The Zen of Fundraising by Ken Burnett

Author:Ken Burnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

When everyone else is being told to “think outside the box” . . . that’s when you should start to think inside the box.

TO PROVE THE POINT: SOME WAYS WHERE FUNDRAISERS ARE GOING WRONG

Fundraisers are ferocious bandwagon-jumpers. A few years ago my agency Burnett Associates conceived and wrote a truly brilliant direct-mail pack for our client Amnesty International. It was Amnesty’s banker (that is, best-performing appeal package) around the world for years. It told the gruesome story of a young man who was tortured by having his eyes put out with an ordinary ballpoint pen. The mailing enclosed a small plastic pen and said, “what you hold in your hand can be an instrument of torture or it can change the world.”

“Go on,” the powerful copy says of the small plastic pen that was attached. “Tear it off the page. Hold it in your hand. Feel the point. Think about it. . . . Stretch your imagination. Because that’s what torturers around the world do. They excel at it: using their imaginations to fashion instruments of torture out of the most everyday things.”

Great copy—“use the pen we’ve given you as an instrument of change, to change the world.” The thing is that in attaching a free pen to this pack, there was a rather obvious point. It worked well, as you can imagine.

Then suddenly everyone was doing pen packs, even when there was no logical reason to include the free pen. Fundraisers turned the addition of a free pen into a cheap, offensive, off-putting gimmick.

The advent of questionnaires, or survey packs, with which pen packs are often combined, followed a similar pattern. At first, Greenpeace included a questionnaire in a direct-mail package because it genuinely wanted to know its supporters’ views on a range of issues. It turned out that the questionnaire stimulated response as well. In time this approach too became a bandwagon. Soon everyone was sending prospective donors questionnaires, mostly with no intention of evaluating, or even of looking at, the responses so thoughtfully and painstakingly completed. They still abound, these survey packs, though most donors saw through them long ago and learned to treat them with the contempt they deserve.

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