FUNDRAISING TIPS—#3, Get Persistent: It's Almost Never Too Much
05.03.2020
The Production Team
Get Persistent: It’s Almost Never Too Much
This post is the third in a four-part series about effective fundraising strategies for worthy causes like BRAKING AIDS® Ride. Part 1, “Get Personal: It Works” was about the willingness to share yourself with donors about why you ride. Part 2, “Get Particular: It’s Money, Not a Kidney,” focused on how you ask donors for money to support your efforts. Today’s post discusses frequency of donor contact and which communications tools work best for what.
Ask everyone. And then ask again. And again. BRAKING AIDS® is an endurance challenge, not a race. It helps to approach fundraising for this ride with the same long-game mentality that one approaches the physical aspect of training for it:
Ask everyone, and keep asking everyone—even if you’ve written them off. The “ask everyone” directive in the ride training packet is worth heeding. You never know who will be most responsive or generous until you ask, and even after you believe you know, some people will still surprise you. “Everyone” means you keep asking even the friends you’ve asked for five years running who have never given, even if that fact perplexes you. You won’t always know why people give in some years and not others. I have had friends who didn’t give for years and then in year six, they began giving. Who can say why? More often than not, it’s a mystery. What’s certain is they wouldn’t have given in year six if I hadn’t kept asking.
Photos of me? Not my fave thing. But they make donation emails more personal and real.
Ask at least three times. Just as you know better than to expect to be able to complete a century bike ride on a few days of training or none at all, you can expect it to take more than one request to get most of your donations. When you send your first wave of fundraising emails, a handful of people will donate right away. For everyone else who is going to give, it’ll take at least two or three rounds to get them to do it—an initial fundraising letter by email, and two shorter, follow-up calls, texts, or email reminders. It’s not personal. Everyone is busy. Most people, even the best intentioned, need reminding. You can keep reminders short and sweet—and creative! it can be a brief video or funny training photos that make people laugh—but stay on it. Following up works. I’ve done a final “last call” email reminder to straggler friends while en route to Cooperstown on Day Zero for orientation, and damned if I don’t get at least 10 to 20 donations from that.
Use social media to amplify your direct requests, not instead of them. A combination of emails, phone calls, and/or texts are your best bets (and for big donations, face-to-face requests, if you can do that). Those avenues yield more because they feel more direct and personal to the people you’re contacting. Unless you’re famous and have an enormous online presence and following, social media is a forum for light-touch, more impersonal reminders and communiqués. It’s less work, and, predictably, less yield. A single post or tweet goes out to your whole network in principle, but who sees it in their newsfeed in practice is an ever-changing algorithm that’s out of our control. Social media is a good way to promote an in-person fundraising event, and it can be great for getting creative and deepening people’s engagement with your training fundraising progress. But in my experience, these posts work best as supplemental reminders to the more personal solicitations, not as a replacement for them. Social media may prompt someone who’s gotten your emails and been meaning to give to do it, but few donations arrive solely as a result of a Facebook post, no matter how charming it is or how cute your dog is.
