In usability studies, we observe people peeking at top-level pages for answers to foundational questions. Make sure that your site passes the first impressions test by answering top questions succinctly. People are more inclined to engage further once they've determined you're worth the effort.
Your "About Us" page matters a lot to some donors. Make sure they can easily find and quickly read what they need. Which is probably this:
What do you do? Not the long-winded, abstraction-filled brand guidelines version, but the succinct, specific donor-focused version.
Are you trustworthy?
What can I do through you?
Give it some good thought. Make sure your About Us page is doing its job!
Trying to motivate donors to give by addressing them with jargon they don't understand crushes a lot of fundraising efforts. People are far less likely to respond if they don't know what you're talking about.
Many people are afraid of using language that's simple because they worry that it will make their product or service seem basic. Provided you're careful when writing about what you do, that's not as big a risk as people think it is.
Let's be clear: Poor use of jargon can cost you. The Crazy Egg post cites a test for online conversion in the financial service industry. They tested the term sales tax refund (which is what most people call it) against sales tax recovery (what the experts call it). A one-word difference.
The non-jargon version got 31 times the response of the jargon version.
I hope the folks who wanted to look smart by using the jargon term are feeling stupid.
There are several reasons you might be tempted to use jargon:
You want to show people that you're smart. As the test above shows, doing that might help you feel smart, but it clearly demonstrates that you're dumb.
You value technical accuracy over clarity of communication. If that's you, you may be a lawyer. You sure aren't a fundraiser.
You're on a mission to educate everyone else about the intricacies of your cause. Can you see how sociopathic that is?
You're so trapped in your own head that you don't realize other people don't speak your jargon. If that's you, a quick solution is to get professional fundraising help.
The way we raise funds is to communicate clearly and with emotion. Jargon blocks both of those things.
The only time you should consider using jargon is when you know for sure that your entire audience also uses the same jargon. This may be the case if your audience is made up entirely of members of the same faith group, the same branch of the military, or the same profession. In those cases, using a shared jargon can help you connect.
Otherwise, turn and flee from the temptation to throw around those jargon terms.
I'm guessing that's how it happened here, but the stupid turned out so severe, I simply can't give it a bye. Take this as a cautionary tale, because it could happen to anyone.
It's a campaign for the Motor Neurone Disease Association in the UK (that's ALS in the US). It features the stories of people with MDA/ALS. This one is about a young man named Michael Smith:
In case you can't read that (after all, it's all-cap text reversed against a photo, which basically the same as invisible ink) here's what it says:
Last summer, I was the only person I knew who didn't do the ice bucket challenge. Five months later I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
You can see the problem. It looks more like a threat than a story: Donate, or you'll be stricken with a terrible disease!
You can imagine how this played on Twitter:
Did you fail to do the ice bucket challenge? You too could be at risk!
Unbelievably stupid premise for a campaign. pic.twitter.com/BGWZg9MtMA
Clearly, that's not what the people who created this ad had in mind. They couldn't see it.
You can see their anguished "we didn't mean it" in an article at Third Sector:
It was certainly not our intention to cause any offence. As we always do with our campaigns, we put people with MND at the centre of them. In this case it was Michael talking about his story in his own words.
If you go online and read Michael Smith's story, you'll see that it's a powerful account of one person facing a terrifying disease. The bit about not doing the ice bucket challenge is not an important part of the story.
But it unavoidably looks like a bizarre, thuggish threat of instant karma on anyone who doesn't support the organization. Anyone outside of the MNDA can see that in an instant. It wasn't visible to those who created this ad.
This could happen to you or me. When we're too close to see the obvious. Be careful. Get an outside view of things.
This may be counterintuitive. Chances are, you get bored and annoyed with your message before your donors' processing fluency reaches the point where it makes a difference.
Repetition comes in two varieties:
Repeated words, phrases, and ideas within a message.
Repeated (or similar) messages over time.
Both types of repetition can improve response to your fundraising over time.
Think of it this way: If your messaging is making you (or your boss) a little crazy with repetition -- you're probably getting close to getting through to your donors.
