Your instincts about fundraising lead you astray [COMMANDMENT 9]

A ten-week sequence on issues it is best to learn about fundraising.

Belief information, not intuition.

It doesn’t matter how sensible you’re — your intuition about how fundraising needs to be is untrustworthy.

Three primary causes for this:

1. You aren’t your donor. Demographically (most likely), psychographically (virtually absolutely). What works for you is unlikely to work for them.
2. You could have the curse of information about your trigger. You merely can’t bear in mind what it was prefer to know solely a little bit about it — as your donors do.
3. You might be paying much more consideration than your donors are. A lot extra that you’ve got a radically completely different expertise of your supplies than donors do.

What could look like “frequent sense” to you is commonly precisely flawed in fundraising. Like this:

“No one reads any extra; so we should always at all times ship quick messages.”

Not true. Longer messages work higher than quick ones. (There are exceptions, however they’re uncommon.)

Or the frequent perception that statistics are persuasive. They aren’t in fundraising.

Or the also-common perception that tales of previous success are one of the best ways to inspire donors to offer. Nope. Tales of issues that must be solved are the best way to go.

This stuff (and a whole bunch extra) are primarily based on information. Not opinions.

Information comes from years of testing and attempting issues.

In case your checklist is just too small for testing, you may get an enormous head begin by taking note of knowledge-base of our occupation. It’s out there in books, blogs, webinars, conferences and extra. It takes work in your half to search out and use the information — however it’s higher than making it up out of your instincts.

The remainder of the commandments (thus far).