Jeff Schreifels
Hey everyone, thanks for joining me today. I have as my guest, probably one of the greatest direct response fundraising creative directors, strategists, and writers in the business. Jeff Brooks is our guest today. And if you have followed his blog called Future Fundraising Now, you've gleaned an amazing amount of fundraising knowledge.

And I have all kinds of questions for Jeff. So why don't we bring him in and let's get ready for some real talk.

Hey Jeff!

Jeff Brooks
Jeff, hey good to see you.

Jeff Schreifels
Good to see you. Thanks for being on the show today.

Jeff Brooks
I'm glad to be here.

Jeff Schreifels
Okay, I just introduced you as probably one of the creative direct response fundraising creative directors, strategists, and writers that I've known and probably respected in the business. So why don't you give a little history? How did you get here?

Jeff Brooks
Well, I was tricked into it. I think a lot of us were, you know, but I was fresh out of school, looking for work and I wanted a writing job. So I was getting in touch with this a long time ago. There were newspapers and I was talking to them and doing all these frustrating interviews. And then one of them was as an editor for this charity that worked in India.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Brooks
And they mentioned, you know, it was like a warning, you'll have to go to India. I go, cool. I want that. So I got this job. And I thought the job was to do their newspaper newsletter and their publications and stuff. And that was it. But I was also going to do the fundraising writing. They did some direct mail and stuff. And I did not get it.

I just did not understand. I'm in my twenties and there was nobody there who really knew anything. So I didn't have mentors. I just kind of had to guess. I got a book. It was a book by Kay Partney Lautman. I don't know if you remember this book. It was a big yellow book, is what I remember. And it was kind of the only one. It was called Dear Friend and it was about doing direct mail for non-profits. That was all I had.

And in fact, I worked at this job for like two years and then I thought, you know, I'm going to go a different direction with my career. I went to grad school. I was going to become an academic, yada, yada, yada. I did that whole thing. And then after a few years of that, I realized this really sucks. I really hate this. It’s a treadmill, right?

There are things about it that I actually wish I could do. Like, you read books all the time and you talk about books all the time and you kind of live in a library. But that, on the whole, not great. I was applying for jobs, really nowhere jobs, because that’s what you have to start with. Anyway, I got in touch with somebody I’d met when I worked at the non-profit. It was a small agency that had done a couple of jobs for us, and I got to work there.

And that got me my mentor. And I worked for a number of different organizations. And that’s how you really learn. You’re not living in your isolated bubble. You are serving a handful of non-profits and you’d better do a good job. Fortunately, I had a really harsh, difficult mentor where I didn’t get away with anything. It was difficult and hard, and it was discouraging, but it was boot camp.

Jeff Schreifels
I can imagine, like you submit some copy and then you get it back and it’s all full of red ink everywhere.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, no, no, it’s worse than that. This particular guy, he was owner of the small agency and creative director and a really, really amazing fundraiser. You’d bring in your board doc that you’d written, two copies. You’d hand one to him and you’d have one in front of you. You’d sit at his desk and here’s the best part.

He would sharpen his pencil in one of those electric pencil sharpeners while you’re walking in. I don’t know if he was trying to be scary. It was rough. And then he would write on it and talk to you there, live in real time. That’s just kind of how he worked. But you’ve got to say, I would never do that to somebody.

Jeff Schreifels
Intimidating you. Yeah. Right.

Jeff Brooks
But I would also say it’s not such a bad way to get points across.

Jeff Schreifels
I mean, talk about a baptism of fire, right? It’s like throwing you in. And I can see like every time you went in there, it was probably a little bit less and less sharpening, because you're starting to get it. Maybe it took a while.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, I worked there for two years. So it took a while, but I was really learning. Probably the biggest thing I learned, and we’ll probably talk about this more later, is: what’s the offer? Or you’ve departed from the offer, or you’ve complicated the offer. That was kind of what most of the criticism was about. I was a pretty good writer, but I didn’t really know much else.

