Creative

Remember that you're sending engagement communications to donors. Your most important job is to keep them motivated to donate.

One of the hardest parts of copywriting is that, to be truly effective, you have to be a genuine advocate for your client or organization. That means you have to genuinely feel what you want your readers to feel.

Donor retention is often overlooked, and because of this, nonprofits aren’t using email as a key retention tool. That likely means more email “asks” this year (donations, event registrants, advocacy actions) and fewer retention emails, like reporting back to donors and building relationships.

The risk this poses is if most emails ask for something, people may start tuning out everything. To make “ask” emails more effective, constituents need to also see results consistently from your organization. They need know that progress is being made and feel the momentum.

When you're building a powerful, emotional message, the last thing you want is for the reader to get distracted by trying to understand what you mean. So be brief, be cogent, be powerful, and know when to stop.

In our new Question Marc column, a frustrated fundraiser asks, "Why didn't people respond to my year-end fundraising letter?"

What we write is designed to generate strong emotions. And it’s why we have to be certain that what we write takes readers into the world we want them to be in.

This list of writers serves a double purpose: First, it offers some tips that, if you follow them, will absolutely make you a better writer. Second, as you read them, you'll discover how many parallels there are between your writing and so-called "serious" writing.

I wish I could tell you that somewhere out there is the perfect subject line, one that could send your open rates skyrocketing and make opt-outs and spam reports ancient history. But I can’t. I can tell you, however, that creating almost perfect subject lines for your nonprofit is possible

To do it, you first need to understand a few important things …

How do you break through the clutter? It matters all year but becomes more urgent during end-of-year giving campaigns when inboxes and mailboxes are full to the brim. I took the question to our in-house experts here at Blackbaud: the client success managers who work closely with our customers day in, day out.

Their advice? Tell a great story. Make it relevant. Make it easy to give. Be mindful of how your audience likes to receive information and how donors like to interact with you.

In the January 2010 issue of FundRaising Success, Jeff Brooks shared 25 tips for better fundraising copy.