Fired for Doubling Revenue

John Lepp’s agency recently doubled a client’s direct mail revenue. Then the client fired them, because the marketing team didn’t like how the appeal looked.

That story captures the gap between what looks good and what actually raises money, and John has spent nearly 30 years on the right side of it. In this episode, the co-founder of Agents of Good explains why there’s no room for being clever in fundraising, why your appeal shouldn’t read like a doctoral thesis, why he deliberately stamped over half a client’s logo, and why AI is basically a frying pan. You’ll also hear about a mother-in-law who sends $100 without reading the letter, and a blunt bit of career advice for anyone who finds empathy hard: go work at a bank.

Meet John Lepp

John is co-founder and partner at Agents of Good, the Canadian fundraising and communications agency he launched with Jen Love in 2009. He cut his teeth in advertising, including a stint at a pharmaceutical agency where he learned to turn complex ideas into simple pictures. He then worked as a freelance designer and with agencies across Canada and internationally.

Today he works with organizations around the world on annual and individual giving. He’s the author of Creative Deviations and a regular on conference stages, where he is famous for one thing above all: giving fundraisers permission to be human.

The conversation

Your donors are not grading your vocabulary

John’s old boss had a rule: there’s no room for being clever in fundraising. John has honored it ever since. Clever forces donors to do cognitive work, and as he puts it, our brains are inherently lazy. Nobody wants to decode your appeal.

When clients send him letters to review, he runs a readability score first. Some come back at a grade-16 reading level. His verdict is gentle but devastating: that’s not cleverness, that’s not knowing how to talk plainly. And if your organization preaches inclusion, writing at a graduate-school level (or letting your designer reverse out tiny type) quietly undercuts everything you claim to stand for.

The agency that never launched

Andrew noticed that Agents of Good opened its doors in 2009, smack in the middle of a global financial meltdown. John’s answer: there was no launch. A few anonymous promo videos on Twitter were enough to send an Australian agency scrambling to find out who these new competitors were. Meanwhile, John and Jen simply talked to the people they already worked with, and clients followed.

The lesson he took from it applies to every charity too. Nobody cares about your anniversary, your logo colors, or your brand positioning statement. They want to know what you need from them, and whether they want to do it.

Stop living in checkbox world

Too many charities run on autopilot: the calendar says spring appeal, so out goes a spring appeal, with silence in between. John’s alternative is a Donor Experience System. It means consistent emotion across every touch, values that echo the donor’s values, decision-science nudges that make giving easy, and above all, identity reinforcement.

Drawing on Dr. Jen Shang’s work on self-identity, John argues that giving is an expression of who we are. So hold up a mirror: tell the donor you see them as the compassionate person they are. Most charities never do. His model is Disney, where every touchpoint from the parking lot to the washrooms is built around the story.

“If it’s hard for you, go work at a bank”

What if you’re a tiny shop with no Disney budget? John’s answer is refreshingly simple. Make the ask abundantly clear. Sound like a group of humans who care. Make the action easy