While it’s good to see what you’re up against here, it’s also important to remember that people can’t afford to have all these excess expenses in their budget. Paying for multiple subscriptions begins to add up quickly. For example, a 1 yr. $5 subscription is $60/yr. Not bad till you have 5 of those. Or more. Everyone wants us to pay for a subscription. 5 low cost subscriptions balloons to $300 per year! Just on that alone. And if you’re not careful, you could easily be paying for far more of them. Most people are struggling to pay their necessary bills as it is. Many haven’t recovered from the covid lockdowns & loss of businesses, & job loss. So this is the other side of this coin. We appreciate the content, but we’re all in a similar financial position you may be finding yourself in. Hard times for sure!
Yes, I certainly understand that, and that's why we don't often make requests for larger sums of money. As I said in the original post, I know that the vast majority of people don't have it. But we still have to ask. We wouldn't last very long as a nonprofit if we never asked for donations. And remember, we aren't asking for money to support this content. We are a nonprofit law firm, and are still fighting to get justice for those very people you referenced, who lost their livelihoods and more during the covid years. But that has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's still not over. The economy has been terrible, yes, but does that mean we should give up and stop fighting? If people don't support our work, that's exactly what will happen.
The way the article is written suggests only people with large sums to give should give and it was noted in the article that's not a lot of people. I don't have large sums so I ignored the giving thing.
Had you continued with the theme you started with in the beginning about how ALL amounts are helpful and you'd be grateful for any amount, maybe more of us would have stepped up instead of realizing you weren't speaking to us.
It is very rare that we ever ask for large gifts. Almost all of our fundraising appeals are for small gifts (or no identified amounts at all). But even then, almost no one responds with a donation. At some point, when we realize that only a small handful are donating, the strategy has to shift to asking for larger donations. It's just simple math. If you need a lot of money, and only a few people are willing to donate, then you need larger gifts from those few people. If you know of a way that we can get thousands of people to donate small amounts, I'm all ears. We've been trying to do that for nearly five years now without success at the numbers we need to thrive.
People in the business have told me that open rates are generally meaningless, especially because email algorithms often consider an email "opened" if it is even viewed in the email reading pane (but not actually opened an read). Click rates are better performance indicators, because they demonstrate whether your content was successful in getting people to engage. Since the purpose of the article was to inspire giving, having three people out of over 17,000 respond is a very poor outcome.
While it’s good to see what you’re up against here, it’s also important to remember that people can’t afford to have all these excess expenses in their budget. Paying for multiple subscriptions begins to add up quickly. For example, a 1 yr. $5 subscription is $60/yr. Not bad till you have 5 of those. Or more. Everyone wants us to pay for a subscription. 5 low cost subscriptions balloons to $300 per year! Just on that alone. And if you’re not careful, you could easily be paying for far more of them. Most people are struggling to pay their necessary bills as it is. Many haven’t recovered from the covid lockdowns & loss of businesses, & job loss. So this is the other side of this coin. We appreciate the content, but we’re all in a similar financial position you may be finding yourself in. Hard times for sure!
Yes, I certainly understand that, and that's why we don't often make requests for larger sums of money. As I said in the original post, I know that the vast majority of people don't have it. But we still have to ask. We wouldn't last very long as a nonprofit if we never asked for donations. And remember, we aren't asking for money to support this content. We are a nonprofit law firm, and are still fighting to get justice for those very people you referenced, who lost their livelihoods and more during the covid years. But that has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's still not over. The economy has been terrible, yes, but does that mean we should give up and stop fighting? If people don't support our work, that's exactly what will happen.
The way the article is written suggests only people with large sums to give should give and it was noted in the article that's not a lot of people. I don't have large sums so I ignored the giving thing.
Had you continued with the theme you started with in the beginning about how ALL amounts are helpful and you'd be grateful for any amount, maybe more of us would have stepped up instead of realizing you weren't speaking to us.
(And by the way, a 33% open rate is good.)
It is very rare that we ever ask for large gifts. Almost all of our fundraising appeals are for small gifts (or no identified amounts at all). But even then, almost no one responds with a donation. At some point, when we realize that only a small handful are donating, the strategy has to shift to asking for larger donations. It's just simple math. If you need a lot of money, and only a few people are willing to donate, then you need larger gifts from those few people. If you know of a way that we can get thousands of people to donate small amounts, I'm all ears. We've been trying to do that for nearly five years now without success at the numbers we need to thrive.
People in the business have told me that open rates are generally meaningless, especially because email algorithms often consider an email "opened" if it is even viewed in the email reading pane (but not actually opened an read). Click rates are better performance indicators, because they demonstrate whether your content was successful in getting people to engage. Since the purpose of the article was to inspire giving, having three people out of over 17,000 respond is a very poor outcome.