14 Fundraising Writing Tips – How to Raise More Money without Spending More

If you’re doing your own fundraising writing, you probably wonder sometimes if you’re doing it ‘right.’ Or if there even is a ‘right’ way to do it.

Perhaps a better way to think of it is, there are more effective ways to write fundraising, and less effective ways. And we know this, because it has been tested. ProActive Content hasn’t done large scale testing because we prefer to work with small and mid-size nonprofits. But that’s why we make a point of reading testing data from organizations who conduct it on a statistically valid large scale.

One of our favorite sources for testing data is Moceanic. They recently put out a list of 26 fundraising writing tips.

It’s a terrific list, and you can click the link above to get them all.

We’ve pulled out 14 of our favorites and presented them here. The key thing to remember is, most of these fundraising copywriting tips have been tested, some exhaustively, by groups like Moceanic and others. So these tips are not just suggestions someone thought up because they wanted to write a blog. These are the result of decades of fundraising writing experience from many people and organizations.

This is collective knowledge.

Try them, practice them, and master them, and watch your fundraising grow.

1. Show, don’t tell 

This is a classic, and applies to almost all forms of storytelling, not just fundraising. Don’t tell your readers how desperately their donations are needed. Show them. What does that mean?

It means use imagery, the five senses, emotion, and human aspirations that sometimes get squelched by oppression, injustice, poverty, isolation, and natural disasters.

Here’s an example:

“If you had kids in school and it closed down suddenly – even for just one month – you and the other parents wouldn’t stand for it very long. But what if there were no school buildings for kids to attend at all? This is what some kids around the world have been facing for years.”

This relates the need to the reader’s own cares and concerns, rather than just telling them how important building new schools is. It personalizes for the reader the impact of having no school buildings.

2. Flunk your English teachers

An early client we worked with, not in fundraising, epitomizes what this writing tip is about. We were told, very directly, to stop starting sentences with ‘And’ and ‘But,’ because it’s grammatically improper.

We dumped the client soon afterward.

Advertising copywriting (as in this case) and fundraising copywriting are much the same in many ways. You will often break the rules you learned in English class. You’ll use sentence fragments. You’ll use passive voice. You’ll start sentences with conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘but’ and ‘so.’

And it doesn’t matter. In fact, it works better, because it’s more readable. It flows better. You want your reading experience to be effortless. English teacher-writing isn’t effortless to read. So you see – this isn’t about right and wrong ways to write. You’re just writing for a different purpose, which calls for a different approach.

3. Write at low-grade level

They say to write at around a 6th-grade level. Same reason as above. Make it easy for everyone to read it. Don’t use words like ‘epitomizes’ in your fundraising. And don’t use official, bureaucratic, PhD language either.

5 Reasons You Should Rarely Use Jargon in Fundraising 

4. Repeat yourself

This is terrific advice. Think about how you engage with emails, direct mail advertisements, and TV ads. You pay attention, kind of. You skip around. You might only read parts of it.

Yet, far too often, we make the mistake of presuming all our readers will read the entire thing.

Few do.

What do you want to repeat the most? Your call to action. Put it everywhere. When writing email fundraising campaigns, we try to put a call to action link near the top and at the bottom. If the email is long enough, we’ll also include one in the middle.

Tell them what to do. Then tell them again. And in case they might miss it, tell them again after that. This is a great way to use the P.S.

5. Cut back on adjectives and adverbs 

Here’s a 2-part series about the power of verbs in fundraising copywriting. Verbs compel action. Adjectives make us think about pretty pictures. And adverbs, for the most part, don’t add much of anything. In fact, they weaken the verb they’re trying to modify.

Consider these two sentences:

The king harnessed his horses and rallied his troops for battle.

The king quickly harnessed his horses and valiantly rallied his troops for battle.

The adverbs don’t add anything to the central action taking place. And if the surrounding sentences have already painted the picture (because you’re showing and not telling), then you don’t need those extra words. They slow down the read, and add little of value.

6. Avoid huge numbers

Much testing has been done on this. Here’s a look at some of the research exploring how facts and figures are far less effective at moving donors to action than well-told stories.

avoiding the use of huge numbers and statistics in your fundraising copywriting is an easy way to boost response

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

We once had a nonprofit completely change a fundraising email we wrote for them, and then send it out without consulting us. They added in a bunch of huge statistics about poverty in Africa. They also changed the final sentence. While it doesn’t use any actual numbers, it has the same effect.  

The original final sentence:

Thank you for your wisdom and care in providing the critical infrastructure that makes all other localized change possible around the world.

Their altered final sentence:

We appreciate your support and thank you for your care and concern for the world.

