HOME

SUBSCRIBE TO ZIMNOTES

• NEWS

• SEARCH

Are you taking full advantage of your organization's emotional wallop? Are you fearful of "letting it all hang out?" Do you believe that a simple, objective compilation of the facts about your organization/clients/goals will send big bucks zooming over the transom?

Fundraising is an emotional, not a logical, business. Put slightly differently, good fundraising means the creation of a system to identify your best prospects and give you the opportunity to meet with them and make them cry. Of course I am exaggerating, but only slightly. Too many nonprofits have taken the dictum "nonprofits should run more like businesses" (which is true, but in a different context) to mean that their approach should be dispassionate and focused on the bottom line. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every organization has the ability to generate a profound emotional response from prospective donors. Some organizations have an easier time of this than others: a homeless shelter will engender a gut response with more immediacy than, say, a community college. But the community college loses out if it concentrates solely on academic achievement and neglects to tell the story of the welfare mom whose life was turned around by the courses she took at the college.

I hope I'm preaching to the choir here, but I fear not. Look at your fundraising and marketing materials: direct mail letters, newsletters, "leave-behind" materials for major donor campaigns, and so on. Are you telling gut-wrenching stories? Is the focus on clients? Are you making optimum use of photographs? Your graphics should be designed to elicit a strong emotional response. Once you've "captured" the prospective donor emotionally, then you can tell your organization's story and describe your exciting plans for the next few years. But if you don't make that emotional capture, all the facts and figures you can amass will mean very little.

This information is the property of Zimmerman Lehman. If you would like to reprint this information, please see our reprint and copyright policy.