Jeff Schreifels
So because there’s a lot of people listening from all different stages of their careers here, how long did it take you before you felt, “Hey, I kind of know what’s going on now?”

Jeff Brooks
Maybe next year.

No, well, it is a moving target. That sense where you say, “Yeah, I know everything,” means you’re now on the downslope.

Jeff Schreifels
Right. Not that you know everything, but you kind of have a feeling, okay, this is my career. I love what I’m doing. And I think I have some knowledge now and I’m helping other writers.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah. Well, I then got work at a larger agency, The Domain Group, where you and I worked together. And I think it’s there where I realized, okay, I think I get this now because it was a knowledge-based culture. It’s not the only one; other agencies are like that. But it was not one person, one genius running the whole thing. It was a group of smart people working together. The first agency job was kind of one genius running everything and you just kind of do what he wants you to do.

Great way to learn, but there’s a ceiling over you. At Domain and at the other places I’ve worked since, it’s been more a community of people who think alike and work together and learn together. That’s where you really grow.

Jeff Schreifels
I want to reminisce a little bit about Domain because, for those who are listening, Jeff and I got to work together. I was there from ’96 until Domain merged with Merkle, until about 2005. And one of the cool things about that experience was, as you’re talking about, it was a learner environment. It was an experimental environment. It was a place where you could take risks and do some new things.

For those that don’t know, our first book that we wrote, It’s Not Just About the Money, you wrote the foreword to it. One of the cool things, you talked about how we’d have lunch, like probably every week we’d go out to lunch. We’d go to Happy Teriyaki.

The thing that I loved so much about it was that while we got this really cheap, good teriyaki, we also had all these great conversations around fundraising and what works, what doesn’t work, what could we do differently? And there would be a group of us sitting around talking about this. It was such a collegial atmosphere, because you had account people and creative people together. And you guys would bash on us account people. And we’d be like, you creatives don’t understand how the client works and you can’t get away with that. But the workplace environment was such that you felt like you were creating a great thing.

And the beautiful thing about direct response, of course, is that you got to test out these ideas and see if they were any good or not. I remember one specifically. If you remember when we first got America’s Second Harvest, which is now Feeding America, as a client, this was a huge thing for us at Domain. They were willing to invest in trying to figure out how to grow their donor base at that time. They wanted to double and triple it. They put the resources toward it. But we must have tested hundreds of different kinds of ideas, offers and envelopes and writing this and this different approach. It was just this creative atmosphere of trying to figure out how do we help grow this thing.

It was just this wonderful place where we didn’t have it all figured out, but we got to try and play with it.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, yeah. And we got to make mistakes.

Jeff Schreifels
That’s what I think was really special.

Jeff Brooks
It was special, yeah. And when it’s over, you look back. I’ve had a number of jobs since then. That was special, and we were blessed and very fortunate to have that time. Now, there are lots of ways to do it, and I imagine most of the people listening to this are not agency people, but they’re working in non-profits. But you still want to find that.

You want to find community, you want to find a mentor, you want to find like-minded people that will help you explore and make mistakes and find new things and cry on each other’s shoulders. You really need all of that.

Jeff Schreifels
That’s right. So if you don’t have that, seek that out. That’s an important thing.

It’s funny. Has anyone ever told you that your office looks a lot like Tom Ahern’s back office? Both of you guys are creative writers in the direct response world. If you ever notice Tom when he’s online, his office is just like, there’s books everywhere and papers and all that stuff.

So brilliant people, that must be what their backgrounds are. Mine is pretty clean. I like my desk all cleaned off.

Okay, well let’s tap into some of your wisdom, because you’ve been doing this for a long time. One thing I want to talk about is in our industry, we’re always talking about how we’re not retaining donors. Non-profits are continually struggling with this. Why is this? Why are we struggling so much to retain donors and value from donors? What’s going on?

Jeff Brooks
Well, I think there’s two main things. And one of them is not our fault, but the other is our fault. The not-our-fault part is there’s a lot of competition for the attention and dollars of donors. There’s an incredible amount of competition. So no matter what you’re doing, the people you’re talking to, your donors and your would-be donors, are hearing similar things from others. So that makes everything really difficult.

