How to Be Effective in Your Fundraising Communications
/
Dennis Hoffman is the Founder and CEO of Engage USA, a leading company whose personalized caging and lockbox services meet your organization’s unique fundraising needs. In addition to serving as the Founder and CEO of Engage USA, Dennis owns District East, a retail store specializing in rare, local, and hard-to-find beers.
His businesses have been recognized multiple times on Inc. Magazine’s lists of the fastest-growing private companies. Dennis has been featured on Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, and has helped two United States Presidents run successful fundraisers. He is also a member of the Baltimore Chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and serves as the Global Recruitment Subcommittee Chair.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Dennis Hoffman discusses how a JCPenney workshop left a lasting effect
Communicating with donors after the initial transaction to establish long-term relationships
Why you should believe in thank-you letters
Dennis talks about balancing the data and the bank department to maximize interactions with clients
In this episode…
Are you looking to reach clients and establish lasting connections? What if there was a way to achieve your full potential through fundraising?
Involving donors in a meaningful way to increase transactions is the holy grail of fundraising. According to Dennis Hoffman, the truth is in the data. Having accurate and timely data can impact the success of a fundraiser, especially when it comes to reaching current clients directly. To maintain a relationship, quick and personalized responses secure return donors.
In this episode of Greater Returns: A Fundraising Podcast, Dennis Hoffman, a creative guy at heart and the Founder and CEO of Engage USA, talks with John Corcoran about sticking to your message, initiating a direct impact, and converting donors into multi-donors. Dennis talks about how a happenstance class changed the way he did work for his clients, and how a fast and personal thank-you can retain clients. Develop marketing strategies that work to run a more successful fundraiser. Stay tuned!
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Dennis Hoffman’s Email: dennis@engageusa.com
Sponsor for this episode...
This episode is brought to you by Engage USA.
At Engage USA, we maximize direct mail fundraising efforts for nonprofit and charitable organizations by streamlining processes, providing obsessively accurate data, and delivering personalized and transparent expert caging and commercial lockbox services.
We pride ourselves on being quick to respond to customers. Our systems capture, verify, and balance data in real-time, allowing us to provide our clients with obsessively accurate data and deposits within 24 hours. At Engage USA, we help nonprofits, charities, and political campaigns run more successful fundraising efforts.
So what are you waiting for?
Visit engageusa.com to learn more about our work or contact us today!
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:00
Welcome to the Greater Returns podcast, where we talk about nonprofit fundraising analytics and how to get better every day. Now, let's get started with the show.
Dennis Hoffman 0:14
Dennis Hoffman here, I'm the host of Greater Returns: A Fundraising Podcast, where I talk with top nonprofit leaders about marketing, direct mail, and analytics. I have John Corcoran here from Rise25 John has done 1000s of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs. we flipped the script today and John will be interviewing me.
John Corcoran 0:36
All right, Dennis. Thanks so much. Happy to be here. And in this episode, we're gonna be talking about fundraising, communications and different ways to communicate effectively. And of course, before we get into that this episode is brought to you by Engage USA. Engage USA provides expert caging and lockbox services to help organizations meet their unique fundraising needs their proprietary systems capture, verify and balance data in real time, allowing them to provide clients with obsessively accurate data and deposits within 24 hours state and national charities, advocacy organizations and political candidates count on Engage USA to help their fundraising campaigns become more successful. So what are you waiting for visit engageusa.com or you can also email info@engageusa.com to learn more. All right, Dennis. So this would be a fun topic, because first of all, I want to know, how did JCPenney help influence the strategy that you use with your clients with fundraising?
Dennis Hoffman 1:37
So John, I was telling you the story before about how I got into data, I was a creative guy. And I, and my job was to write fundraising mail, and to help my nonprofit clients raise more money. Once I got in when I once I saw the data and realize what an impact good had a habit so to learn about it. And the first place I went was dm days in New York. But being me, I didn't register for anything, didn't just showed up and figured out to figure out what to do when I got there. And I got there, and all of the amazing classes about how to build relational databases or data warehouses, relational Co Op databases, they were all filled up. And I ended up going to walking into a seminar or JCPenney seminar went by the head of data for JCPenney, okay, ideas home from that, that really changed the way I did work for my clients, man, amazing
John Corcoran 2:45
how you didn't even intend to go into this workshop, you go in and have such a lasting impact that 20 years later, you're, you're still thinking about it. So what are some of the things insights you gained from that workshop?
Dennis Hoffman 2:56
Well, one of the things I mean, it's, it's seems simple to me now, but when. But the speaker from JCPenney said, So, we bring in a new catalog buyer, and he just bought pants from us. What do we sell him now? And the thing he told me that he told me, he told the whole group, but, of course, it's all about me. The thing he talked about was he that his first reaction was trying to sell them a shirt. I mean, they already had pants started so but but the data shows is the thing that guy is most likely to buy is another pair of pants. And logic says, Yeah, if I think it through, yes, it is. And the the lesson I learned from that, that I helped my clients with is, stick to your message, have a tight message and and and stay with it, use the same message have the same cause the same, the same explanation you don't have, why the money and give it over and over again,
John Corcoran 4:04
rather than shifting to some other rationale or shifting to some other story. Stick with what you've been using?
Dennis Hoffman 4:12
Absolutely. If If I was raising money for the YMCA summer camp, and you know, a lot of times the YMCA was a blessing raise money, one of our other programs. Well, these donors want to give you a summer camp, they've actually already given to you a summer camp once. We don't know if they care about helping seniors. We don't know if they care about helping with daycare. We know they care about summer camp. And so we should stick as close to the summer camp issue as we can to keep the donors keep the doors happy and keep the donors involved.
John Corcoran 4:45
That's interesting. So do you find you have to push back sometimes against clients who say that we want to talk about this other program that we have?
