How to Ensure Your Fundraising Materials Appeal to a Broad Cross-Section of People

How to Ensure Your Fundraising Materials Appeal to a Broad Cross-Section of People

By Eden Stiffman

Most charities could do a better job of broadening their base of support and appealing to donors of diverse backgrounds. As you develop fundraising strategies targeting groups that vary by race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, or ability, you’ll need to ensure your messages and images are welcoming.

Just because you serve the community through your programs, that’s not enough anymore, to create a diverse pipeline of trustees, donors, and charity executives. You have to show that you’re an inclusive organization, or taking steps to be inclusive.

Establish your organization in the community

You can’t go in and start asking for support unless you’re really in those communities in a meaningful and consistent way. If you want people to support you,you have to be present, you have to be visible, and you have to be real.

That doesn’t happen overnight. The most successful direct-response fundraising follows consistent and inclusive outreach by marketing and program staff. Do not send an appeal targeting a particular population unless you plan to keep showing your commitment for the long haul.

Foster diversity from within

Ideally, the people helping you create content are representative of the people you want to reach. Having different people working with you is the best way to do that. If your organization lives its values, reaching an audience that shares those values will be easier to help you diversify your own staff, board and donor base.

Consider your own point of view

Think about your own identity and how it might influence the ways you describe and depict your constituents in fundraising materials. Are you an insider or outsider in relation to the communities you serve? If you’re young, if you’re middle-aged, you might bring your own lens, your own prejudices with you and not realize how something might appear to the population group that you’re trying to reach out to.

Ask for feedback.

Talk to members of the target community about your outreach so they can help guide your future strategy. You might test appeals and messages through a focus group, a survey, in-depth interviews, or simply by taking someone out for coffee. Taking time to do this with someone who doesn’t know about your cause has two benefits:

• They’re going to become educated about you
• They’re going to give you really good feedback.

A colleague who eschews the popular notion of "cultural competence" — being able to communicate effectively with people from different groups — in favour of "cultural humility. That means not assuming that we can become competent in and fully versed in the culture of another group, but rather recognizing our own limitations, being upfront with that, and asking for assistance and what would be appropriate.

If your organization is not as diverse as you would like, be transparent about it. Don’t be afraid to say, you haven’t had a lot of success engaging people in a certain community, or, we’re not diverse but now we want to be — can you help us?

Find out how relevant your organization is within a community by asking questions like these:

• What matters to you?
• How would you like to hear from us?
• Are there ways in which you want to become involved with us?

If you don’t ask, you’ll just assume, and then you’re the one out of luck.

Spending time with the audiences you are trying to reach is the best way to break stereotypes.

Translate language and culture.

The words, voice, and tone you use must be inviting and welcoming. For example, an appeal to recent college graduates would likely be written in a different voice than an appeal to baby boomers.

In some cases that could mean translating your appeals into another language. In others, it might mean describing an audience as they would describe themselves, with appropriate pronouns or identifying terms — even if it differs from your organization’s normal writing style.

Choose images thoughtfully

Consider how you’re depicting the people you serve. Avoid images that seem paternalistic.

If the only picture you show is the poor family or black kid, then you’re setting up more barriers, and beyond that, consider the power dynamics. Is it always a white man leading the group, we need to switch it up and have different people shown as leaders?

When you look at your charity’smaterials try to ensure that a variety of people are represented. You don’t need a perfect rainbow every time, but think about who is and is not shown.

While tokenism should certainly be avoided, we must use our communications as a way to break stereotypes. We want to contribute to a narrative and a society that shows different people in a positive light and uses our images and stories to fight stereotypes, even if we’re not writing a story about diversity, our content still helps to do that just by existing.