Start Here
Before we get into the material, I would like to ask you to read no further until you complete an exercise. In my opinion, it is a critical part of this process that will make your actual campaign far better.
I did it myself, entirely by accident, if I am being honest, and boy was I glad I did.
The exercise is simple but probably challenging: Write a fundraiser post that you are happy with before you get into any of my advice. That’s it. Just write the post/campaign asking for the money before you move on.
I strongly recommend that you write this draft letting your emotions speak loudly. Give this very little conscious thought, and simply put to paper why this money is needed to help you or your loved one. Do this without judgment or reservation. It doesn’t matter if you write something totally inappropriate. No one will ever need to read it but you.
This exercise can be tough to do, but it is critical for three reasons:
- If you don’t, you may end up with a log jam in your brain that makes writing the real appeal take much longer, and it may be more difficult than necessary.
- You will probably end up spitting some gold that would otherwise have gotten trapped in overthinking the process. Sometimes raw phrases and ideas that come from a deeply personal place are the most powerful to readers.
- It really helps to get it out. This isn’t pop psychology; it’s practical. The first draft of these kinds of appeals is almost always focused on you or your loved one’s needs. These drafts can be full of anxiety, fear, doubt, unhelpful pridefulness, and so on.
Get it out of your brain and onto paper where you can really think about it from the perspective of a reader. This is what we're going to use moving forward, and I will refer to it often.
Do it now, and then once you're happy with it proceed to Planning Section 1 below. Good luck!
Planning: Section 1
Creating your Story
I wrote this guide with a basic assumption: you need to raise money outside of your immediate circle of family and close friends because of a medical situation that has thrown your life into upheaval. If you had enough available money within that tight circle to handle whatever you may be facing, a broader appeal would probably not be necessary. As such, this guide is really about raising money from acquaintances and total strangers, people who might be moved to give but are not deeply connected to your situation.
Understanding that you are primarily talking to people who don't know your situation well is crucial. They need to get up to speed quickly, and in a credible way. The story you tell, and how you chose to tell it, is of the utmost importance.
The first step of the planning phase is to lay out the story you want to tell.
I want to strongly emphasize from the beginning that this story and the details that describe it must be true. Do not embellish. Give them the facts so you can be confident that those facts will stand up to scrutiny if they are challenged - and they may be. Nothing will kill an appeal faster than someone saying that it is based on lies. The Internet can give, and the Internet can take away just as quickly if people smell BS. Making up or exaggerating details may also be considered criminal fraud. For your sake and everyone else's, keep it real, please.
I recommend that you think about organizing your story in three parts: before the illness, during the illness, and the future beyond the illness. If you bring people into this story, they are much more likely to feel like they are a part of it, connect with it, and thus be moved to action.
Before the Illness:
This section is where we pull in key details from the value building exercise above. What was their life like before getting sick? What great things did they do for their family, community, or country?
This is a great place to talk about positive attributes, work ethic, etc. For those who had meaningful challenges before getting sick, talk about what they did to overcome those challenges.
Action Item:
Lay out some key points from that brainstorming exercise. You may also want to skim your draft and see if there are any useful phrases or ideas that would pair with these value-building attributes. Set all of that aside, we’ll use them later.
During the Illness:
This section should be short. It should be descriptive, so people understand the illness and how it has impacted your life and the lives of loves ones. However, it should not be a blow-by-blow review of a long story, nor should it be a dramatization of the situation. Let people into your “new normal” and allow them to experience a taste of your situation.
Action Item:
Make some bullet points about the most important parts of the journey for which you are raising money:
How long has this been going on?
How did it start?
What is the person’s diagnosis and prognosis?
What is the expected course of treatment?
What kinds of details can you add that make the ask a little more real? How many doctors have been consulted? How many hospitals have been visited? How many trials have been applied for? Have any grants have been won?
How much do you realistically need to raise?
After you lay out these bullets, see if you can put them together into 1-2 tight paragraphs that hit the key points that bring the reader into the story.
After the Illness:
Sometimes referred to as “The Bridge Effect,” people tend to be more comfortable and enthusiastic about donating money when they know that there is a potential positive outcome they could help to create. Their money becomes a bridge to a better place.
You should also gently explain what happens if you can’t build that bridge. There is an art to doing this that I will discuss more. We do not want to guilt people into donating or create negative emotions. But the fact is, you need this money. And without it, something bad will (probably) happen.
Importantly, the story needs to have stakes. Randomly asking for money because someone is sick is far less powerful than connecting that money to a positive outcome, and gently connecting not raising money to a negative outcome.
A good story is like a good crab cake, mostly meat and very little filler. Most every sentence should add detail toward helping people feel comfortable contributing to your appeal. Everything off-topic, unrelated, etc. should be cut.
