top priority at your nonprofit because good writing is a tool of tremendous power, influence, and leverage. A single compelling press release might land you a national television interview that leads to 100 new donors and $100,000 in funding. A motivating flyer could inspire dozens of people to volunteer for your new program, and a per­suasive letter to a senator might inspire new legislation.

The nonprofit world swims in an ocean of written documents. There are annual reports, grant applications, website pages, blogs, appeal letters, policy docu­ments, procedure manuals, thank you notes, press releases, program reports, research papers, legal documents, advertising copy, board orientation documents, promotional material, and much more.

Each of these communication vehicles influences its readers in some way. Each will make positive or negative impressions on a reader about the nonprofit, the person who wrote the material, and the concept or ideas expressed in the material. The result could mean the difference between whether or not a nonprofit receives a major grant, acquires a new donor, or secures a key partnership.

Good writing often goes unnoticed, but poor writing doesn’t. It can cre­ate lasting, negative impressions. Most people will forgive an occasional grammar or spelling error, but writing letter after letter and document after document littered with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and choppy sentence flow will dilute the credibility of a writer—and a nonprofit. Not good.

You may have only one chance to make a good impression, so you want to make each impression, especially a written impression, the best it can be. To do that, you need to value quality writing as much as you value quality programming, and you need to adopt a culture of quality writing as early in your lifecycle as possible to harness its power and influence.

Case Study: The lost art of writing

One of the organizations I ran, Sun Valley Adaptive Sports (SVAS), once excelled in shoddy writing. The found­ing administration put little time or effort into the written word, and it showed. There was no letterhead or style guide. Donors received poorly formatted appeal letters. Typos and grammatical errors were common in grants and corporate documents, and the copy written in brochures and on the website was dry and lifeless.

Had SVAS written about the good work they were doing in a compel­ling, professional manner, it may have been able to raise more money, secure more media coverage, attract more volunteers, and establish more business partnerships. Instead, the quality of writing was so poor and made so many negative impressions, it turned some people away from SVAS to more “professional” nonprofits in the area.

One of the first major to-dos the staff tackled after I took the helm at SVAS was evaluating corporate documents and marketing literature. The goal was to review each document and separate the poorly written ones from those of acceptable quality. After reviewing more than 200 docu­ments, I’d say we tossed 90 percent into the dumpster and the remaining 10 percent went into a hopper to be rewritten and reformatted.

Later that week, staff started the arduous process of rewriting and refor­matting the documents we kept and creating new versions of the ones we trashed. The objective was to write compelling collat­eral material to rebuild our brand, increase public awareness, raise money, and improve donor and volunteer relations.

The first thing we did was establish a comprehensive style guide. We then wrote a new set of marketing materials, programming literature, opera­tional handbooks, and appeal letters to donors and foundations. Nothing was untouched; we even scrapped the website and built a new one.

Next, each staff member made a personal commitment to write better. They began to focus on spelling and grammar, and writing compelling, thoughtful copy. Staff also helped one another write and edit material. In fact, we created a policy stating at least three staff members had to proofread any document slated for public distribution.

It didn’t take long for SVAS to see quality writing pay off. Within six months, executives from major media companies such as CNN, NBC, and Newsweek were responding to our compelling press releases with calls to produce features about the work we were doing to rehabilitate wounded veterans.

Newspaper columnists and talk show hosts called for interviews after reading our poignant op-ed pieces. Donors commented on our thought­ful appeal letters and inspiring support material. We even received com­pliments from foundations saying the quality of our grant applications and reports were some of the best they had ever seen.

Looking back, I believe one of the important factors that catapulted SVAS to national prominence, and one of the most understated, was SVAS’ ability to write and publish all types of powerful and compelling material about our amazing programs and the impact we were having on people’s lives.

If you want to bolt past the competition, fulfill your mission, and be­come a gold standard nonprofit, you must become a master nonprofit wordsmith. The sooner in your lifecycle you make a commitment to this objective, the faster you’ll see the results you hope to achieve.

Tactics and Tips

1. Hire staff who can write

When hiring staff, I seek out candidates who write well, especially man­agers. I want a program director who can write compelling stories about the experiences of our participants. I want a volunteer coordinator who can write inspiring thank you notes, and I want a development officer who can write thoughtful appeal letters to donors.

Good writing requires good writers, and the more quality writers you have on staff—and on your board—the more opportunities you’ll have to use the power and influence of writing to accomplish your objectives.

If you’re a startup, you’re in luck. You have a chance to a hire a team of good writers from the start. During the hiring process, make the skill of writing a top requirement for all positions.

At many nonprofits, the skill of writing is an afterthought in the hiring process. If you look at the job descriptions they post, the skill of writing is usually listed toward the bottom, or it’s lumped into a general category such as “good communi­cation skills.”

