Creative

Persuasive copywriting is just one skill in the fundraiser’s toolbox, but I’d argue that it’s critically important. After all, everything from your newsletters, to your fundraising appeals, to your grant proposals, to your online campaign, to your website, stems from the written word. It’s a skill-set that you should be honing on a regular basis. How? Here are a handful of my most-relied upon resources...

Deciding on your big picture goals and creating at least some loose project plans can give you structure for the year. But how can you plan for storytelling? That’s what I want to talk about in today’s blog. These tips will help you with editorial and content planning and more. Think about your themes. While…

There's a single word that can be one of the worst or one of the best words to use in fundraising. The word? We. Here's how to make it the worst: When we means "those of us in the organization" or "the committee that wrote this message." When used that way, it's exclusionary. It sets…

What can “Where’s Waldo?”, the lovable children’s book series of the '90s, teach us about designing better page layouts? A lot, it turns out. In UX, we use different page layouts to help organize information and guide the user's eye path. The “F” pattern, for instance, is commonly used for article-heavy sites to guide the…

You all know how much I love insight and data from studies. Recently, someone pointed me to the 2016 Donor Loyalty Study from Abila. There’s a lot in this document, and to really understand it you need to download the whole report. But here are some interesting elements about how donors view the content they receive from nonprofits...

Superman is boring. Or, he was at first. Think about it. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall building in a single bound. X-ray vision. Invulnerable. He should never lose any conflict with anyone. Yawn. Who could sustain interest in a hero who automatically wins every time? That's…

If your organization is in need of advertising agency-level work, there are two ways to go: lead the search for an outside agency or establish your creative team as the go-to in-house agency. If working with an outside agency is not feasible, consider positioning your in-house team as the in-house agency of record for the project. Here's how...

Our challenge as fundraisers is how to write to the donor in the donor’s language. Simple enough, until you are faced with someone who doesn’t accept the challenge. So we have to battle against the editor or copy approver who forgets that fundraising takes head and heart. When you find yourself in this battle, here are a few strategies I use as needed...

I recently came across the late Elmore Leonard's "10 Rules of Writing." Leonard was a novelist, most famously of crime fiction. But his rules apply surprisingly well to fundraising writing. Here are the first five, along with my annotations for fundraisers: Never open a book with weather. (Probably not a good idea for a fundraising…

The present political campaign season offers a number of lessons for the astute nonprofit fundraising professional. Although the heated and sometimes virulent rhetoric political campaigns employ may often seem out of bounds and incongruous with nonprofit charitable work, the strategies on which these campaigns rely for procuring financial support from donors are plainly effective...