6 Ways Your Boss Is Wrong

• Casual. It's colloquial, informal and designed to be read with little effort. Short (often incomplete) sentences. Brief paragraphs that don't conform to standards of composition. A less-than-rigorous adherence to the rules of grammar and usage. If you try to bring copy up to the formal standards of academic or business writing, it won't get read — so it'll raise less money.
• Simple. Good fundraising is about action. It's not about the methodology of doing it, and it's not about the philosophy of why. If your boss wants to push the how and why, that's going to bury the what — the action you want donors to take. And that means fewer donors will respond.
• Repetitive. It says its one simple point over and over again. That long message we talked about earlier is actually more like a series of shorter messages stitched gracefully together.
• Emotional. The decision to give comes from the heart. That's why fundraising copy wears its heart on its sleeve. It appeals to the emotions without shame. Appealing to reason doesn't work very well. It's not the dignified style you learned in school. And writing so emotionally would probably get you drummed out of your nonprofit-management program. But emotional writing is what works.

I hope you can persuade your boss to pay attention to these things. More importantly, I hope your boss can learn to trust the knowledge of fundraising professionals like you. We can't afford more guesswork. These are tough times that demand high-level professional knowledge. Bad direction from bosses probably costs the good causes of the world millions of dollars every year. Let's change this. Our work is too important to let it slide. FS