Future Fundraising Now

Bullet lists can drain the life from your fundraising -- or pump up the energy -- here's how

Bullet points are normally a helpful tool for making what you've written more readable.

When you have several similar points you need to make, a bulleted list can:

• Introduce visual variety, which increases readability.
• Turn what would have been a long paragraph into an easily scannable entry point.
• Organize your thinking, thus making it more clear.
• Lower the reading level of your copy.

All good.

But let me show you a type of bulleted list that hurts fundraising results: A list of program attributes.

In an appeal asking donors to support a poverty fighting program, it might list what beneficiaries will get:

• A quality education
• Basic medical care
• Nutritious food

Just a list of attributes. Important things, but boring.

Actually, worse than boring. It draws the eye, possibly away from something interesting, motivating, and about the donor ... and it delivers almost nothing to the reader.

Remember, people don't donate to fund programs. They give to make things happen.

So to make sure your bulleted lists speak to their motivations, you might take those attributes and make it a list of the problems they solve:

• Without a quality education, the children have little chance of improving their futures.
• Lacking basic medical care, far too many are dying from preventable diseases.
• Because they don't get enough nutritious food, they're suffering the devastating and long-term impact of malnutrition.

Or make it about the donor with a list of what they'll make possible when they give:

• You'll provide a quality education that will transform the kids' lives.
• You'll give them basic medical care that will keep them healthy and even saves their lives.
• You'll supply nutritious food that will fill their empty tummies today and keep them healthy and full of energy.

(Tip: If all -- or even some -- of your list items have the word you in them, you are more likely on the right track.)

Don't waste your time (and your readers' attention) with merely listing attributes. Make it interesting. Make it about the donor!

How to write powerful fundraising first lines -- lessons from the giants

I just read an interesting book: Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt. It's a writerly romp through the details about great literature. If you're a word-nerd, you'll really enjoy it.

One chapter especially got me thinking about fundraising messages. It's about the opening sentences of great novels -- those memorable and often arresting beginnings that propel you through hundreds of pages of words.

You know, like "Call me Ishmael." Which opens Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

We often work hard to start direct mail or email message with a strong opening. So I wondered what I could learn from great opening lines in fiction.

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve lists a lot of "best" opening lines, based on compiled lists by literary critics and others. I'm showing some of them here, because they can teach us something about opening lines in fundraising. (They're also great moments in literature, and kind of fun to read!)

Openings that establish a situation

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want a wife.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

There was a boy called Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

All this happened, more or less.

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

This can be a good way to open a fundraising message: Tell the reader exactly what's going on. Something like this...

I'm writing to you today because a devastating landslide has buried part of the area where we work. Many families we know and love have lost their homes and livelihoods. Will you please rush an urgent donation to help them?

Or like this:

It was a tough winter here in New England, and our garden was badly damaged by snow and wind.

Here's another approach great novels often take:

Openings that start in the middle of the action.

In literature, this is called in media res, Latin for "into the middle of things." You just plunge right into your story, and get to explaining the background later.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Ulysses, James Joyce

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1984, George Orwell

A screaming comes across the sky.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

It's a great way to start a book. And most great movies start this way.

But for fundraising messages, you have to be careful. Book-readers and moviegoers are consciously choosing to enter the world of the story. Not so with your fundraising audience. Almost always, you're popping into their world, interrupting whatever they're doing and thinking about. They are not agreeing to enter your story.

If your story is powerful enough, you might draw them in. And that's how this approach can be great in fundraising.

But it's a tall order!

Use this "start in the middle" approach rarely, and only when your story is truly unusual.

I should point out that opening lines in fundraising are less important than they are in literature. Because our readers don't sit down with the intention of reading the whole thing, the way you do when you read a novel.

Our readers skim. There's a good chance that your great opening line is hardly read at all. We know from research that the P.S. in a letter is the most-read part.

So work hard on making your opening strong.

But work harder on a call to action that's compelling, easy, and well targeted to your donors!

The secret weapon for writing better, faster, and easier

Every writer of every kind sometimes faces "writers' block." Every writer, no matter how talented and experienced, also sometimes writes crappy copy.

