The well-respected Fundraising Expert had a lot of good stuff to say that morning at the conference. Great advice that would help people in the room raise more money.

Including an extended riff on the importance of using personalization in fundraising.

The Expert talked about how people love seeing their own names in messages. How it really makes everything more connected and important to readers. They ended by saying, basically: If you use “Dear Friend” instead of personalization in fundraising, it’s like slapping donors in the face. It will turn them against you and wipe your revenue off the face of the Earth!

I could see people around me looking worried, ashamed, confused. Eyes were sad. Shoulders slumped. Clearly, they thought they’d been failing at fundraising by not using enough personalization. I wondered how many people decided this moment that they were failures and should find some other kind of work.

Because the Expert’s advice on personalization wasn’t quite right.

Personalization is good. Using it is better than not using it – most of the time.

But the difference is not the binary heaven-or-hell kind of difference the Expert made it sound like. The reality: You can fail while using personalization. And you can succeed without it. I’ve done tests where the non-personalized version did better than the personalized version. Not typical, but it sometimes goes that way.

So if you’ve heard from the experts that you must, must, must personalize everything all the time, it may be good advice, but it’s not perfect advice.

Experts do that. They want to sell us on good practices. So they focus on the upside of doing the thing. And they emphasize the downside of not doing it. People take them seriously. Many, from that day forward, believe that doing the thing will improve their results, and that not doing it is the quick path to a fundraising apocalypse.

You probably should personalize most of the time. But you hereby have my permission not to personalize a fundraising message if there’s a good reason not to.

And I have a handful of similar absolutions for you …

Long letters

I know it’s hard to believe, but longer letters almost always perform better than shorter ones. That’s a dependable truth in fundraising. In fact, we could say that the longer the letter, the better. I’d routinely write 10-page fundraising letters, except for the high cost.

But I routinely, more often than not, write two-page letters (that’s one sheet, front and back). And they work just fine. Would a longer letter work better? Likely. But would it be worth the higher cost? Maybe.

So even though you don’t need my permission, I give it to you anyway: You can write and send two-page fundraising appeals when necessary. Look into making your letter four pages (or more), but don’t worry if you end up with two. The only thing you should usually not consider is a one-page letter. (Though even those can work well in some cases.)

Zinger openings

I see this advice often: You’ve got to grab your reader with an amazing opening line for your letter or email.

I love a powerful first line. (Here’s a favorite of mine: “There was a boy called Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” – the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis)

There’s a problem, though. Your fundraising is not a novel that readers choose to sit down with and put aside some time for. It’s a random message out of nowhere. Your readers don’t want to read it. In fact, hardly any of them will. They’ll skim. If you’re lucky.

So instead of spending hours trying to start an appeal with some kind of fundraising version of “Call me Ishmael,” focus on your fundraising offer – the specific action you hope your readers will take. Make it compelling, easy to read, repetitive.

If you come up with a zinger, good for you. It’s just not all that important.

Reading ease standards

Your fundraising needs to be easy to read. If it comes in at a Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score of 10 or higher, you’re in trouble. Fewer people will trouble to read it. You’ll raise less money. That’s why you’ll so often be told to keep your writing at or below a score of 6.

But if you check your copy and it’s at a 7 or 8, don’t worry too much. It might not be worth your time to keep shaving it down. Your cause might be forcing you to use a few longer words, like the names of diseases or long place-names that really can’t be replaced with shorter synonyms.

More readable is better than less readable. But if you’re close to a 6, you have a pass from me. Get on with more important things!

Readable design

I advise fundraisers to send letters in 13 or 14 point type – maybe even bigger. And in a serif font (for print). With nice big margins on each page. And short paragraphs. I promise you, this is all good advice.

But you might need to fudge it a bit. If your type is at least 12 point, it’s not the end of the world. (If it’s smaller than 12, yeah, you should probably sweat a bit.) If you are stuck using a sans-serif font, don’t worry too much: Just use a larger size. It’ll be readable.

My readability guide is just a guide. Get as close as you can. My absolute musts would probably be: Use black ink ONLY for text. Don’t use reverse type (light type over dark background or photos). Don’t let your message be a Berlin Wall of solid type.

Lots of lifts

In direct mail, lifts – printed pieces other than the letter and reply device – can be very powerful. And testing largely tells us that the more of them, the better for response. I’ve done direct mail package with as many as ten different lifts … and they’ve worked well.

But that doesn’t mean you must dream up half a dozen or more amazing lifts for every direct mail package. In fact – I know this might freak you out a bit – you can send out direct mail that has no lift pieces in it.

Yes, lifts are good and more lifts are better, but not all lifts are worthwhile. And every lift you add increases cost. They also take time to create.

My advice: For every direct mail fundraising project you do, brainstorm what lifts you might include. Then do one or two of them. Maybe more. Or less. Zero lifts will not crush your chances at success.

Bottom line

Most Fundraising Experts are giving you good advice most of the time. But they are not laying down the law. They’re just giving you good ideas.

Focus on the Big Stuff: Are you asking donors to do things they understand and love because they can clearly see how it connects with their values and their sense of who they are and what they want from life.

Get that nailed down, and the rest is just details.

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Please share your experience by leaving your reply below. We’d love to learn from your experience.

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