That won’t cut it. The skill of writing should be toward the top of every job description you post, including those for part-time positions. You should also include the skill of writing as one of your screens through­out the hiring process.

Carefully read emails and resumés of applicants and look for telling clues. Is their writing clear and concise? Is the tone of their writing profes­sional and friendly? Do you spot spelling errors and sentence fragments? Do thoughts and ideas flow smoothly, or do they bounce around? Is the text well formatted?

If an applicant gets an interview, ask him or her to bring along a few writing samples. If you’re hiring a grant writer, request samples of grants he’s written. If you’re hiring an operations manager, request samples of strategic plans, program assessments, board reports, or other documents she’s written.

Read these documents carefully. How’s the grammar? Spelling? Thought flow? Paragraph length? Layout and design?

When applicants make it to the final round of the interviewing process, give them a topic in their area of expertise and ask them to write three short paragraphs about it. Provide them a quiet room and a time limit, say 20 minutes. We all write better when we have time to edit and mas­sage our writing, but writing on the spot, under a little pressure, is a telltale sign of someone’s writing ability.

If forced to make a decision between two final applicants, a good writ­ing sample might be the determining factor that swings your favor to one applicant over another.

2. Encourage staff to improve their writing

Let’s say you’re beyond the startup stage. You’ve been up and running for seven years and have 10 staff members. Four are poor writers, five are aver­age, and one is an excellent writer. In this situation, you would want to find ways to improve the abilities of the less skilled writers.

This is easier said than done. The topic of writing can be a touchy sub­ject because many people are insecure about their poor writing skills. They may have grown up in a grade school that didn’t emphasize writ­ing, or perhaps they were simply left-brained, science and math types.

So, if you’re going to discuss someone’s writing ability with them, be sensitive to their insecurities. I would also suggest keeping the discussion centered on improving the overall quality of writing by your nonprofit, not the poor writing skills of the person you’re talking with. Make the focus corporate, not personal.

The good news is your staff can improve the quality of their writing with a little time and effort. Start simple. Suggest staff subscribe to a daily email subscription service such as “Spelling tip of the day,” “Grammar tip of the day,” or “Writing tip of the day.” These are fun and gradual ways to improve writing skills.

You can also buy a subscription to Writer’s Digest and leave it on a table in your break room. The magazine is loaded with tips on style, tech­nique, grammar, and inspiration. The articles and sidebars are short and easy to understand.

One of the best ways to improve the writing quality of your staff is to get them to write more often. Encourage staff to take on assignments that require writing. Do you need a new brochure? How about a new page on your blog, a helpful report for the board, or a series of press releases? Does the thank you letter to donors need updating? Would volunteers benefit from a training manual?

Assign these tasks to various staff or teams of staff. If you’re fortunate to have a star writer on staff, use this person as a resource to help others improve their writing abilities as they work on their writing assignments.

Your star writer can also help fellow staff members learn how to organ­ize thoughts, write compelling stories, and write with rhythm so words glide across the page. They can share samples of their writing to illus­trate key concepts such as simplicity and clarity, and they can teach tips on editing and proofreading.

Writing is an art people can do well if they practice. Your job is to dis­cover ways to create an easy-going environment that encourages your entire staff to become better writers. If you do, the written word will become a tool of power and influence your nonprofit can use to achieve the impossible.

3. Use a professional

You may find yourself in the unfortunate position of having talented and hardworking staff with little or no ability to write compelling copy and no motivation or willingness to learn. In this case, you need to out­source important writing tasks to a professional writer.

You have many choices. Freelance writers are always looking for work and most have affordable rates. Reporters at small newspapers or online periodicals often moonlight and may offer to write at discounted rates if they believe in your cause. Colleges and vocational schools have interns that will write for free because they can earn credit. Other options in­clude professors or high school English teachers that teach writing, or one of your vol­unteers who has a writing background.

What’s most important is finding an experienced writer who can quickly and affordably create powerful and effective copy. In some cases, a written document may be your only chance to raise money from a po­tential donor, persuade a decision maker, or influence a business partner. If you don’t have good writers on staff to deliver the goods, outsource the work. Otherwise, potential opportunities will slip by one-by-one until there are none.

4. Editing: Turn gold dust into gold bullion

The best writers know there is no such thing as good writing, just good rewriting. Rewriting (editing) is often crowned as the “art” of writing and it’s usually the most time-consuming and frustrating aspect of writing.

I agree. I wrote the draft of a book in less than a month, but spent almost a year fine-tuning sentences, finding the right transitional phrases, swapping out dull words with sharp ones, and scanning for grammatical errors and typos. Editing can be a mind-numbing task and there were times I threw up my hands and said, “Why am I spending so much time on this?!”

