Jeff Brooks joins long-time friend and colleague, Kristine Poggioli to talk about writing great stories for fundraising — for direct mail, email, or any other medium. Kristine’s tips for fundraising stories that really do the job: Grab the reader’s attention…
We don’t have any dramatic stories to tell! How can we tell great stories? We don’t work with babies or puppies! We have no way to be emotional. Have you heard or said things like this? It’s flat-out wrong. If…
Every once in a while, I hear from a fundraiser who says something like this: Our direct mail is not at all the way you say it should be. It’s wordy, complicated, and written at a very high reading level….
One of the reasons I like the Web: It’s helping kill off the Clever Headline. Google and the other search engines don’t understand puns. They don’t appreciate wordplay. They don’t admire a Joycean multilingual, triple-entendre, back-flip ironic headline. These things…
Sean Triner, Fundraisingologist at Moceanic and Lynne Boardman, Managing Director at Harvey McKinnon Associates tackle some common advice nonprofits receive, including: “Don’t ask your donors to put you in your will. Talking about death will upset them.” “Don’t thank donors…
Once upon a time, I was an English teacher. A guardian and promoter of our written language in its formal academic form. Please accept my apology for the damage I did during those years. I worked hard to teach my…
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…
Do you need your donors? It’s a yes-or-no question. There’s no maybe, no degrees of agreement. You need donors to make your work possible, or you have some other source of funding and you don’t need donors. Even if donors…
