For a lot of cultural organisations, their starting point for visitor or audience donations is a handful of donation boxes or buckets dotted around the place, with signs that say something inspiring, like “donations welcome” or “please donate”.

Don’t all rush for your coins at once…

If this sounds depressingly familiar, or if you’re keen to review individual giving in your organisation, here are nine steps I use to help organisations develop supporter journeys that actually get people to give:

Focus on a specific target audience – the most successful fundraising messaging doesn’t try to appeal to everybody. Having a specific audience in mind means you can target your message and your offer based on their specific relationship with your organisation – their shared likes, dislikes, values, motivations and experiences. For a lot of cultural organisations, your primary target audience will be the people who walk through your doors every day.

Understand their motivations – people give to different organisations for different reasons at different times. You need to understand what is most likely to motivate people to take action to support your organisation or project. In particular, you need to be clear whether your target audience has a transactional motivation (giving because they are going to get something back) or a philanthropic one (giving to solve a problem, or because they love what you do and want to help you do more of it). (A lot of arts fundraising incorrectly assumes that people will only give if they are going to get something in return, which leads to organisations rushing to set up a Friends or membership scheme.)

Craft an attractive proposition – I always encourage organisations to think of their ‘ask’ as an invitation. Look for the overlap between your funding need and your target audience’s motivation, and use this to find the right invitation. For example, are you inviting them to fight for something? To save something? To join something? To fix something? To be part of something? To believe in something? Remember – the offer or invitation doesn’t need to be a package of tangible benefits or rewards. Don’t force people with a philanthropic motivation to have a transactional relationship with you.

Katch their attention – at any given moment, approximately 99.999% of your target audience are thinking about something other than you and your fundraising message. You need to change that before you can compel them to act. Consider what are you going to say or do to hook their attention and draw them in. Part of this means being bold and unashamed about your need for support. Don’t hide your message in the dark, unexplored corners of your venue/website/newsletter.

Tell a story – having caught their attention you now need to compel them to take action. Stories are a brilliant tool for bringing the need for your work to life. Consider – who or what does the potential donor care about, and/or empathise with? What is their goal? What stands in the way of them achieving it? How can the donor help them overcome this barrier? What emotion do you need them to feel at the point you ask for a gift? Remember – while you might use complete case studies to show the difference your work can make, you also don’t want the potential donor to feel there is no room for them. Leave space for them to be a Helping Hero. After all, you are asking the donor to help write the story’s ending.

Remove barriers to giving – having compelled someone to take action you need to make it as easy as possible for them to give. What channels make it easy for them to give in that moment? How can you reduce the mental and physical effort required to make the gift?

Use SUPER thanking – make donors feel valued and respected by ensuring your thank yous are speedy, unique, passionate, engaging and repeated.

Make them see the impact – having given the donor the chance to help write the ending to your story, you now need to show them what’s changed as a result of their gift. Showing that their support made a difference can help pave the way to talking about their next gift.

Prepare to ask again – encouraging existing supporters to give again is far more efficient than having to constantly recruit new donors. When the time is right, present people with a new invitation that aligns your needs with the donor’s motivations and drivers. And one final tip – don’t fall in to the trap of assuming you need to wait a year before asking again. Memberships might work on the basis of annual renewal dates but philanthropic gifts don’t have to.

Now, if only there was a handy acronym to remember all that…

I don’t think I’ve ever looked more smug than I did last Friday.

After a day going back and forth trying to find the right name for one of our new consultancy services I’d finally hit the jackpot.

It had the lot. A smart analogy. Some clever word play. A witty twist on two well-known acronyms.

Staring at it on the page stirred feelings of pride I haven’t felt since the birth of my kids.

There was just one problem.

When I showed it to a group of fundraisers, not one of them had the foggiest idea what the name alluded to or what the service was we were actually offering.

That smug look vanished as I realised what had happened.

I’d been so distracted by “clever” I’d taken my eye off the single most important thing I needed to achieve – to clearly show my target audience why this service was right for them.

I’d fallen victim to the Curse of Clever.

The Curse of Clever is where we become so wedded to an idea because of its novelty or cleverness that we will move heaven and earth to make the idea work, even if it means sacrificing clarity and functionality.

(If you’ve ever have been at a conference where someone has started talking about “The 32 Ps of Corporate Partnerships”, where each P has got more and more tenuous as the speaker desperately tried to find a synonym for what they were actually trying to say, you’ll know what I mean.)

“Clever” ideas can come from a range of places. Linguistic tricks (such as puns, wordplay, alliteration and acronyms that spell a word), quirky design choices, linking to current events or notable people and events from our organisation’s past – all can turn into cursed ideas that distract us from our primary aim if we hold them too tightly.

And this curse doesn’t just affect our copywriting.

“Clever” ideas can influence how we structure appeals, the names we give to different membership schemes and even the amounts we ask for (looking at you, anniversary campaigns that use multiples of the year as the suggested donation amounts, despite them having no connection to the amount you need or your donor’s giving habits).

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for these techniques and devices. Done well, they can be effective ways of helping you engage and inspire your target audience. But, to do so, they need to remain the humble servant to your message. As soon as your “clever idea” starts calling the shots you’re in trouble.

Because here’s the thing – clever is only clever if it works.

Your goal is to get your message across to your target audience in a way that catches their attention, inspires them and motivates them to act.

So, if you feel yourself becoming the hostage of a “clever idea”, stop and test it against the following questions:

• Does this idea help or hinder us to catch the attention of our target audience?
• Does it help or hinder us to build trust, rapport and connection with our target audience?
• Does it help or hinder us to achieve the desired emotional response in our target audience?
• Does it help or hinder our target audience’s understanding of why our work is needed?
• Does it help or hinder our target audience’s understanding of what we’re asking them to do and why this is right for them?
• Does it help or hinder our target audience to give?
• Does it help or hinder our target audience to remember our message? (NB Acronyms don’t automatically make things easier to remember. They only become more memorable after repeat use. To begin with they’re usually harder to understand as your audience struggles to remember what each letter stands for).

If the idea is helping more than hindering, proceed (but on the understanding you will jettison the idea if it stops being helpful, or if a better one comes along).

But if the idea is holding you back, perhaps it’s not such a clever idea after all.