The part that is our fault is that we really have a hard time being relevant to them. I think the working assumption for most non-profit fundraising these days, and not just these days but basically all the time, is: if we just tell them how awesome we are and how important our cause is, people will dump money on us. And no, it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s proven not to work.

Jeff Schreifels
They’re wanting to change the world with a significant gift. And if they stop giving or they give less, obviously we’re not doing a good enough job of bringing some kind of value to them. They’re not seeing how their gifts are making a difference. So they don’t see the impact of their giving. We don’t do a good job with that. Or we don’t provide an offer that hits that value, that matches their passions and interests well.

So what do you say are some of the elements that make a superior donor offer that gets results? What have you found?

Jeff Brooks
Well, I’ve been struggling for decades on, like, do we talk about this? And I kind of keep coming up with these different formulations. And what I feel like is the most basic simple one is problem, solution, invitation. That’s what an offer is. Now that doesn’t quite get you there, does it? It sort of sets up a framework.

I also find that different causes might have different formulas for how you get there. But here’s the thing: you better go to your donor with something specific. And when I say specific, I mean something you can take a picture of, an action or an object or something that you could actually photograph. Because “support us,” that’s not that.

Now, it’s really hard not to say “support us,” because that’s how it looks to you, right? They’re going to support us. They’re going to send us money and then we’ll be able to do our work. And that’s how it looks to you. That’s fine. But that’s not how it looks to them. And that’s why we miss the boat. We say it wrong.

So that first thing is specificity. Now that can also be difficult because a lot of us, maybe most of us, are tasked with raising unrestricted dollars. We do have this program and it’s like we give out breakfasts to kids in schools and that much costs this much, but that’s like four percent of our budget, so we don’t really want to talk about it. It’s a great offer, but we don’t want to talk about it because we can’t really use it if we’re going to get too much money for this one thing.

What we have to learn is, you still have to be specific, even when you’re not getting specific money. I think that puts people in a box where they think unrestricted money means unrestricted conversation about people giving money. It’s not. You’ve got to be specific. And ideally, you know what it’s going to cost to make that specific thing happen. You know why it needs to happen right now. You need to know what’s the urgency, and you need to be able to describe what the impact of it is going to be. So I call it the offer diamond: specificity, cost, urgency, and then impact.

And sometimes you get very specific. Like you could say one dollar will send seven dollars worth of food to people who need food. That was the food bank slash Feeding America offer that propelled them to new heights. There’s a lot of impact. You give even a small amount of money and a lot of food goes, and it moves food from the waste system and gets it to people who need it. That’s a good offer.

It also has the advantage that it’s kind of based on budget, their total budget and their total impact. Everything’s bundled in there. So it’s unrestricted money. You’ve got to raise money to pay your fundraiser salaries. If you don’t do that, you can’t do your work. But you’re going to have a hard time finding very many donors who are going to raise their hand for that.

Like say you’re a hospital. You’re not going to do very well saying, “You could buy a beaker for our medical research. It’s only $850.” That’s not going to work very well. It’s maybe real and it’s specific. But you’re going to have to find a different way to talk about it. And that’s hard. It takes a lot of work, a lot of brain work, a lot of experimentation, which is why it doesn’t happen often enough.

Jeff Schreifels
And there’s also a whole strategy difference. You have an acquisition strategy where you would have the most broad thing that you can do, but also the most specific thing, like you’re saying one dollar releases seven dollars of food. And that appeals to a big audience. Then once you bring them in, you might talk a little bit differently about some of the things that you’re doing as you’re engaging that donor into, “Here’s what you came in on that did something really good. Let me tell you more about what we do.”

And over time, as that donor engages, they’re finding out more things about you. And as they give more, they’re finding out even more things so that when a donor now becomes a major donor, you’re talking about, we need this new computer system to help us reach the 250 food banks around the country within seconds and tell them where the food goes and all of that, and that’s going to cost $15.7 million. You wouldn’t be able to use that offer for the mass audience. It would fall flat.

