9 Things I Wish I Had Figured Out Sooner
We all have personal preferences for the way we like communication to be. In nearly every case, our preferences will lead us to weak fundraising. If you want to reach people, you have to cater to their preferences, not your own.
5. Don't try to bang it out in one sitting
You have lots to do and not enough time. But when it comes to writing, break the task into pieces. Time spent not writing is valuable time in the writing process.
6. Simpler is better
If you can't say your fundraising offer in one sentence, you're in trouble.
7. They aren't paying that much attention
Your donors barely skim your well-crafted copy. That's not to say you shouldn't strive to make every word right and sweat the details. Just make sure you sweat the big picture even more. Whether to use a comma or a dash matters — a little. Whether you have a topic that's going to move people to action, whether you're talking to the right people, whether the call to action makes sense — those things matter a lot. Spend your time there.
8. If copy isn't good, design won't fix it
I hate to think about the number to times I've struggled to get copy right but just couldn't quite do it — then ended up saying, "It's not quite there, but we'll make it work with great images, brilliant type treatment and flawless layout." It doesn't work. Good design matters. But it can't make bad copy good. Copy that goes in incoherent will come out that way.
9. Enthusiasm is good, but experience is better
Years ago, I was looking at direct-mail response rates. They averaged around 5 percent. Not great, not terrible. Suddenly it struck me: A 5 percent response rate is a 95 percent failure rate! I was off like a thoroughbred, campaigning against these huge failure rates. I had a hunch if we could just write better we could drive response rates up to somewhere around 50 percent.