Notice the changes. The new version thanks the reader for caring about “the world.” Yes, the entire world. Thank you for caring about it.

Yes, the original does use some non-sixth grader reading words. That was always a challenge with this organization, because their work is so technical. But we did succeed in turning around their monthly donor decline, and quadrupled their Giving Tuesday donations from the previous year.

7. Limit your paragraphs to 6 lines

This is a simple one, and one of the most important fundraising writing tips on this list.

Long paragraphs are harder to read. They just are. And Moceanic was suggesting the 6-line limit for direct mail, because in email, six lines is almost always too many. We rarely include more than a couple of sentences per paragraph.

The goal is to enable people to read – or scan – your writing very quickly and still get the main point.  

8. Read everything you write out loud

This is another excellent strategy. We do this with much of the fundraising writing we produce, especially direct mail.

If you read out loud, and keep stumbling over certain sections, find a way to reword those sections so they read more smoothly.

You must remember – people don’t plan to read anything you write. You are interrupting their day. Think about that for a second. So to get them to read your fundraising copy, you must make it easy to quickly read and digest it. The best way to know it’s a fast read is to read it out loud.

9. Cut your first paragraph

Moceanic actually recommends this tip frequently. I’ve heard it many times. The interesting thing is, on a recent fundraising campaign, we actually did cut the first paragraph. And the email was better!

Sometimes your intro is just fluff, and really not necessary. Try it out and see what happens.

10. Make the message longer

We just read again the other day the tired trope that “people don’t read long emails.” They said to never send an email that’s over 200 words. The same gets said about longer fundraising letters.

Don’t believe it.

We almost never send emails that are under 200 words. And every organization we have worked with so far has improved their fundraising the longer they work with us.

Longer copy works better, because it gives the reader more context, more emotion, more detail, and a greater immersion into the need you’re asking them to help meet.

It doesn’t matter if they read every word. It’s the weight of it. Copy that’s too short cannot engage emotion as well as long copy. So the only people who will respond to short copy are people who will respond to anything you send them. But those other people – the majority of people who may or may not respond – they need more copy to grab their hearts and compel them to act.

11. Underline stuff 

You should use bold, underline, italics, and even the occasional colored text to emphasize certain details in all your fundraising writing. Here again, we have had organizations remove these elements from writing we’ve produced.

Why? What are they afraid will happen?

Emphasis doesn’t just draw attention to key ideas, emotions, calls to action, or details in a story. Emphasis also aids the reader in getting through your copy faster. It’s easier to comb through a letter and only read the subheadings, underlined and bolded parts, and maybe the openings of paragraphs.

If all the text looks the same, it’s harder to scan quickly.

If your only reason for not doing this is because you think it will look ‘tacky,’ don’t worry about that. Your readers don’t care or even think about it that way.

12. Bypass most of your reviewers

You can see we’ve had some challenges with our fundraising writing being altered by people without our knowledge or input. You may have experienced that too.

It’s an unfortunate part of life any time writing is involved. For some reason, everything thinks they have something valuable to contribute when it comes to writing. No one complains about the color of their paychecks. But they do opine about whether you used bold text too much. Go figure.

Do what you can to minimize the number of fingers in the pot.

13. Use 13-point type (or larger) for body copy 

This is ideal especially for direct mail, because many direct mail readers who actually read your fundraising letters will be older. But it’s true in email too. Screens are so tiny these days, and you need your copy to be easy to read. Don’t use 11-point fonts in emails. We usually use 14-point.

Hopefully, you’re getting the theme with all these fundraising writing tips:

Fundraising writing should be easy and effortless to read. That’s one of your primary goals, in addition to grabbing attention and arousing emotion.

14. Use black serif type over a white background (in print)

Lastly, for the same readability goal yet again, don’t use colored paper or any color of print other than black. And use a serif font for print, and a non-serif font for digital.

Serif fonts are things like Times New Roman. They have the little lines on the ends of the letters.

Non-serif fonts are like Arial and Calibri.

Fundraising Copywriting Help

Hopefully you feel empowered by these 14 fundraising copywriting tips. You can use all these in almost any fundraising writing you create, without a ton of extra effort. Probably the hardest one to master is the first one – show, don’t tell.

But you can do it – if you have the time.

If you don’t have the time, but don’t want to work with some big fundraising agency that will make you sign a big contract for much more than you need, that’s what ProActive Content is for.

We create fundraising on an as-needed basis, specializing in small and mid-size nonprofits who don’t have time to create all the content they know they need to be sending out. You can also have us produce your monthly newsletters and any online articles you need.

We write as well as the big agencies, but aren’t a big agency.

Reach out using this page if you want to learn more

 

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