Jeff Brooks
Right, that’s right.

Jeff Schreifels
If you want to lead people, you have to know what they want to do.

Jeff Brooks
And it’s going to be different from one organization to the next, but fundamentally not different. And that might be the other thing: you’re not as unique as you think. So many organizations, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a client that didn’t say this, “Well, our donors are different because we are different.” And on the surface, that’s true. But at the deep level, it’s not true.

Because basically, donors are most likely to be women, even more likely to be elderly, and maybe even more likely than that, they’re likely to be religious people. It’s those three things. That’s where donors generally are. And that might bug you. It might feel out of step with you. And you could fight it and say, “Well, no, we’re going to go for younger donors.” Well, that’s a losing battle. There are very few young donors out there and they don’t stick with you.

Jeff Schreifels
We’ve worked with hundreds of different types of organizations. You’ve worked with them, I’ve worked with them. And it’s true. Everyone thinks they’re different. They’re like, “Well, we’re animal welfare, we’re higher ed…” It comes down to donors. Essentially, they need this compelling offer. They want to take care of a need, right? And how they respond is pretty much similar across the board. And it’s also international. We have clients in Spain and Italy and the UK, and they respond the same way.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, they’re the same. Totally my experience too. I work with organizations everywhere. I’ve done direct mail for India. And you think, well, if there’s a place that’s culturally different and maybe the donors are different, well, they’re not. They really aren’t. There are language and culture things that you really better pay attention to that make them different. But actually the reason direct mail in India didn’t work when I did it was the postal system didn’t work well enough. That’s a local condition.

And that’s true. There are various countries where the postal system kind of doesn’t support us anymore or hasn’t yet figured it out. That’s actually one of the changes that’s coming. There are countries now where their postal system is kind of gone. And you can kind of see things happening here in this country where that might be coming. That’s going to be rough. It’s going to be a rough transition.

Jeff Schreifels
That is rough.

Jeff Brooks
I think innately, though, we as human beings have inside of us this need to give. And so whether we live here in the United States or Spain or Russia, we do all want to give something back.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, it’s very basic. What do you think is going to happen to our sector in the next five to ten years?

Jeff Brooks
Well, the big changes that are coming, one would be if the postal system fundamentally changes, you’ve got this big challenge that you have to figure out how to get around. There are ways. In places where that has happened, like Denmark recently, that’s been in the news lately, it basically doesn’t have a postal system anymore. Of course, you can get things to people’s homes, right? But it costs more. Anyway, that’s probably coming in some way or another.

The other thing that has already happened and is happening is the end of paper checks as a way of exchanging money. That has already happened in a lot of Europe. It happened in New Zealand a couple years ago. It was kind of catastrophic because it’s older people who give, and their habit is the way you pay is you write a check, and it’s really hard for them to do it differently.

As you get older, and I can attest to this a little bit, it’s hard to change a habit. So that’s rough. Smart fundraisers in New Zealand found ways to help their donors get over that change, but giving went down. There was a fundamental loss of revenue from donors over that. So those are two things that kind of scare me.

I suppose that technology changes and that brings opportunity, but it also brings challenge. It makes things harder. Probably the biggest thing that’s been happening slowly, much more slowly than we thought it would, was money migrating from the paper world into the electronic world. It has been going for, what, 20 years? And every year, a little more money isn’t coming into our office via the post but is coming in over the net.

That’s kind of a big deal, but I think on the whole, if you’re smart, you’re making it work. You just have to be sure of the fundamentals.

Jeff Schreifels
So it’s the principle of fundraising that will always remain true. You have to have a great need, a compelling need. You have to have an offer and you have to have a way for donors to respond. And whether it’s by mail, electronic, or whatever. A lot of non-profits today are acquiring donors pretty successfully through canvassing, those people on the streets.

Jeff Brooks
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Since your background obviously was in writing, how do you feel AI is affecting fundraising writers’ work right now? And where do you think that’s going to go?

