Writing for fundraising – secrets revealed

If you want someone to donate money, give a major gift, a bequest, or provide sponsorship dollars for an event or service, it is paramount that you ask them using simple, concise, everyday language that they will understand and respond to.

Get to the point quick smart – don’t try and educate a prospect with industry speak and jargon or boggle them with your latest service provision manifesto because they don’t have the time or interest on the first approach.  

Spell out the benefits of becoming involved – both for your prospect and for your cause.  If you take the time to build and nurture an ongoing relationship with your prospect, you’ll successfully educate them over time. 

Remember, successful fundraising is built on successful language, so make sure what you write is emotive, inspiring, factual and, understandable!

Not sure how to do this?  Call me!

Writing tips for Annual Reports

It’s about the past, not the future.

The purpose of an annual report is to focus primarily on the previous 12 month’s operations, not to write about what might happen in the next 12 months.

 Be clear in the manner in which you write

Who are you writing for?  Who are the stakeholders?  Writing in a style that your target audience will understand is paramount to communicating well.

 When writing, KEEP IT SIMPLE using everyday language and avoiding jargon, buzzwords, acronyms and grandiose words and phrases at all costs – especially if you’ve got multiple audiences. Write to inform, not to impress.

 Less is best

As a general rule, people want to find information quickly and have limited attention spans, so don’t bog them down with unnecessarily lengthy reports that can frustrate and kill the reader’s interest to read on.

 Keep your sentences short and if you can say it in one sentence rather than five, do so. 

 What to write?

Describe your purpose, history, annual goals & objectives, the strategies employed to achieve them, and the successful outcomes or otherwise.  

Detail your organisational structure, members of the Board, governance procedures, and full financial accounting for the year.

 The inclusion of graphs showing income and productivity increases or losses over the previous five years can be helpful as it establishes a context in which to review the annual report.  

 Don’t personalise it

Annual reports are not platforms to name individual rank & file staff members who worked on successful operations over the previous year.  

 If you name one staff member, then you have to name every staff member, which can fly in the face of succinct communications and comprehension of message.

 If you really want to name and acknowledge staff members for their hard work and loyalty, do it in the internal staff publication where the reader will know who you’re talking about.  

 Keep it interesting

It is pointless spending time and money on producing an annual report that nobody reads, so keep it interesting by giving it a theme that can be carried through the entire publication.

 Visualise the theme on the front cover to entice people to pick it up, and continue the theme visualisation throughout the publication for context and consistency.  

 By the way

Lengthy and expensive looking annual reports have the capacity of alienating shareholders, stakeholders, and the general public who can interpret them as bombastic and wasteful.

Tips for pitching your story to media

Is it newsworthy?

Individual journalists, editors and producers will ultimately determine if your story is newsworthy according to what other stories are around on the day. But as a general guide, a newsworthy story is something that could be:

• New
• Controversial
• Spectacular
• humorous
• Quirky
• Different
• Unjust
• something someone else doesn’t want you to know

Pitching your story to media

• Ensure that your media release or media alert is concise and jargon free, covering ’who, what, when, where, how and why’.
• Ensure that you are sending your media release or media alert to the correct person.  
• Personalise your media release or media alert, and after emailing, faxing or posting it, follow it up with the addressee to ensure that they have received it – thus giving you a chance to further ‘talk up’ your story.
• If it’s print media, make sure you can provide a good photo opportunity - or provide professional photos with the release.
• If it’s radio, make sure you’ve offered media savvy interviewees for interview
• If it’s television, make sure you’ve offered filming opportunities for moving images to accompany the story, or provide them on DVD for the program’s use. 
• Don’t try to pitch a weak non-newsworthy story to a journalist, even to a friend, because you’ll lose credibility in their eyes  for next time.  Besides, no professional journalist will risk his or her reputation pushing a story with no legs.

Business letters that work

The secret of writing an effective business letter that generates a desired response is partly language, the arrangement of that language, but most importantly, it’s the strategy behind the language, without which, the business letter is pointless.

For instance, when writing a business letter that introduces a new product or service to a prospective customer, the immediate question in the mind of the prospective customer is, “What’s in it for me?”

If you don’t answer that up front, you’ve probably lost the reader at that point.

On the other hand, if you have answered that question, and you’ve told your story in an entertaining and inspiring manner, you’ll not only have the customer’s attention, but they will be open to receiving your follow up telephone call to arrange a meeting. 

Every successful business letter has a strategy behind it that generates a positive response.

Your local wordsmith, Colin Stephen Coordination, creates the strategy and the language for a successful business letter that jumps off the page.

Quick business writing tips

From your local wordsmith, copywriter & communications consultant www.colinstephen.com.au

Know your customer
Write in a style that your target audience will relate to and understand.
For instance, flowery and descriptive text might be better to sell a holiday destination, but short and technical text might be better to sell a kettle.

Spell out the benefits
Always spell out why and how your product or service is going to benefit your customer in the first few lines of your communication.

Less is best
Most people are busy with limited concentration spans and don’t have the time or inclination to wade through endless text to get information.   They just want quick informative grabs, so if you can say it in one sentence rather than five, do it. And keep the sentences short.

Keep it simple
Grandiose words and phrases (otherwise known as ostentatious, pretentious or pompous) don’t necessarily impress readers, but they can make it more difficult for readers to grasp an intended message.   Write to inform, not to impress – the correct information will impress.

Jargon
Avoid buzzwords and jargon at all costs because they’re confusing at best and destructive at worst. Jargon kills comprehension. When in doubt, write in easy everyday English.

Layout & design
White space is good because it allows words to breathe.   Cluttering up text with long paragraphs and badly placed photographs and graphics that interrupt the natural flow of reading do nothing to enhance the experience of it, and can often destroy the comprehension and thread of the message.