I'll admit it, I like "high-brow" Masterpiece Theater costume dramas. One of my favorites is Bleak House that ran on PBS in 2007. Dickens' beautiful and droll Lady Dedlock was definitely bored - bored with the rain, bored with her husband, and bored with her life.
But can we afford to be bored with our fundraising. Not according to fundraising guru Jeff Brooks in a blog post entitled How to break free from boring fundraising. To quote, "Are you getting bored with your fundraising? Are you tempted to "get creative" and change everything?
Jeff continues and references a blog post from Kivi Leroux Miller's Nonprofit Communications Blog entitled Your Boredom is a Bad Way to Measure Success.
Brooks states that the fact that you've grown bored with your fundraising has no bearing on whether it's time for a change. Actually, he maintains, "there's a slight correlation: If you're bored with it, you're probably on the right track:
Getting creative is NOT a high value goal in direct mail...The goal of direct mail is to find a "formula" that works and then do it until it stops working. You'll know you've succeeded if your appeals make money and you're bored with them."He suggests concentrating on these key fundraising elements:
- Finding new fundraising offers.
- Discovering ways to encourage cross-channel behavior.
- Finding images that work.
I encourage you to review both Jeff and Kivi's blog posts. Unfortunately, some nonprofit executives question, ignore, or even scorn these recommendations. Ignore them at your own risk.
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