Jeff Brooks
Yeah. Well, it’s a pretty interesting tool and I’ve been playing around with it. It can do some kind of amazing things, but at this point it can’t do it by itself. If you just walk into ChatGPT and ask for it to do an appeal and you give it a few facts, it’s going to write a really bad appeal.

If you have an AI that you have trained on fundraising principles, it’ll write a pretty good appeal that still needs a little bit of work. So I think right now we’re at a scary place because I hesitate to say don’t use AI, because an AI bad appeal is probably as good or better than 90 percent of human-written appeals. I hate to say it.

At least right now, who knows where AI is going to be next month, but human-assisted AI is kind of maybe the way to use it. And the other thing is, I don’t think it’s a really good idea to say, “Hey AI, write an appeal for me.” I give it small tasks. I will feed in 20 pages of interview notes and I say, “Could you write this into a narrative story?” And I still have to check it because it sometimes misses the whole point of the story. But it writes a coherent narrative that I can stitch into the thing I’m writing. And that saves me a bunch of time.

The other thing I use it for a lot is subject lines. I will write the email, I will put it into a trained AI and say, “Hey, give me 20 subject lines for this.” And I don’t know if I’ve ever used one of the exact ones it gives me, but I always get a good idea. So it saves me that hard lifting part of, what’s the right way to get people to open this? It gives you a bunch of good ideas, not quite great, but good. And you go from there. So I think it’s a good tool.

I think the scary thing is, and I’ve been seeing this, where I read an appeal that’s kind of bad and I think, this kind of has the flavor of an AI-written appeal. And it’s not very good, although it’s still not the worst thing. If it had training, it’ll have an offer, although a lot of the time it won’t even have an offer. But most fundraising is going out without offers anyway. It’s not going to kill us all.

The part that kind of worries me is like right now we’ve got a lot of experienced copywriters who can take an AI appeal and make it better and human. But how did we get there?

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, we’ve seen those.

Jeff Brooks
Exactly.

Jeff Schreifels
They’re so eager to be for the brand, how awesome we are, how important we are, and we’re looking for a younger demographic. That’s what their brand exists to do. And that just flies in the face of reality. It’s not going to work. It’s going to take about three years for you to realize what a dismal failure it is. By that time, the person who brought it in will have moved on to go wreck a different organization. We see it all the time.

Jeff Brooks
So I’m kind of pointing my fingers at the larger organizations that do that. I think it’s the smaller organizations where the energy is because they can’t afford to do that nonsense. They might want to, but they can’t. So they just keep chunking out old-fashioned direct mail that works. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but they’re doing the good stuff. And you can make decisions. I love working with smaller organizations because you can say, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And they’ll kind of look at each other and go, “Yeah, let’s do that.” Whereas with a large organization, there’s a lot of people involved and they’re protecting their territory and all this stuff is going on, and I can see it’s not going to happen.

So I would say, you asked me about some organizations. I’m going to name a few. They happen to be organizations I work with and they tend to be smaller, but they’re amazing.

First one I want to say, this is quite a small organization. It’s called SOS Community Services. They are based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which is a sort of struggling Rust Belt outskirts-of-Detroit place, struggling with poverty, unemployment, that stuff. And it’s a really small shop. Basically two people do the fundraising work. And they are just kicking it. They’re small, they’re geographically limited. They’re just in one county in Michigan, basically. But they’re just paying attention.

Barbara Cecil, I hope she listens to this podcast. She’s amazing. She pays attention to detail. She doesn’t fight reality. She says, “Okay.” And she tries stuff. Like she tried billboards a couple of years ago. I kind of thought, I don’t think you want to do that. But it didn’t work, and it also didn’t not work. So it seems to have moved the needle.

A bigger organization that I work with is Meals on Wheels of San Antonio. Meals on Wheels is one of those great, great, great offers. You almost can’t mess it up, right? Because basically we’re just bringing meals to older people. People are shut in and need help. It doesn’t take specialist understanding to get that. And you can come up with a cost.