Dennis Hoffman 4:52
Absolutely. And I have to say that in their history. That's what they've normally done and you And certainly there's a place for it, there's certainly a place for a nonprofit to talk about. Its the various things it does. But if we want to involve donors in the best possible way to get the best way of response, and the most in the most involved donors, is to stick with the issue that brought them in,
John Corcoran 5:19
that they're most interested in. What about, what did you learn from that about speed or the pacing, when you should come back and communicate with the donors again after that initial transaction?
Dennis Hoffman 5:35
So the really amazing thing about that is same speaker, same setup. And he asked how quickly should JCPenney go back and try to sell that pair of pants to the catalog buyer. And JCPenney did a lot of research on that, and found that the fastest time was the next day, today that were a different one with the internet. I bet the fastest time is probably a few minutes later. And in fact, I can think of that when I've bought something online. And they immediately come back and try to sell me something very much like it. And the same is true with donor response, the faster we get a thank and thank you out. And the faster we're back in the that same donor asking for donation again, for the same same cause, the more quick, more likely they are to respond. We spent so much money nonprofits spend so much money acquiring new donors. A, it's ridiculous that they don't spend as much money to make sure that they're they're retaining those donors and getting them to give a second time a third time, become active, he'll come long term
John Corcoran 6:48
supporters of the organization. What do you say to your clients who say No, that's too quick, they just given we have to pace it out a little bit,
Dennis Hoffman 6:56
then it shows exactly the opposite. There definitely are great reasons to to give time between fundraising between fundraising letters, you can see you and some donors will give a lot more often than others. But after an initial gift, speed is the most important thing. People who give once 50% of them will never give again, if the sooner we get into the mailbox, the more of them will. And it has an incredible impact in the bottom line with nonprofits, with nonprofits convert their donors into multi donors quickly.
John Corcoran 7:33
And talk a little bit about you know, are there stories of clients who had been taking, let's say, months to get a thank you letter out, compressing that down and seeing better results? isn't any that come? come to mind?
Dennis Hoffman 7:47
I have to say that's a pretty common thing. A lot of a lot of large nonprofits, nonprofits that, that we've all heard of, will save their most will save there. Up until they have a lot of them so they can send them out inexpensive, inexpensive way. They won't they don't make regular they don't update their databases on a regular basis. And, and that's those are simple things that can have a big impact.
John Corcoran 8:20
So just just that one thing, just the speed of sending out the thank you notes had such a big impact. What else any other ideas or insights that came from that original workshop that come to mind?
Dennis Hoffman 8:30
The biggest thing that my biggest takeaway from that workshop was was was that people that people want to give to what they've given what we know about a donor or responder is that they gave to this cloth to this package that they gave for this for this call to action that they gave for this mission. And any changes we make reduce the chance of them giving a second time. What types of changes are you referring to? I'm talking about. If a If the donor gave the first time by, by email, they're most likely to give by email at another time, if they gave the first time to a flat package, they're most likely to give to a flat package and the next time but also if they bring in a donor for annual fund, and we send them a special appeal, they are less liquid here to the special appeal than they are to give to the annual fund another time. Interesting.
John Corcoran 9:37
Any final thoughts on fundraising communications, any other strategies or insights that you've gleaned that you want to share for nonprofits that want to you know, communicate more effectively?
Dennis Hoffman 9:51
Well, I have to say that early in my career, I didn't believe in thank you letters. I
John Corcoran 10:00
I'm very different from your what we're talking about here. Why did you not believe in thank you letters,
Dennis Hoffman 10:05
because I didn't see there because I couldn't get an immediate return on investment from a thank you letter. And I, my, and the people, I knew the professionals who taught me how to do this. None of us believed in and thank yous. And the big difference that I, the big thing that I realized is a thank you, thank you not about paying for itself. It's about acknowledging that donation that the person person made, it's about the long-term relationship with between the nonprofit and donor. And I, we can see directly a direct impact from fast and personal thank yous to people who give, whether those things are made by telephone, by mail, by email, however, this Thank you, so made, thank you to donor increases the chance that they will continue to give to your organization.
John Corcoran 11:04
You know, it's it's interesting, because this idea of this principle of speed, and communicating faster and sending out the thank you notes faster, it seems very simple, like it can be done easily, but there's so much complexity to it. Know, from gathering the data to processing the payments to sync it up with your with the CRM. So where are the choke points? where are some of the ways in which you see nonprofits struggle to speed up that process, since you know it obviously, intimately, you've been so involved in this, what are some ways in which you see that being a struggle to speed it up,
Dennis Hoffman 11:47
one of the big things is we tend to, we tend to people tend to be way too worried about how quickly the money gets in the bank and not worried enough about how quickly their data gets into that database. And what we've done in engage is couple those two things together. So we, we balanced the data to the to the bank deposit, and both of them or both of them get to our clients The next day, it's within 24 hours of receipt here. And that in theory could allow the organization and a lot of orders a lot of our clients to get acknowledges miss out and the following day, some of them even the same day that we get them the get them the data. And then the choke points all through it if if a if a client is on if you know if a nonprofit is on every three week mailing schedule, for example. And there they get their data in the day after the cut off that means that they're if they get mail in and that takes three or four days to get the data and then that's the day after they're cut off. It could be a month before they get a thank you or another another letter to the to that donor.
John Corcoran 12:57
Hmm. Interesting. Dennis, it's been great. remind everyone listening where they can connect with you and learn more about what you do and engage with say,
Dennis Hoffman 13:06
Sure. You can find us on our website at engageusa.com or you can email me personally I'm Dennis, Dennis H @engageusa.com and I look forward to hearing from you. Perfect. All right. Thanks, Dennis.
Outro 13:25
Thanks for listening to the Greater Returns podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes