I once had a fundraising client with one team member who really hated ellipses in their messages.

You know, those little rows of periods that mean:

• Formally: “something has been edited out here.”
• Informally: “the speaker here is pausing.”
• Even more informally: “keep reading … something good is coming.”

The team member said my use of ellipses (I used all three meanings) was “incorrect” and was sure that it was annoying donors and turning them away from giving. And they were very focused on this.

“Hogwash,” I said. (Inside my head. I think.)

This person said they’d allow ellipses if I could prove – with data – that they “worked.” I would love to have data that granular about everything I do. But it simply doesn’t exist, and probably never will.

We know quite a bit about what works in fundraising because it has consistently tested well over time. (Like the power of longer letters, readable fonts, low reading levels.)

But we don’t have data for everything. In fact, we don’t have data for most of the hundreds of decisions you make in every fundraising project you do.

We don’t have the data for these things because they are small and subtle. They have very little impact. If you tested them head-to-head (such as a message that included ellipses against the same letter that didn’t), you would certainly fail to find statistically significant results. There will be more “noise” than signal, and you won’t learn anything. Some might call it a “tie,” but it’s really more of a piece of non-information.

It might be possible to get a significant result if you have testing quantity in the millions. Which very few of us do. And those lucky (?) few have more important things they need to know than the impact of specific punctuation mark.

So without support from data, why do I believe ellipses are effective in fundraising writing?

Because use of ellipses is LIKE other things that are testing-supported. We know better reading-ease scores are highly correlated with stronger response. Quality writing and storytelling that captures the attention of skimmers and holds the attention of distracted readers. These things (and others like them) have clear and strong data behind them.

These things have clear data backing them up.

I extrapolate that to support my belief that ellipses are a minor but useful tool in fundraising writing.

It’s possible I’m wrong about that, and somehow ellipses really bug a lot of people and don’t help your fundraising do well. I’ve been surprised before.

But c’mon! The likelihood of that is incredibly small. Microscopic.

Also, there seems to be a “gestalt” to many of the small fundraising techniques we use. Individually, they don’t move the needle, but working together they make a difference, probably because they work together to create a more readable, relevant experience for donors.

Here are some other tiny things I believe in as part of effective fundraising, even though I don’t have direct data backing them up:

• Dashes
• Oxford commas (a comma after the “and” in a list of three or more items)
• Sentence fragments
• One-word paragraphs
• Indented first lines of paragraphs
• Underlining and other forms of emphasis (I’ve heard believable anecdotes about tests that support this)

There are a lot more like these. Each of them has people who hate them and want to remove them from any writing they have influence over. (If you have or know of data on things like these, let us know!)

You may have a stakeholder (or two) with strong opinions about these minor fundraising tools. What should you do? Stand your ground and fight?

Probably not.

They are practicing the worst kind of micromanaging. And it’s pretty weird that their “hunch” about something like a punctuation should hold sway over your somewhat-informed hunch. But they probably don’t see it as such. They honestly believe they are saving their fundraising program.

You can write powerful fundraising without ellipses. Really, you can. Your fundraising quiver has hundreds of arrows in it. Having one of them removed won’t make much difference.

The only problem is this: Someone who removes ellipses from your toolkit will probably want to remove other things too. And not all of those things will small.

That’s what happened with my anti-ellipses client. We eventually had a long list of things we were not allowed to do, including a list of forbidden words (many of them very useful words, like “gift” and “you”) and other techniques, like underlining, “sob stories” (meaning any story they chose to call that), and more.

Every time something was forbidden, they’d insist that it had to be specifically supported by “data.” Which some things were, but most were not. And you won’t be surprised to know that often, even data-supported techniques were rejected because “our donors are different.”

My fundraising quiver had few arrows left.

And their fundraising started to tank.

Author H.G. Wells said, “The strongest compulsion in the world is not love, and it is not hate; it is one person’s desire to edit another person’s copy.”

That’s what was going on. That’s why we’ve all experienced this

Fortunately, it usually doesn’t get to that extreme. But you have faced it to some level and will probably face it again.

Choose your battles. Don’t create conflict over every little thing.

But do explain yourself for the decisions you make. Cite direct data when you have it. Explain how something correlates with data when you don’t have it. If possible, remove micro-editors from the ability to edit at all.

You won’t win them all. But if you win enough, you’ll make a meaningful difference in your fundraising.

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• How to Know Who You Can Trust for Good Fundraising Advice
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• Fundraiser: Disobey Your English Teachers to Improve Your Writing