Get used to it.

But there's a tool that can really minimize those painful facts of life: Freewriting.

Read about how freewriting can help you at A Simple But Powerful Method For Getting More Writing Done (and Much Faster) at Inc.com.

Here's how to do freewriting:

• Set a timer for 10 minutes.
• Start writing. Don't stop to think or read what you've written until time is up. Just write.
• Ignore grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Nobody else needs to read what you write. It's okay if you write garbage.
• If you don't have any ideas, write anyway. If you don't have anything to say, write nonsense. If all you can think of is how annoying this exercise is, just write I hate freewriting. If you feel bored or uncomfortable, write about that.

Want to know more about freewriting and similar approaches to writing? Read Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process by Peter Elbow.

One of these outlines raises funds. The other one doesn't.

Here's something really worth knowing, from the Better Fundraising Blog, at The Simple Outline for Appeals That Raise Money:

A (very common) appeal outline that never works:

• Thank you for helping in the past
• Let me tell you a story about someone we already helped
• Please help us continue this good work

I see appeals that follow an outline like this all the time. You'd think it was proven, guaranteed, bullet-proof, and known to work.

It doesn't.

Instead, try ...

The appeal outline that almost always works:

• There's a problem right now
• You are needed to solve it
• Here's how your gift will solve it

You still have to do a bunch of other things right, but this is the outline that works. Follow this (or some version of it). Abandon that other one!

How to write a better fundraising letter

Writing a direct mail fundraising letter? Here are some things that will help you make it more effective from Pamela Grow's blog: 7 musts for writing your best fundraising appeal letter...

1. Engage your reader right from the start. (Grab attention with the outer envelope and keep on grabbing it at every step!)
2. Ask early and ask often! (If your message asks only one time, you're missing it.)
3. Your Story (About one, and about how the donor can make a difference.)
4. Your Offer (Make sure there's a specific and compelling call to action.)
5. The Ask (How much are you asking the donor to give -- and what will that amount do?)
6. PS (The most-read paragraph in a direct mail letter. Use it well.)
7. Formatting and Design (Go for readability.)

Free online workshop: 5 Steps to a Wildly Successful Bequest Fundraising Program with Christiana Stergiou. October 17 and 18. A must for serious fundraisers ... and it's FREE.

The strange power of "Even if you can't give now..."

by guest blogger George Crankovic. He blogs at The Clued-in Copywriter.

In order to write fundraising copy that works, it's a good idea to look at copywriting that sells.

Yes, some of the tips and tactics that work in commercial marketing will also work in fundraising. Here's one of them.

It's the idea of giving power over to your donor in order to persuade her to accept what you're selling.

You see this in commercial marketing all the time. For example, in commercial direct mail letters, there's often a line of copy something like this: "It's up to you whether you buy now or not, but here's why this is such a good deal..."

Why does this work? Well, it's a pretty basic fact of human psychology that if you want to get somebody to do something, one of the best ways to do it is to make it feel like it's their idea. The more you do that and the less you seem to be pressuring them, the more likely they are to do what you want them to do. That's what this simple line of copy does.

And we can use it in fundraising. In the copy for a fundraising appeal, we might say, "It's up to you whether you give now or not..." because this shifts the decision-making power over to the donor, making it seem like giving is her idea. Which is good for fundraising.

Or, depending on the appeal, we can even vary it a little. Say there's a bounce-back in the appeal. We could write something like: "Even if you can't give a donation right now, sign and return the card anyway..." The same principle is at work. We're shifting the decision-making power to the donor, taking the pressure off, and making it seem like giving is the donor's idea.

Plus, with this approach, we're adding in a small measure of guilt at the prospect of not giving. And, a line like this even subtly suggests that the donor might not be financially able to give, and that in itself could be a hot button for many donors.

But even beyond all that, let's say the donor takes us up on our offer to return the card without giving a gift. Instead of no response at all, we've gotten the donor to respond by returning the card. And that means this donor will be far more likely to give a donation the next time she receives an appeal.

Now, maybe all this seems well and good, but you're wondering whether this kind of approach gives the donor an "out" and might discourage donations. After all, we are saying it's okay not to give.

