How to Share Your Results with Donors
Penelope Burk of Donor-Centered Fundraising fame spoke at the Planned Giving Days conference in DC that I also spoke at yesterday, and one of her main themes was that donors really, really want to hear about what you did with their money in specific, measurable, and meaningful ways before they will give you another gift. (I tweeted highlights from her talk – she’s full of great info, if you aren’t familiar with her research.)
The problem, of course, is that providing solid results is a lot easier said than done. Many of the issues that we work on in the nonprofit world will never be “solved” and those baby steps we are taking toward those big solutions sometimes don’t feel all that significant. Much of what nonprofits do simply can’t be measured effectively in numbers. Much of our success also comes from partnerships or helping other people who are really doing the hard work in their own lives. Taking credit for those results can be tricky too.
One of the better solutions to this results dilemma is to use storytelling to give donors examples of the good work you are doing — examples that are really emblematic of your larger accomplishments, especially when those larger results are hard to quantify or explain.
I’m teaching a webinar on Tuesday, May 19 called Boasting without Bravado: How to Share Your Success Stories. During the one-hour webinar, you’ll learn how to
- separate your real accomplishments out from all of your activities
- emphasize the parts of your success stories that excite your supporters the most
- take credit by giving credit to others
- build a choir that sings your praises
- use stories to make complicated or esoteric accomplishments easier to grasp
- capitalize on your current successes to build support for future work
We’ll review not only how you write up success stories, but also where and how you can use them to encourage your existing supporters to stay with you and to connect with new supporters too. I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday!
P.S. Get the All-Access Pass now and you can attend the Success Stories webinar, Mal Warwick’s webinar on writing successful fundraising letters (Thursday, May 21) and everything else we host for the next 12 weeks, all for $97.
Penelope Burke is awesome; I attended a Philadelphia workshop awhile back.
In terms of success stories, I recommend maintaining an active swipe file of them, ranging from client stories to board member stories to employee stories to funder stories. Everyone has a story about why they are engaged with your organization.
Don’t forget to mention having blogs on your website. My non profit works with events.org and they showed us how to add a “Where in the World is your donations” blog. We blog and others can to about how we are using the money and of course stories people tell us. Events.org is a non profit software company we hired because they help us with online registration and donations for our organization. Also, they have taught us a lot about IT.
http://www.online.donation.events.org/