The power of texture words in copy

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07 June 2012

It seems certain words do more to activate the brains of readers than others, as reported at the Neuromarketing blog: Persuade with Silky Smooth Copy.

A recent study (Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex) compared people's unconscious reactions to "textural metaphors" compared to non-textural phrases. Like these:

Having a bad day?
or
Having a rough day?

The use of "rough" in this context caused sensory areas of the brain to be activated while "bad" did not.

What can we fundraisers do with this information? Easy: Look for those texture words:

Say "sharp pain" instead of "severe pain." "Smooth" instead of "easy." Find ways to use words like gravelly, crunchy, bumpy, silky, hard, soft.

Your fundraising can still perform poorly if you do this, but if you're getting everything else right, prompting more action in your donors' somatosensory cortexes can only help.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 07 June 2012 at 07:15 in Donor Psychology | Permalink

Technorati Tags: fundraising, writing

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The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing, has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 20 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff.brooks [at] truesense [dot] com. More.

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