Three Ways To Add Emotion Into Your Fundraising

If you are involved in fundraising for your church, here are three things you can do to increase the number and size of the gifts.

These suggestions apply to current gifts as well as gifts to your endowment fund. Donors can often see the results of their current gift right away. Gifts that will find their way into the endowment fund may come years later. Nevertheless, it is still possible to apply these three gifting mainstays to future gifts.

In selling, those on the marketing end know that, most of the time, a person buys on emotion and later justifies their purchase with logic. Why do you think the sales person down at the car dealership suggests your taking the car you are considering for a spin around the block? Words are no substitute for the smell of leather and the surge of power you feel by actually driving the car.

Planned giving professionals tell us that donors also give on emotion. In fact, one book I recently read claims that major donors often make their decision to give (and we’re talking million dollar plus gifts) in a split second. That decision occurs a split second after the donor feels the emotion of the application of the funds you are asking for.

Here are three things that can create that emotion for the ministries in your church.

1. Personalize

Communicate clearly how the gift will affect people. Dollar amounts are cold and nebulous. Donors want to see the people with the problems their money will solve. There is no need to bring out the violins. Laying out the problem in front of someone carries enough emotion by itself to tug at anyone’s heartstrings.

2. Quantify

How many shoes will a certain amount of money buy? How many children will the missionary teach? How many people will your gift feed?

It’s a lot easier to relate to a gift’s specific end result, as opposed to $100 or $500. This allows the donor to visualize his or her gift in action. Just running this through the imagination creates emotion.

3. Show

Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, it creates emotion. In today’s high-tech world, “pictures” include the entire gamut of audio-visual tools. Video, video DVDs, audio CDs, podcasts (both audio and video), audio and video on web sites, slide shows – and the list could go on.

Here’s an example that produced good results. Nothing fancy. Just pictures. Our church participates in a larger worldwide program, which sponsors children in third world countries. The program encourages the donor and the child to write back and forth. Often, the child sends pictures they have drawn that end up on the donor’s refrigerator door.

One woman at our church decided to actually visit the little girl she was sponsoring in a Latin American country. Once a year our church devotes part of a Sunday service toward asking people to sponsor a child. Last year, this woman shared many of the photographs of her trip. Pictures of the child she sponsors, her school and village were projected up on the big screen as she moderated her trip and what she saw and learned. It was powerful. The ushers had to pass the tissue boxes out.

The emotion her little presentation and pictures evoked “sold out” all the sponsorships.

If you take the time to translate the dollar amount of your fundraising goal into these three emotion-creating suggestions, I believe your results will be multiplied.