For one thing, donors aren't lab mice that we can force through a maze until they arrive at the place where they give a donation. Donors who lose interest just toss the appeal. So, it would really be overstating our influence to suggest that fundraisers would even have the power to let donors off the hook. We can't really get them on the hook in the first place!

And even more important, giving the power over to the donor is what donor-centric fundraising is all about. It doesn't benefit us to seem like we're giving donors the hard sell and twisting their arms. The power can and should rest with donors. Acknowledging that simple and obvious fact is unlikely to turn donors off. In fact, it can only help to win more of them over.

Language change literally drives some fundraisers crazy

The horror!

Some dictionaries now give a new definition for the word literally!

The entire planet is literally going up in flames!

Or so you might think, to hear people react to the news that some dictionaries now acknowledge the odd way many English-speaking people use literally to mean almost exactly opposite of its main meaning. Something like, "not really, but in an emphatic way."

Read about it here at Salon: According to the dictionary, "literally" now also means "figuratively".

... people increasingly use "literally" to give extreme emphasis to a statement that cannot be true, as in: "My head literally exploded when I read Merriam-Webster, among others, is now sanctioning the use of literally to mean just the opposite."

First: the dictionary isn't "sanctioning" this use of the word. The dictionary is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is put in writing what is really happening in language. Dictionaries are guidebooks, not rulebooks. Here's how Merriam-Webster puts it, at Did We Change the Definition of 'Literally'?

There is no plot by dictionary-makers to destroy our language.... There is, however, a strong impulse among lexicographers to catalog the language as it is used, and there is a considerable body of evidence indicating that literally has been used in this fashion for a very long time.

What does all this have to do with fundraising?

Not much. But I bring it up because so many word-conscious people -- those of us who write the words that persuade donors to give and fund the good causes of the world -- are very unhappy about certain kinds of language change, and even take it as a personal mission to stop those things.

You really don't need to do that. It's not your job. And all your complaining won't stop it.

Few of us are bothered by words that shifted in meaning before we showed up. Like silly (then spelled saelig), which used to mean blessed. That must have made people literally tear their hair out! Maybe that's the real reason monks had hair like that.

Or the weird way cleave means both divide things and connect things. Now, we just look it up in the dictionary and think, How odd our language is. And get on with our lives.

I won't be using the "new" sense of literally in my fundraising any time soon. I don't recommend you do it either. It will only make certain donors peevish and unhappy. Not very many donors, but they'll be really, really peeved. They won't hear a thing you have to say after they've seen your "wrong" literally, and a few will try to organize boycotts. Who needs that?

But language changes. And that's a good thing. Even though it means an old "rule" gets revised now and then.

Put your energy on making language great. Not on freezing it the way it was when you were in college.

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4 weird copywriting cheats for fundraising writers

1. In your first draft of any fundraising piece you write include the word you (your, yours, you're, etc.) in EVERY SENTENCE. Don't worry that some of those sentences or sentence combinations may be awkward. You can revise them later. But I can guarantee that with you in every sentence, the psychological core of your draft will be spot on -- even if some of those yous go away!
2. Try not saying the name of your organization anywhere in the body of your writing. This is not to hide who you are -- after all, the name will be on the letterhead, the return address, and a dozen other places. But by keeping it out of the body of writing, you are forced to focus on the donor.
3. Start your first draft with these exact words: I'm writing to you because... It's possible you'll eventually edit these words out in subsequent drafts. But if you start there, you will be on track to a relevant message!
4. Have your computer read your copy out loud to you. I find this even better than just reading aloud yourself. You'll hear awkward and unnatural phrases that you hadn't noticed before.

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Good fundraising writing: It's not about avoiding your peeves

Years ago, I worked at a company where one of the best ways to get ahead was to talk. A lot.

Being able to filibuster at a meeting or write staggeringly long emails marked you as a winner.

The content of what you had to say wasn't as important as word count. It was the best path to a vice presidency (and this company had a lot of VPs).

