I found two interesting online banner ads. One from Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, the other from UNICEF USA. Each ad is half brilliant. And half not-so-brilliant. Sean and I talked about these ads and the easy step each of them…
Long letters work better. But don’t just take it from me. Dr Barnardo wrote a four-page appeal letter in London in the 1880s using classic direct mail techniques: Underlining, urgency, dollar handles, specific ask and a clear reference to what…
How do you make sure that everything you write grabs the reader’s attention, engages them and makes something happen? After all, there is no point writing stuff that doesn’t have the desired outcome. Even if that outcome is to help…
July is National Wheelchair Beautification Month here in the USA. It’s also Cord Blood Awareness Month. I’m not telling you this in order to mock these awareness holidays. There are no doubt quality nonprofit organizations that use these days to…
Don’t you hate making errors? They make you look and feel stupid. But errors are funny things. It’s impossible to predict what damage they’ll do. Surprisingly often, they hurt your pride a lot more than they hurt anything else. We…
Dan Pallotta couldn’t have been more right with his TED talk ‘The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong.’ But he wasn’t just trying to explain the importance and good that ‘overhead’ does for charities to the public and media. It’s also the charity staff who really need to…
As I was working on some articles about story-telling, copywriting for your website and making your direct mail great I found I had to come back to the absolute fundamentals about why we in charities write anything at all. It…