The challenge would be that the costs have gone way up. The inflation of groceries has been part of that. And then since the pandemic, there are various challenges with getting them delivered. It used to be almost entirely a volunteer-driven thing. It got really hard to get volunteers. And in some areas, some cities, some communities, they’re having to pay drivers. But in San Antonio, the cost per meal is $9.50. That’s cost per meal delivered to the door.

Jeff Schreifels
I do too.

Jeff Brooks
And I think a major donor saying I’ve always heard is it’s harder to get the meeting than to get the donation. I think that’s true of all donors. It’s harder to get their attention to your envelope than it is to get them to write a check. You’re not getting the check if they don’t open the envelope. So attention is more precious than money and harder to get. So at a certain age, they have a little more attention to share.

Jeff Schreifels
All right. So before we go, I want to get your advice because we have a lot of new fundraisers that have been just starting out in this business. What advice do you give a young fundraiser getting started who’s working at a non-profit today?

Jeff Brooks
Learn everything you can. There are a whole lot of really good books. I’m sure, Jeff, you have your stable of books where you say, read this book. And there’s a lot, right? Read a few fundraising blogs. Not all fundraising blogs are good, but there are more good ones than bad ones. Go to conferences. That’s where you’ll meet people who have different experience.

But maybe the most important is have a community and have a mentor. And those two things might kind of be the same, because your mentor might be several people that you work with rather than one. But somebody who’s more experienced than you, who can talk to you about stuff, who can set you straight or comfort you when something goes wrong. You really need other people.

So if you’re in a small non-profit and you don’t really have a community, or there’s maybe only two of you, which is so common, one or two people doing it all, there are things you can do to find that. Maybe your local AFP might be one. And I know you guys at Veritus offer all kinds of things where people can learn and maybe get in touch.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, we have this community hub. We have over 3,500 people around the world that kind of use this spot to say, “Hey, I’ve got this issue. What are you guys doing?” It’s awesome. It’s so cool.

Jeff Brooks
Right. And in a way, I work with Moceanic too, and we have the same kind of thing. The Facebook group is so cool. People come on and ask questions. And actually, we have learned, the experts said, don’t answer this for a few days. Let other people answer it. Let the non-experts who are in the trenches do it.

And it’s better that way. Now we sometimes chime in and say, here’s some perspective you might want to see. But on the whole, it’s people in similar situations helping each other out. They care about each other. And I can’t believe how generous people are. It’s really amazing. Again, it feels good to help somebody else, right? It feels good to help another fundraiser. It feels really good.

Jeff Schreifels
It does. So how do people get ahold of you if they want to reach out to you or Moceanic? Talk about that a little bit.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, well, my sort of most public-facing thing is my blog, Future Fundraising Now. And you can kind of find all the other stuff from there. I have a business website. It’s called Jeff-Brooks.com. I couldn’t just get Jeff Brooks as one word. Somebody else had that. There are lots of people with my name.

I work with Moceanic. It’s an Australia-based but international group of smart, like-minded fundraisers. We have a membership organization called the Fundraisingology Lab. You should join that. You really should. It’s so amazing.

Enrollment is open for the lab. It’s not usually open. But yeah, at Moceanic.com you can find everything you need there, or you can click through my website and then I get an affiliate thing. But either way, join it. It’s so good. Or work with Veritus. And there are some other really quality organizations that you can be part of.

It’s really important, and there are a lot of great books, readable, wonderful Tom Ahern books that can change your life and make you smarter and happier.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. The conversation has been really fun. I really thank you for being a part of this and sharing your wisdom. It makes me miss those days that we had. It makes me wish at the time I would have appreciated what we had. You know how you look back and think, boy, that was something special.

Jeff Brooks
I got happy teriyaki.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
I wish I would have thought about how special that was at the time. We didn’t know. But when you’re with those folks again and you’re sitting around talking, you’re like, yeah, this is why it was so special. So thank you for joining us. And for those listening, thanks for being a part of this, and we’ll see you next time.

Jeff Brooks
Yeah, we didn’t know, we didn’t know. All right. Yeah.