When you incentivize something, people tend to pursue it. So there were a lot of people at this company who could really keep up a stream of words. Some of them knew what they were talking about, but not all of them. Having something meaningful to say was secondary to saying a lot.

If you need to keep a monolog going, a very helpful technique is to have a bank of buzzwords and phrases you can draw on while you mentally take a breath.

That's a time-honored technique, and you can see how it was used even in ancient times when you read classic literature that started out as oral performance, like Homer's Odyssey, or Beowulf -- where the ocean is described with phrases like wine-dark sea and the whale-road.

Back at my former workplace, if you were trying to figure out what you wanted to say next, you didn't have to pause. You could dip into your word horde and grab something like...

• Low-hanging fruit
• Synergy
• It is what it is
• All hands (there's a hilarious story about this one, but I can't tell it here)
• Secret sauce
• Rock star
• Verbiage (meaning written words?)

Just mix and match these near-meaningless phrases. That way you didn't lose the floor to some other motor-mouth who might be able to grab that vice presidency that you're after.

So for me, those jargon phrases are odious reminders of crappy meetings where empty suited babblers did their corporate maneuvering.

That's why I hate those phrases.

Your reason for hating phrases like that is probably similar.

And there's a problem with that. We hate a phrase because the people we associate with it are annoying.

That's not a good enough.

I mean, it's not a good enough reason to forbid a word or phrase. It's okay to cringe at a phrase or to complain about it with your friends or coworkers, the way almost everybody dislikes the word moist.

But as a writer working to motivate other people, you should not let your peeves guide your writing.

Feeling okay about the words you use is not your job.

Your job as a fundraiser is 100% to reach and influence others. And 0% to make yourself feel good about your writing.

Now I'm not saying you should start sprinkling your fundraising with business jargon. Please -- don't! There are reasons not to do so that have nothing to do with your peeves:

• They are mostly jargon that your donors are unlikely to understand.
• Most are completely abstract.
• Many of them have no actual meaning.

The fact that they remind you of that insufferable boor with the shiny suit and less than half an idea bouncing around in his brain is not a reason to avoid those phrases.

Example: One of my biggest peeves is the word partner used as a verb. Will you partner with us to help the children?

I hate that! It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and quiver! I think it should be tied in a burlap bag and thrown into the river!

But that doesn't count. Nobody cares what words I hate. And when I'm writing to get a job done, I shouldn't care either.

There's a good argument for staying away from partner-as-verb: It's abstract. It's a verb you can't actually picture happening.

But there's also an argument for using it in fundraising: Almost every church lady I've ever known or listened to uses it a lot. And those church ladies (of all types of houses of worship including "none") are the main body of donors for nearly every organization on Earth. It means something to her!

Should you use partner-as-verb in your fundraising? That's your call. But if you hate it like I do, that's not enough reason to go against it!

When I see those lists that pop up on blogs now and then of words you must never use in fundraising, I get wary. Sometimes they are useful lists of jargon phrases that we might not even recognize as jargon because we use them so often. But more typically, it's someone's list of peeves. That is of no use to a serious writer of fundraising.

Writing fundraising is an innately humbling activity. It forces you outside of your own mind and feelings. Which is not easy, and sometimes doesn't feel good at all!

But here's the good feeling you're actually seeking: Raising tons of money for a worthy and needful cause! Yes, you can stand using your peeve words and phrases in the service of that! If you can't, you aren't really a fundraiser ... yet.

Powerful fundraising begins in middle

Here's a piece advice from Seth Godin that can save you a lot of time and trouble: Throat clearing isn't necessary. The main point, we almost always waste our readers' time by the way we start any piece of writing ...

The first paragraph, where you lay out what's about to happen. The half-apology you use to preface your comments at the meeting. The email that takes a paragraph or two to get to the point...

You can skip those.

About 90% of the time when I edit fundraising copy (in any medium), I chop off the beginning. Because it really is just throat-clearing.

That includes my own copy.

Throat-clearing may be a necessary part of writing. But it's a seriously unnecessary part of your final message.

Get rid of it.

Take my online course, Irresistible Communications for Great Nonprofits. It's a four-part complete masterclass in the surprising things that work in fundraising. Details here.