We're going to have to learn to write differently
In his always-worthwhile Monday Morning Memo, Roy H. Williams takes a look at the words we use in marketing: The Faded Color of Empty Words.
Talking about commercial spots on the radio, he notes declining effectiveness. The reason: People's media consumption has changed, and that's leading to a change in the way we perceive messages:
- Internet surfing has trained us to disregard empty words.
- Relevance has become more important than repetition.
Bottom line: Meaningful messages are working better than ever, especially when the fundamental premise of your ad is clearly stated in the opening line. Ads full of unsupported claims and overworked "image-building" phrases are being rejected before they ever enter the brain.
Unsupported claims are those phrases we throw around like "best" and "leading." They don't actually impart any useful information -- they're just empty bragging.
Copywriters have been trained to write that way. (I remember an early mentor telling me, "Never miss a chance to pump up the value of what you're selling." That meant pack in the positive adjectives; I got very good at it.)
But "pumping up" is losing its persuasive power. Worse than that, it signals to many people that the content at hand lacks value. So empty phrases have the exact opposite affect from what they used to have.
Is it time for us to go out and change everything about the way we do fundraising?
Not quite. Remember that direct mail, the bread and butter of most fundraising programs, is driven largely by older donors. They are much less impacted by changes in media habits. The old stuff still works, and will for some time yet.
But not forever. Start testing now. For the poor old copywriters among us, there's some serious un-learning to do. And in online fundraising, the change is already upon us.
Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech
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