Copywriting

Creepy is great for a Halloween costume but not so great for raising funds so you can change the world. Let’s look at what’s really going on here: You, like most people on a mission to make the world a better place, probably have a pitch. Singular. Only one. You lovingly refer to it as your "elevator pitch." Its job is to close a deal while you glide up and down in an elevator.

Brandon Stanton, better known as Humans of New York (HONY), shares photos and stories of the individuals and visitors who populate Manhattan daily. HONY’s exquisite photography catches the eye … and then the emotional stories behind the photographs draw the viewer in.

What can fundraisers take away from Stanton’s success? The power of consistency. Stanton never lets a day go by without sharing a photograph and story. Find your medium — and stick to it, like glue.

One of my "soap box" topics has always been share more stories about the impact of your work. A great story versus a so-so or ho-hum story can make the difference between keeping your donors and volunteers connected and losing them to the next good cause. Make sure to put a face on your work often. Here are seven rules about stories.

Back in 2011, former Pixar artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of rules for great storytelling that she'd picked up from her colleagues. Dinolgnacio has now painstakingly superimposed all 22 over images from Pixar's films as a means to remember them. They aren't all directly related to fundraising, but they make an important point — great storytelling is about getting an audience to root for your hero.

Halloween costumes are a $28 million industry. Even if you haven’t bought yours yet, I bet you’re weighing your options. (After the Red Sox’s big win over the Detroit Tigers Sunday night I’m thinking of going as a bearded cop with his arms raised in victory!) Here’s something else you should be thinking about. The most popular costumes offer valuable insights for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers on what trends are real or an apparition.

It can be all too easy to take the readers of our nonprofit’s newsletters and blog posts for granted, and to write for them the same way that we do for our professional partners, readers of grant proposals, etc.

The truth is, supporters of nonprofit organizations are a very different audience than those “in the business,” so to speak. As such, they have different needs and expectations that writers should be conscious of. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing for your nonprofit audience.

Messaging is one of the first and most important tools nonprofit communicators need in their tool kits. Whether you're out to drive donations, inspire actions, attract volunteers or recruit participants, it all starts with a clear understanding of what story you need to tell and how to tell it.

But it can be almost impossible to boil all of your nonprofit's information down to get your message across. Here’s a little trick that might help you see the forest in spite of all those trees: Focus on the "musts."

I get it. Sometimes it’s really, really hard to come up with an attention-grabbing e-mail subject line or headline. That’s why we came up with a list of 50 fill-in-the-blanks to get you started, most of which are inspired by sensational headlines on consumer magazines. You can make that selling power work for your cause too!

You aren't offering anything tangible, so your case has to be pretty powerful.

Stories are fundamental to how we communicate as human beings. Tell the right story and you can capture attention, entertain, enlighten and persuade … all in the course of just a few minutes.So we can all agree that stories matter … but how do you tell them? What, specifically, makes for a good marketing story? Here are five critical components and talk about how they fit into your marketing: 1. You need a hero. 2. You need a goal. 3. You need an obstacle. 4. You need a mentor. 5. You need a moral.