Helping good causes is serious work; it involves saving lives, alleviating misery, righting horrific injustices, preserving habitats, and protecting the planet. The stakes could hardly be higher, so why should we overly concern ourselves with petty sensibilities? After all, if we can’t get worked up about a cause we believe in, then why should anybody else?
In the absence of others taking the lead, charities are more important than ever in creating a kinder, more sustainable world. They should do all that is necessary to nudge people to act on ingrained good intentions and take the actions humanity needs.
Happiness
The happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.~ H. Jackson Brown
This is not rocket science; happiness is an included and appreciated donor.
Although fundraising is essentially about laying bare the world’s woes, inadequacies, and injustices and asking others to make it better, it is important for a charity to keep a warm, contented glow going among their supporter base.
Normally the best way to achieve this is by conveying lots of love and employing a little surprise and delight. The most successful nonprofits routinely engineer these qualities into their communications to keep the goodwill going. I am a big fan of New York based Charity: Water, who are excellent in this regard. It keeps supporters in a happy place with such goodies as on-the-spot live feeds of new well drills or heart-warming films of the moment a remote village receives clean water for the first time.
We have endeavoured to create similar “feel good” moments for supporters to help cement loyalty. While sometimes a client may baulk at the cost of these “donor love” activities, in my experience they are always well-received and invariably result in increased giving.
We regularly gave high-value British Red Cross donors the chance to visit overseas projects or opportunities to meet a royal at a House of Commons reception. Both offers were always heavily oversubscribed.
At the lower end, we always updated donors on projects they had supported; especially popular were detailed outcomes from their Tracing service, a brilliant resource that helps reunite families separated by conflict or disaster. Even though we could rarely show the individuals themselves, their heart-warming stories were especially well-received.
For pet charity Wood Green, we produced numerous short films; showing how they were helping abandoned cats and dogs find new, loving homes. These good news stories would be sent to their animal-loving supporters at regular intervals, keeping them constantly appraised of the importance of their contribution and the impact they were having.
After every major anniversary campaign we produced for the British Legion, we ensured the happy results were relayed back to each participating supporter, along with personal messages from veterans and current serving personnel.
Legion supporters loved to receive pictures of the incredible displays they helped to create. Especially memorable were the 65,000 message flags that adorned Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London for the 60th anniversary of D-Day and the over 100,000 poppies, each containing personal messages of thanks, in Ypres, Belgium to commemorate the 90th anniversary of World War One.
Nick Thomas’s “How Emotional Marketing Can Save the World” is a treasure for nonprofit marketing, communications and fundraising professionals who seek to inspire donors to give, and then give more by triggering their deep feelings about your organization's work. A fundraising and marketing expert in the U.K., Nick describes and shares graphics from dozens of campaigns he crafted for charities that raised millions of pounds. He sorts them by the emotions they elicit.
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