Why the boss can't read your fundraising right

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13 August 2012

Why the boss can't read your fundraising right

From Tom Ahern's newsletter, a checklist you might want to give your boss or that meddling board member who's bent on taking all the life out of your fundraising: Why does good direct mail sound so weird?

Here's what I think may be the main point, the reason reviewers have a tendency to get things so terribly wrong:

We write (and review) these letters at 1 mph. Readers, though, read at 100 mph. Things that are said just once tend to be overlooked. When you read direct mail at 1 mph (listen up, reviewers!), it can sound choppy. That choppiness disappears at 100 mph.

In fact that "chop" is what makes it possible for people to understand what they're reading at that speed. If you wrote in a way your reviewers found smooth and pleasing, you'd lose readers -- and revenue.

Get Tom's list and make your reviewers read it!

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 13 August 2012 at 07:20 in Fundraising | Permalink

Technorati Tags: copywriting

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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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