How To Ask for Money: Fundraising Ask Strings
Over the past 12 months I have written extensively about improving the fundraising effort of your organization with data driven, direct mail techniques. For our newer readers I thought it would helpful to summarize some of our past posts that will help you to ask for money. Last June we introduced our readers the concept of "Ask Strings" which rely on the principals of Anchoring and Priming to help your donor to consider a higher pledge.
Anchoring works without the participant being aware of its influence. It is an automatic function of the brain. It works even on experts in their own field, even when they believe they are immune to it.
We also dug deeper and researched best practices in asking for donations greater than $100 and how to handle fundraising ask strings for major donors greater than $1000. Based on hard data and the performance of our clients’ campaigns, Five Maples has published two primers you will find helpful:
Our Guide to Ask Strings will guide you step-by-step through the process of formatting your data in Microsoft Excel to improve the results of your campaigns, as well as providing recommendations and insights
The How to Use Ask Sentences Primer will give you the right language to segment your prospects from previous donors, and to make sure you retain your LYBUNTS and SYBUNTS
Finally we also published The Checklist for Effective Appeal Letters. This 2-pager will help your organization make sure all "Asks" are optimized for best performance and using the best fundraising ask strings and sentences. We love helping organizations to improve their fundraising results (and we hope it shows!). If we can be of any assistance in helping you please do not hesitate to contact us. Next time we will summarize our effort to help folks improve their Response Forms.
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Five Maples helps fundraisers save time, raise more money and enjoy doing it!
Give us a call today for a free consultation.
Contact Sarah Gnerre, CFRE, VP of Philanthropy, at 1-802-387-3091 or sarahg@fivemaples.com!
