Writing fundraising Letters
The Artful Manager, a blog for arts directors, has a good post up dealing with the curse of clinical, dry fundraising letters.
“After running more than 2000 fundraising letters through a text analysis system, he found a frightening consistency with a similar, smaller study, which discovered that fundraising discourse:
- failed to connect with and involve readers on a personal and emotional level, and
- failed to tell stories about real people whom readers might actually care about
Instead, messages were clinical, detached, evidence-based, and academic.”
It’s all right to be evidence-based (a bit) in your letter. But the meat of it has got to be an emotional connection between the donor and the cause — the evidence is to show why you are best equipped to connect them with that cause.
Permalink: Posted at 12:42 pm, November 15, 2009