“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, crap detector.”
That’s what Ernest Hemingway said.
A super-helpful corollary to that is from author and cultural critic Neil Postman: “At any given time, the chief source of crap with which you have to contend is yourself.”
There’s plenty of bad fundraising advice out there that encourages us to do crappy fundraising. It’s pretty easy to ignore bad advice. The hard part is ignoring your own bad advice. The most damaging, pervasive, inescapable crap comes from within. We should know better. But we trick ourselves into getting it wrong.
I’m not talking about some group of incompetent fundraisers out there somewhere. If they exist, they aren’t reading this blog. I’m talking about you and me.
We all are guilty of crap fundraising now and then. The best thing you can do is learn to recognize crap and stop it before it goes out to donors.
Here are two of the most common sources of crap-from-within, and how you can avoid letting them devastate your fundraising results…
- Abstraction
When you use abstractions, it feels high and noble. But it throttles your fundraising because it doesn’t give your donor anything to hold on to.
We love those beautiful ideals about a better world we want to live in. Like community, justice, beauty. And the big favorite of nearly everyone: hope.
So much fundraising focuses on hope. I think every nonprofit organization could be said to be in the business of creating hope. My massive swipe-file of fundraising messages supports this belief. “Hope” is everywhere.
That’s part of the problem, “Hope” is so abstract that every good cause can legitimately claim to be creating it.
Don’t get me wrong. Hope is beautiful. It’s necessary for everyone’s life.
But you can’t take a picture of it.
That’s your first line of defence against abstraction crap: ask yourself if you can take a picture of the ideal you’re talking about. I don’t mean a picture that symbolizes it – the way a picture of a mom holding a baby symbolizes love – but an actual photo of love itself.
It can’t be done. You’d better go to the mom and baby. Talk about the specifics. That will tell your donors a thousand times more about your cause than the abstraction.
The second tool that can help you avoid abstraction is a well-known thinking tool for writers called the Abstraction Ladder. It’s a way of connecting the concrete with the abstract. You start with something very specific, then think of the category that thing is in. Then think of the category that category is in. Do this until you’ve reached what seems to be the highest and most general concept.
Here’s a well-known example (revised for fundraising). Usually, we think of the ladder going up from the concrete to the abstract, but I prefer to think of it as going down.
- Bessie: a specific cow that you can observe and tell a story about.
- Cow: Cows in general. You can still observe them, but it’s hard to tell a story of “cow.”
- Livestock: All the farm animals. It’s getting harder to tell a story or take a picture of this.
- Farm: We can hardly see Bessie anymore!
- Food: Yes, that’s what farms create.
- Hope: And food leads to hope. But now you’re completely abstract.
Our inner crap creator often does this exercise almost unconsciously, because we think the far end of the ladder is the most important. The thing we should be talking about because it’s the best thing, far better than a smelly old cow.
When you’re doing fundraising, always ask yourself how far away from the specific you’ve gone. It’s fine to talk about “hope,” as long as you talk more about Bessie!
- Pomposity
You are an educated person. You know a lot – especially about the thing your organization does. You are justly proud of your organization, your fellow staff, and yourself.
It’s easy to think all this greatness will move donors to donate.
It won’t. Sure, your donors expect excellence from you. But that’s not why they give. They give to make something happen. And their sense of that “something” is much simpler than yours.
But pomposity tells you otherwise. “Donors need to know how awesome we are,” it tells you. So your fundraising includes things like:
- Technical jargon. Jargon is known by insiders. It’s usually a more efficient and accurate way to talk about your issues. Feel free to use it within your organization. But when you’re talking to donors, you’re just making noise. And excluding them from the conversation.
- Too much detail and background. To be good at what you do, you need to be detailed and know the background and history of your issue. You don’t need that to be a donor. (This is the type of crap that most often gets into my fundraising.)
- Complex, over-formal writing. The professional discourse of your cause is likely filled with extreme vocabulary and long meandering sentences where subordinate clauses spread like tree branches. Writing that breaks your Flesch-Kincade readability calculator. More’s the pity for you if that’s so. Your donors won’t follow you down this path.
This type of crap can be hard to see. It’s the way everyone communicates in your organization, to the point that it sounds completely normal to you. You might even think it’s necessary to communicate this way to be accurate.
Get outside help for this from someone who writes well but isn’t an insider. You’ll quickly see just how much of pomposity crap has filled your fundraising.
First draft crap
If you find crap seeping into your first draft, don’t worry about it! As long as you take it out before you hit “send” – it’s okay. It may be necessary to go through a “crap phase” in your writing. Sometimes the most brilliant fundraising is adjacent to some real crap!
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Related Blog Posts:
- Effective Fundraising Is Always a “Choose Your Own Adventure” Story
- 26 Tips for More Effective Fundraising Writing
3 Temptations that Undermine Your Fundraising Storytelling, and How to Stop Them Cold