You may not have a staff of great writers, but you may have a staff of great thinkers. An alternative to hiring a professional writer is having your staff write draft copies of your most important written material and then giving these documents to a professional editor that can transform gold dust into gold bullion.

A big advantage of taking this route is cost. Hiring an editor to edit copy is less expensive than hiring someone to write and edit copy. Plus, your staff knows your programs and operations better than anyone, so they are in the best position to write about such subjects.

Another option is to pay your star writers small bonuses for editing copy or teaching staff how to edit and polish writing. They could show staff why it’s useful to read copy slowly out loud during the editing process to listen for rhythm and spot grammatical errors. They could explain why it’s effective to sprinkle copy with quotes, anecdotes, and photographs, and why it’s important to use generous amounts of white space.

Whoever you use to write copy, make sure quality editing is a part of the process because it’s during the editing process that the real gems of what you want to say are made to shine the brightest.

5. Write compelling stories

Whether you’re writing a letter to a donor or a press release for the local newspaper or blog, you can add tremendous power and effectiveness to your writing by adding compelling stories and anecdotes.

For example, let’s say you want to write a blurb in your annual report about how your ski program enriched the lives of local children with disabili­ties during the past season. One way to do this is to list your accomplish­ments. You could display a bullet-pointed list high­lighting how the pro­gram doubled the amount of children it served, tripled the amount of time each child skied, increased the amount of one-on-one instruction, and how the program taught three children with Down syn­drome how to ski for the first time.

Pretty good, but bland. Now, imagine if you supplemented those facts with a success story about one of the children in your program, say Stu. Stu has Down syndrome, a heart condition, weak muscles, and a ten­dency to isolate himself. Stu had never attended your ski program be­cause his family is poor and his mother thought the program cost a lot of money.

Early that December, Stu’s mom bumped into one of your volunteers at the grocery store. During conversation, Stu’s mom asked about the cost of the program and the volunteer assured her the ski program was free. The next week, with encouragement from the volunteer, Stu’s mom brought Stu to one of your after-school ski clinics to see if he’d en­joy it.

By the end of the session, Stu was hooked. He joined the program and skied twice a week—all free. At the end of the season, he competed in a regional Special Olympics alpine racing event. He was a little shaky on the first run, but on the second run, Stu’s time was good enough to earn him a silver medal. (You show a picture of Stu and his glorious smile holding his silver medal above his head on the winner’s podium.)

Below the picture, you add a quote from Stu’s mom. In it, she expresses gratitude for the program and how Stu would not have been able to par­ticipate in such a program had the program not been free. You end the story with a “kicker” stating how much time Stu has been spending in the gym lifting weights and training, because his new dream is to win a medal at next year’s national Special Olympics alpine event.

Which was more compelling, the list of facts, or the story with the photo? Stories are powerful and persuasive vehicles that can bring your mission to life in the hearts and minds of all types of supporters.

Write more success stories of the great work you’re doing. Write them in a compelling manner, accompanied by captivating photos, and distribute them through a variety of media channels. It’s one of the simplest things you can do to motivate others to join and support your mission.

Takeaways

Your volunteer coordinator writes training manuals. Your board secre­tary writes fundraising invitations. Your marketing coordinator writes ad copy. Your board members write thank you letters, and your chief exec­utive writes partnership proposals. Everyone at your nonprofit has his or her hand in the writing jar.

Dull, choppy, and sloppy writing will smudge your image, taint your brand, and create negative impressions that steer people away from your nonprofit. Sharp, smooth, and clean writing will create positive, lasting impressions that draw people to your nonprofit.

If you want to separate yourself from the thousands of ordinary non­profits fumbling about, it’s important you realize, and put into practice, the power of quality writing and the ability it has to shape images, raise money, inspire people, and influence opinion.

Start by making quality writing a top priority at your nonprofit. Create standards and guidelines for quality writing and then set up structures to facilitate quality writing among staff.

Encourage staff to write compel­ling and persuasive text and give them the time to edit, massage, and rewrite documents. When hiring staff, make the skill of writing a pri­mary job qualification. If you lack a team of good writers, outsource the work to professionals, or at least outsource the editing portions.

Quality writing is one of the secrets of success that flies under the radar of most nonprofit leaders. Don’t miss this opportunity. Push quality writing to the forefront of your strategic to do list as early in your lifecycle as possible. If you do, you’ll stand out from your competitors like a bestselling hardcover stands out against a secondhand book col­lecting dust on a discount rack.

The post 5 Tips And Tactics To Become A Master Nonprofit Wordsmith appeared first on Bloomerang.

This article originally appeared in Bloomerang. See the original article here.

Our Ask An Expert series features real questions answered by Claire Axelrad, J.D., CFRE, our very own Fundraising Coach, also known as Charity Clairity.