I realize that's not very interesting to anyone but myself -- even though in blog years, it's sort of like celebrating your bicentennial. But I've learned a few things from ten years of blogging, and that might interest you:
What I've learned
Writing what you know helps you know what you write. In work like ours, you have to keep a lot of principles in your head. We all know a lot of things. Writing about those things for ten years means having to go a step beyond knowing.
Having a monster to feed is terrifying, but good. Having a blog is like having a pet sasquatch. There are moments of high terror when the duties of your "real" job seem to crowd out writing anything at all. But that's what makes it work: No sane person would sit down and write several thousand short articles about fundraising. Only a blogger would do that!
People who care about fundraising are civil and incredibly generous. I've met -- online and in person -- and lot of my fellow bloggers, and their most salient feature is generosity -- of advice, help, and spirit. And maybe more amazing, I've had trollish behavior show up only two or three times in the ten years. What is it about our profession? We should be proud.
Prehistory of this blog
Before September 26, 2009, I blogged at Donor Power Blog. It has since gone dormant, but you can still find it in a weird, truncated form, thousands of posts without a purpose but still possible to read. Google it.
Do you know about Warby Parker? It's an online eyewear shop that has low prices and great customer service -- one of the new breed of disruptive online businesses that's changing the way a lot of things are bought and sold.
You can tell they have something going by the number of Google hits that are something like: _____ is the Warby Parker of ______!
Can your organization by the Warby Parker of fundraising?
It must be overwhelmingly tempting. You're a hardworking charity. You're looking for a breakthrough.
A creative agency comes knocking. They've won awards for their creative work. You've even encountered their work in the real world. They're ready to do something creative and award-winning for you.
That's when the stupid starts.
I don't know if that's how it went for Human Appeal, a UK-based international relief organization, but I bet that's close to the reality.
You might have to watch it a few times to get the concept, so in case you don't have the time, I'll describe it for you:
Two little kids run happily through some kind of partly-ruined building. Suddenly, one of them freezes! You see his shadow, stopped mid-stride. But wait! That's not a kid casting that shadow, it's a bunch of Bad Stuff!! Drug paraphernalia, weapons, some other things ... it's moving a bit too fast at this point to identify most of it. The other child turns back, frightened (not nearly frightened enough, given what has just happened). She touches a bullet that's part of the Bad Stuff. It turns back into a boy!!! They hug. A whole bunch of words flash by on the screen, too quickly to read most of them. Then, bigger and slower, because they apparently want us to actually read these ones:
6.3M children need saving
Then, for five seconds, a screen with a lot of contact information on it, including: Help #ShineALight in the darkness
This video follows the lead of so many stupid nonprofit ads: It's built on abstraction. Even the call to action is abstract: "Shine a light."
Shine a light? How about actually do something to help?
But maybe that doesn't matter, because the video dosn't actually make any case that there's a problem that needs solving. It just throws out a statement: 6.3M children need saving. That's pure fundcrushing, the action-killing evil twin of fundraising.
Children around the world really do need help. I imagine quite a lot more than 6.3 million of them. And there are donors who are ready and able to help.
But clever, high-production-value abstractions will not move those people to action. It's a utter waste of time, money, and attention that saps the ability of good organization to do the realistic work of connecting with donors.
Elsewhere on the Human Appeal website, you can do all kinds of specific good things, like feed a family for £50. There should be amazing videos about that.
What this blog is about
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.
About the blogger
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 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 [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.
I'm a Fundraisingologist at Moceanic, the company that can help you transform the way you do fundraising through one-on-one coaching or membership in The Fundraisingology Lab. Find out what we can do for you and with you!
A proud member of The Case Writers, a collective of the smartest, most donor-loving creative professionals in the business.
Writing for fundraisers
Admit it: Fundraising writing is weird.
So many people get thrown into the work of writing fundraising without ever being told about the weird they need to live with -- and master -- if they're going to succeed.
How to use rhyme to make your message more memorable and persuasive.
How to tell stories that motivate donors to give.
How to meet donors' emotional needs.
Whether you should use guilt as a motivator.
Whether you're working on your very first fundraising writing assignment or you're a seasoned veteran ... whether you want it for yourself or need to show someone else how the pros write fundraising -- or both -- this is a book you should order today.
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If your organization is even vaguely considering "branding work," you need to read The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand by Jeff Brooks. Read more here.
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