Action item:
Jot down 2-3 positive outcomes that you could realize if this money was raised. Saving a life is always a good one to use IF IT IS REASONABLY EXPECTED TO BE TRUE.
If known, what is the likelihood of getting to a good outcome?
If known, what is the most likely outcome if the money you have asked for is not raised?
What does life look like beyond this illness?
How will success contribute to your family, your community, and the world?
How I used This:
My sister’s story had the benefit of being of being unique, but this concise telling of a four year saga was just enough to get people into her life and understand the issues at play.
"For the past four years Lexi, who is now 24, has been struggling with a cancer-like disease that has never been seen before. With attributes of cancer, an allergy, and an auto-immune disorder all rolled into one, she has been fighting to stay alive through countless procedures, rounds of chemotherapy, and tests.
Her doctors at Duke and Hopkins designed a handful of studies to try and find a drug that would offer a cure. While they had some initial success, the disease became more aggressive and ultimately the chemo agents they were testing began to harm her kidneys. The last study got shut down when her renal function deteriorated to the point that she had to go on dialysis.
For the last few months her doctors have been searching for some hope and discovered a small clinical trial for a kind of leukemia that is a close cousin to Lexi’s disease process. The study is a cutting-edge, high-risk, high-reward treatment with a 60% cure rate in early human trials. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is likely her last chance at life."
Taken together, what you have here is a young woman cut down in the prime of her life by an insidious disease that will almost certainly kill her, unless she gets access to the trial. Even if your situation is not quite so dramatic, there is a way of projecting the seriousness of your situation and the importance of the money to building that bridge to a better place.
Also, note that there is a real sense of urgency. It’s not just that she abstractly needs money because being sick is expensive (which it is). Rather, she is shooting for a specific goal that she just needs a little help to reach. How you frame the issues is often as important as the facts themselves.
Planning: Section 2
Your Visual Language
The final step of the planning process is finding images that will set the right tone and support your fundraiser.
A picture isn’t worth a thousand words. The right picture(s) may well save your life, and that makes it priceless.
This section is the subject of some debate as people have wildly differing opinions. I will share mine with you, and of course you can make whatever choice you think will best resonate with your audience.
The goal of creating a “visual language” is to communicate with the reader on a deeply personal level in a way that words cannot. If you do this well, the appeal will feel authentic, important, and urgent. The opposite is also true. Poorly chosen pictures can evoke fear, mistrust, and even anger.
Consider an extreme example where someone has poorly photoshopped themselves to look like a cancer patient. If you saw that picture and it immediately felt fake, how would you feel? For starters, you would probably be unlikely to donate. You might also feel manipulated and angry, like the poster had violated some fundamental rule of human decency.
In a less extreme example, think about how you would feel if an appeal was launched with pictures that LOOKED like stock photographs, though they were presented as the person asking for help. In this case, the pictures just look too perfect. It doesn’t FEEL genuine, even though it may be just a lovely shot of them taken and edited by a professional photographer. Here, you would probably have some doubt. It could be them, or it could be a scam. This fleeting thought creates friction and will cause some people who would have donated to pass you by.
I would like to share one more negative example, which is actually super common: the “uncomfortably medical” picture. Appeals on the Internet are loaded with images of patients covered in tubes and wires, looking miserable and frail.
I found the photo of the young woman in a hospital gurney that sits at the top of this section on a stock photo site. When I saw it, I had an immediate, visceral reaction. I didn’t want to see her as she is, so young, and probably suffering even though the photo shows her apparently unconscious. I immediately hoped that it had been staged. The photographer that took the shot tagged it with terms like cancer, grief, and death. I immediately scrolled away, looking for a different picture.
Four pages and a hundred photos later, I realized that the picture I had recoiled from was exactly the example of what I meant by a picture that was “uncomfortably medical.” My empathy had just overwhelmed my purpose.
People don’t like to see other people suffering. It can be so objectionable that it literally causes avoidance behaviors, which is the opposite of what we want. We want people to engage.
There is a school of thought, embraced by some charitable groups who show images of emaciated children covered in flies and living in squalor on late-night TV, that the severity of the images drive donation behavior. That CAN be true. I would argue that it is a huge risk, and one not worth taking.
In my opinion, the photos in your appeal should engage readers, connecting them to your situation, and showing them that yours is a life worth saving. That purpose is hampered if their “read” of the picture is that the patient is probably too far gone to be helped, or if the anxiety of seeing someone so vulnerable forces them to look away.
Let me give you a few guidelines of what makes great and poor appeal pictures, and then I’ll cover some different kinds of images in the last section.
Action Item:
What kinds of pictures can you pull together that really reflect the spirit of the patient and provide a hopeful, positive tone for the campaign? For extra credit, can those images show the patient doing charitable work, demonstrating a talent, etc.?
Reach out to family and friends and give them a sense of what you are looking for so they can scroll through their libraries.