Drawing Attention to Your Cause

Why would anyone in his right mind suggest using humor in a fundraising campaign to help fight a terrible disease or address an important social cause?

Ask any conventional direct-mail expert, and he’ll tell you humor is one of the quickest ways to kill your campaign. But in the 27 years I’ve been creating mailings, I’ve found humor to be an extremely effective tool for breaking through — and creating an instantly warm connection with people. In my experience, humor is perhaps the most effective way to humanize any organization. And when you do that, people begin to care. And respond.

The problem is, working with humor is like working with plutonium. If it’s not handled just so, it can have the destructive power of an atom bomb. Humor done well can inspire and prompt people to act in record numbers. Humor done poorly will surely inspire contempt — and vaporize your campaign results, just as the experts have always promised.

So we’re back to our original question. Why would anyone in his right mind consider testing humor in a fundraising campaign? Because it works. Like nothing you’ve ever put in the mail before. It already has beaten many controls across many industries and missions; I know because some of my own publishing controls have stood for 15 years or more.

See you in the funny papers
When I talk about the use of humor, I’m specifically referring to the use of personalized cartoons as the hook into the mail piece — not cutesy headlines and never tongue-in-cheek appeals or sell copy. Your mission is serious, whether you’re selling memberships, requesting donations or asking for support for an important cause. And it deserves the respect of a hard-hitting, persuasive appeal.

But the outer envelope or front panel of your appeal has a different mission than the rest of your piece. It has to quickly make a connection with millions of recipients. And it needs to stand out among the rest of the mail it arrives with. That’s where humor — or more precisely, a well-targeted, personalized cartoon — can produce dazzling results.

I often feel silly when I first suggest to clients that they invest their campaigns in a cartoon-based approach. But it turns out there are some very concrete reasons for doing so. Cartoons have always scored the highest marks in editorial readership surveys.

They are almost always the best-read and best-remembered part of magazines and newspapers. If we consider the stack of mail that arrives daily in the millions of mailboxes around the country as collective works, just like magazines and newspapers are, it’s easy to see why a cartoon piece stands out so effectively.

In fact, most people have a built-in passion for cartoons. So it makes sense to turn that behavior into an advantage for your campaign. But it gets even better.

If you think about it, humor is about truth revealed. When we hear something funny, we laugh. And as the laughter subsides, an examination of the truth often follows. “Hey, it’s true. It is like that.” Or, “I know someone like that,” or, “I’ve been through something like that.”

That’s the nature of “getting it” when you hear something funny. It resonates as truth. You could think of a personalized cartoon on the outer envelope as a headline on steroids. It engages the recipient immediately, and, if done well, it creates a critical bridge in the form of a central point of agreement. And it seems to do that almost subliminally, bypassing the part of the brain that often dismisses appeals.

Cartoons, by their nature, delight the reader. So it’s no surprise that a mail piece bearing a cartoon can have the same effect. I’ve always felt it’s a lot more effective to thrill someone into an envelope than tease them in. Teasing, by its nature, taunts and disappoints the reader. I’d much rather have readers thrilled, intrigued and already in agreement with what I’m about to request of them in the rest of the piece.

Cartoon cautiously
When experts advise against the use of humor, I’m actually in partial agreement. As direct marketers, we’re trained to do certain things that work against us when applied to the use of humor.

One of the worst mistakes you could make is to treat the cartoon as a branding element or a device to express an offer. The cartoon needs to focus entirely on the identity of the recipients and what is true for them. It should never be about your brand or the great deal you’re about to offer them. That’s true for any mailing, in any mission.

When my company created the control for The New Yorker, we never mentioned subscribing, newsstand savings or the like. We just put the reader in the middle of a typical, whimsical New Yorker cartoon. We understood why the audience loves the magazine and gave them a big dose of it. Along the way, we delighted recipients into helping us beat the previous control.

The same principle applied when we launched the four-wave campaign for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals that resulted in a doubling of sales for its product. We appealed to the audience of pharmacists in a way that motivated it to respond, request information and, eventually, recommend the client’s product to its customers. And we never once mentioned the product, offer or price advantage in the series of cartoons. Instead, we focused on the pharmacist and his or her devotion to doing what’s best for customers.

How do you know if a particular cartoon is on target to produce exceptional results in your campaign? Put it to the “Refrigerator Door Test.” Ask yourself, “Is this cartoon likely to be kept on the recipient’s refrigerator door?” If not, you have somehow compromised the value of the cartoon to the recipient. And that most often is the result of improper focus.

Tread lightly
That question of focus is perhaps most critical when the mission is to enlist the support of millions of people to support a cause or help find a cure for a deadly or debilitating disease — because you have the added complication of not making fun of the very serious reason for getting in touch in the first place.

When we created the last-issue onsert used by the Arthritis Foundation to prompt membership renewals, I didn’t make fun of the disease or those afflicted with it. Instead, I focused on the critical role members play in the search for a cure. And how that search for a cure would be compromised without their continued help. Along the way, we gave recipients hope and recognition, and they rewarded us with a stream of responses that established the onsert as a control for more than 15 years.

We took a similar approach recently when we created a new test piece for a major charity involved in the search for a cure for another disease. I’m bound to nondisclosure of its identity, but I can tell you that the focus of the cartoon element in the piece was quite similar — that the recipient can make a difference, and the vehicle for making that difference is the piece of mail she’s holding in her hands.

In another member-acquisition piece, we focused on the way the recipient would be perceived by others for having taken action. And it appears that has now resulted in a new control for one of the top five mailers in the U.S.

As you can imagine, creating a truly effective personalized cartoon piece requires a healthy dose of nuance. A misplaced word, even an untoward use of punctuation can make the difference between something that turns out well or falls flat. Ditto for the style of drawing or composition of the piece. And that assumes you’re starting out with a strong core concept for the gag.

To pull it off, you must strive for believability. You want the reader to look at the piece and wonder how it was done. You want him to treat it as a keepsake, to feel lucky to have received the mailing.

One way to do that is to use a multipanel format for the cartoon, where the captioning is done in handwriting as part of the art. We, for instance, have used several fonts of handwriting to personalize the piece for an utterly surprising and believable effect.

So, does humor have a place in nonprofit fundraising? I’ll let you decide. At least now you have a different perspective and entirely different test basis than you’ve probably been receiving from the usual experts. FS

Stu Heinecke is president of Seattle-based Stu Heinecke Inc. and CartoonLink.