The ‘killer question’ answered
It’s been called the case for support, the elevator pitch, the fundraising proposition and many other names, but if you don’t know yours, you shouldn’t be a fundraiser. It answers the killer question ‘Why should I give your charity £100 now?’. My arrogant view that if you can’t answer the question then get out of fundraising, will doubtless make all my readers smugly confident of their position.
Some challenges for you.
Try writing your answer down. Like the hundreds of fundraisers I’ve asked to do that, many of you will struggle. Then, when you’ve got some words on paper, show them to a fundraising colleague. In most cases, your version and your colleague’s will differ, sometimes by a lot. And if you really want a laugh, ask your service provision or communications staff to do the same exercise!
Yet the answer to the question is at the heart of a fundraiser’s work. Every charity asks for money, indeed it is the only thing that is common to all charities (that’s an interesting thought isn’t it, given the poor status of fundraisers in many charities).
Most folk in charities will answer the question with a list of activities - ‘We help lonely old people by providing pop-in centres, free meals and transport’ or ‘We rescue animals that have suffered and we do that by….’. Sadly, nobody is interested in what you or your charity DO (except perhaps, you and your colleagues!). People are only interested in what you ACHIEVE when you do it.
This is basic stuff. It’s the equivalent of a sales trainer teaching commercial people to sell the benefits of a product (the change the product will make to the customer’s life), rather than its features - what it does, how it works and so on.
But here is the crunch and I’ve heard the comment many times. ‘Our charity does so many things for so many people, how can you express that in one or two sentences?’ The answer is, ‘you have to’!
Did the NSPCC cut its range of either services or children they helped when they declared that ‘Cruelty to children must stop, full stop!’ Of course not, but look at their staggering fundraising success since they were able to answer the killer question with ‘Your support will help us to stop cruelty to children, full stop’. Supporters don’t want to know the detail of how they go about doing that, they just want to see that cruelty is being stopped.
Another UK charity, providing the most wonderful palliative and neurological care, began to describe their work as ‘caring for people who were seriously ill’. The details of their clients’ terminal or neurological conditions were pretty irrelevant to the more important issue – support is needed for people who are seriously ill.
So how do you find your fundraising proposition, particularly in a charity that has a clear vision statement, mission statement and all the other products of old-fashioned brand reviews. There is nothing wrong with these things, but they are designed for internal use and have to be translated before they are relevant to supporters. The job of the fundraising proposition is to motivate supporters.
My agency has devised (and copyrighted) a model to help fundraisers break down the key elements of a charity’s mission in ways that will motivate supporters. The model assumes the fundraising proposition rests on at least three of four possible pillars, which we describe as Vision, Enemy, Hero and Recipient.
The Vision describes the charity’s ultimate goal, the pinnacle of success that means the charity has no more work. Using the RNLI as an example (UK’s voluntary lifeboat service), their ultimate Vision would be ‘no more deaths at sea’. If there were no more deaths at sea, the RNLI wouldn’t need to exist.
The Enemy, the second pillar, is simple – what evil, what misfortune or injustice, prevents the Vision being achieved? In the RNLI example, the Enemy is the sea. It’s cold, it’s wet and it’s frequently angry. So, while it exists, we will always need the RNLI to save us from it. The Enemy as a pillar is usually a gift to fundraisers (though not in the case of RNLI) because having a ‘baddie to defeat’ makes for a simple call to action.
Third pillar – the Hero. The Hero is a principle, a team, a person (for the RNLI, it’s the heroic member of the lifeboat crew) that is fighting the Enemy to achieve the Vision. And the last pillar, the Recipient, is the person, people or thing that benefits from that fight.
The discussion that leads to clear descriptions of each of the four pillars is difficult and often heated. If you achieve it in a matter of minutes, I guarantee you’ve got it wrong. Indeed, I’ve known it take many months to achieve, but because it leads directly to your charity’s simple and clear fundraising proposition, it’s worth all the time it takes. The best discussions have always included communications and service delivery colleagues as well as fundraisers. Partly that makes for good internal politics – colleagues feel they have contributed to a key weapon in the fundraising armoury. Also these colleagues have a different and interesting view of the charity’s effectiveness and impact on society.
Out of the Four Pillars Exercise © will come a clear statement that answers the killer question ‘Why should I give you £100 now?’. Not every message from the charity needs to contain the words in the statement. Indeed they may never be used. The statement describes the feeling that supporters must develop whenever they see your literature, visit your website, think about your work or talk to your colleagues (which is why it’s so important to involve other colleagues in the discussions).
Supporters will finally understand what good will be achieved when they donate their money or their time. And that’s an achievement worth fighting for. If your charity gets its fundraising proposition right and delivers it consistently, then its fundraising will be transformed.
Stephen chairs Tangible Response and is also a partner in the new European training duo, Pidgeon Sargeant. He will be presenting a session ‘Finding a clear and exciting fundraising proposition’ at the 29th International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands from 20-23 October 2009.