Time and attention: harder to get than money [COMMANDMENT 6]

A ten-week series on things you should know about fundraising.

Time and attention are more precious and harder to get than money.

Major donor people say it’s harder to get the meeting than the money. The principle is the same for all fundraising: The first and almost overwhelming barrier to response is attention. Attention is a more precious and harder-to-find commodity than money.

Most fundraising failure isn’t because would-be donors considered and rejected our offers — it’s because they didn’t even notice we asked. Envelopes were tossed with barely a glance. Emails trashed en masse, or even went straight to a spam filter.

Our donors get an overwhelming amount of marketing messages every day. There’s no way they can pay attention to it all, so they learn to efficiently ignore most of it.

Including the very important fundraising message you worked so hard on.

Prioritize being interesting, relevant, and focused on that recipient. That’s they only way you have a chance to succeed.

The rest of the commandments (so far).