Tips to Energize Your Donor Newsletter

Flaw 6: Your newsletter fails the "you" test. A good newsletter is friendly, even intimate, in tone — not an institutional voice, Ahern said. "'You' is the most powerful word in the marketing lexicon," he added. He recommended doing the "you" test: Get a red pen and go through your newsletter materials, beginning with the outer envelope, and circle every time the word "you" appears to see if you need improvement in this regard. You don't know where people's eyes will land first within your newsletter, so he recommended using the word “you” as often as you can and in many different locations.