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Does your nonprofit fear the emotional "sell?" Does your concern for confidentiality keep you from telling clients' stories? Do you view "professional" and "emotional" as mutually exclusive?

At Zimmerman Lehman, we deal with organizations from all walks of nonprofit life that are reluctant to use their most powerful fundraising tool: telling their stories grippingly and movingly. Why does a direct mail letter from a legal aid program read like a legal brief? Why does an environmental nonprofit benumb us with global statistics rather than alert us to the plight of a particular animal? Why does a ballet company trot out irrelevant detail about the prima ballerina instead of telling us how someone's mind was blown by a recent production of Coppelia?

I'm an opera fanatic, and I realized recently that opera is very much like fundraising. Opera is a highly stylized medium involving lots of folks on-stage and off who are responsible for a series of difficult and challenging tasks with one goal: to make the audience cry (or laugh, or otherwise be moved). Nonprofit fundraising is a business that involves the participation of staff, board and volunteers who execute a series of difficult and challenging tasks with one goal in mind: to secure donations from folks who have been moved by the solicitors' presentations.

Fundraising isn't logical; it's emotional. More accurately, it's a series of logical steps that culminate in an emotional "ask" that engenders a gift. Nonprofits that fear the emotional realm will not succeed in raising funds.

I do not mean to ignore the issue of confidentiality. Nonprofits must protect the privacy of their clients. But there's nothing wrong with telling a client's story with enough details changed to protect that client's confidentiality. And "telling stories" is really what we're about as fundraisers. Program descriptions and statistics have their place, but client stories (and your "client" might be a homeless person, a tropical rain forest or an octogenarian art student) make the sale.

So: learn fundraising techniques, but don't miss the forest for the trees. The techniques will get you in the door, but respectful manipulation of the prospect's emotions will get the bucks.

Copyright 2007 Zimmerman Lehman.

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