Creative

Testimonials allow your reader to see your organization through the eyes of someone you've helped. It's a first-person, ground-level view of how you change lives.

For some reason, fundraisers or their bosses often put too much weight on the opinion of an audience of one. Rather than thoughtfully considering it in light of the whole picture, the response is too often wholesale change.

Communications best practices merge the "fundraising" function and the "marketing/communications" function. So if you want to be successful at fundraising, you have to master some marketing skills and become a master at "fund marketing."

It takes a little extra effort, and often some extra homework, to make case studies compelling enough to persuade a reader to reach for her wallet. But that's what you're there for, right? If it were easy, anybody could do it.

Steve MacLaughlin, director of analytics at Blackbaud, goes to great lengths to provide insight to us all, and he has done it again with his annual review of year-end fundraising email subject lines.

We copywriters have powerful tools at our disposal. Microsoft Word probably leads the pack. It makes our jobs faster and easier. But in today's business-centric world, Word has evolved into an implement for corporate use. As writers who specialize in fundraising, this presents a challenge.

The best way to earn readers' attention, and keep it, is to tell them what they want to know. Not what you want to tell them.

Seeing what others are doing with their fundraising is one of the best ways to jump-start your own creativity and find new things to try or test. If you haven't done it recently, make some donations to nonprofits that you think you can learn from; reading about fundraising is good, but actually being a recipient of it is great!

It looks like the future of fundraising is catching up with us. We are afflicted by the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." And in the year ahead, times are going to get a lot more interesting.

Fundraising is about a lot more than just raking in the money for your client or organization. It really matters. So pat yourself on the back, because you're doing the work of the angels.