Today’s question comes from a nonprofit employee who wants advice on how to record and frame a combined ask (operations, campaign or program funding, etc.) for a capital campaign. 

Dear Charity Clairity,

We are running a capital campaign to open a home, plus fundraising for operations. The ask has been commingled in some of our letters.

Must fundraising letters segregate the asks asking for operations separate from maternity home donations? Must gifts be recorded to show gifts for operations/general needs separately from funds designated to the maternity home?

— Conflicted and Conflated

Dear Conflicted and Conflated,

When donors designate a specific use for their donation, it is incumbent on the charity to spend that money according to the donor’s expressed intentions.

When such a designation happens, you must precisely record the gift in two places:

1. Fundraising database
2. Accounting database/ledger

As the fundraiser, your job is to reflect back to the donor, via thank you letter and subsequent reporting, how their money was spent to create the impact they envisioned. The database is your friend in this regard, as you can produce a letter based on how you input the data.

The finance office has a different job. They must track the money coming in and going out. It is imperative they know how much they have available to spend on capital expenditures vs. operating expenditures.

Which brings us to the question of: How do you know if the donor is expressly designating their gift for one purpose or the other?

As your question suggests, it’s largely based on how you frame your ask. A vague ask yields vague commitments, and confusion abounds.

Let’s take a look at common and best practices.

Many capital campaigns are “blended” in that they ask for money for brick and mortar today and operating expenses tomorrow. Sometimes the money for future operating expenses is swept into an ask to build an endowment for this purpose. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re doing, or if you’re doing one ask that seeks brick and mortar for the maternity home and a side-by-side ask for this year’s annual operating expense.

If the latter, the more you can clarify the choice, both for the donor and for your team, the better. For example:

• Would you consider a combined gift for the home and operations of $30,000? [Problem: The donor doesn’t really know how much is going for which purpose].
• BETTER: Would you consider a capital campaign gift of $25,000 and a repeat gift of $5,000 for this year’s annual campaign? [If the donor only wants to give for one part of this equation, they can. Whatever amount they decide upon, they’re likely to earmark between the two options so clarity is achieved].

It’s always ideal to know which part of the appeal truly resonated with the donor – so you learn what floats their boat, and can record the gift in your donor database in a manner that enables you to report back to the donor based on their interest and intent. Also, the finance department wants to know how much money they have available for either purpose.

If doing a blended ask, either just for brick and mortar plus operating endowment or for brick and mortar, operating endowment, and current operations, here are some additional appeal options:

• This is a once in a generation opportunity to build for our future! Would you consider a combined gift to build the home and ensure future operations of $35,000? 15% of your gift will be invested in an endowment to assure the home can keep operating in perpetuity.

• Would you consider a capital campaign gift of $25,000 to build the home, an operating endowment gift of 5,000 to be invested in perpetuity to sustain the home’s operations, and a gift of 5,000 for this year’s annual campaign? Your combined $35,000 investment will secure the future for people like Maria who rely on us, today and tomorrow.

There are pros and cons to blended asks vs. separate capital and annual campaign appeals. For major donors, they often like to know what the total ask amount for the year will be. A blended ask respects this, and you don’t end up being perceived as “nickel and diming” them through multiple appeals received after they made a significant commitment. Since most major gift appeals are made in person, it’s easy to clarify the ask. Start with the larger number; explain how you’ll allocate. Often the donor will simply say “Allocate where most needed.” You can then enter it into both development and finance databases according to your use preferences. But make sure you enter an annual campaign commitment so the donor gets credit when you run reports for donor listings. You definitely don’t want them showing up on a lapsed donor report!

If you do decide to separate capital and annual appeals with major donors, make sure you acknowledge their capital campaign commitment in their annual ask. For example:

• Thank you so much for your capital campaign commitment of $10,000 to build a home – it means more than words can express! Until it gets built, people like Maria continue to rely on your generosity to survive and thrive during this critical time. Will you continue your annual commitment of $2,000?

For smaller to mid-size donors, separate capital and annual appeals make the most sense. Many are accustomed to the annual appeal, and it’s good to be consistent. If you ask them to be part of the capital campaign, a separate appeal that includes incentives to contribute (e.g., all donors will be invited to the groundbreaking ceremony, will be listed on the donor honor wall, and etc.) is a good idea.

In reducing conflict and conflation, clarity is your friend!

–Charity Clairity

Have a question for our Fundraising Coach?

Please submit your question here. Remember, there are no stupid questions! If you need an answer, it’s likely someone else does too. So help your colleagues by asking away. Please use a pseudonym, like “Conflicted and conflated” did, if you prefer to be anonymous.

The post [ASK AN EXPERT] How To Frame And Record Combined Asks For Capital, Endowment, And Operations appeared first on Bloomerang.

This article originally appeared in Bloomerang. See the original article here.