Chapter SevenYour Fundraising Offer from the Inside Out

In the last chapter, we examined the way a fundraising offer should look and feel to your donor—how it should be a problem, its solution, a cost, with urgency, donor context, and donor benefits. That was the fun part. Now we're going to look at the hard work you have to do behind the scenes to create a motivating fundraising offer.

Remember the movie Titanic? We saw the rich and famous passengers basking in luxury. Just yards away from them, completely undetectable, the men who powered the ship labored away in the hellish engine room, dirty with coal dust and streaked with sweat.

That's where we're going now: the engine room of your fundraising offer. We're leaving the pleasant, well-crafted upper decks we've so carefully built for your donors. We're climbing down a series of ladders and squeezing through narrow passages to discover what it takes to make those beautiful offers steam across the ocean of your donor's crowded psyche. Be careful: I just saw a rat scuttling past our feet. It's not pleasant down here. We're going to meet some unseemly characters such as lawyers and accountants. We might even have to talk with them.

But that's what it takes to produce a fundraising offer that does the job of connecting with donors. If you ...

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