How I know the sky is falling

We're screwed.

We can't write out way out of a wet paper bag, and we couldn't focus on our audience if they were standing right in front of us. No wonder fundraising results were already dropping more than two years before the recession started. We just don't know how to raise funds!

Here's how I know this awful news: a few days ago, I posted a piece titled The case of the forbidden word about the difference between formal and less-formal words. Shortly thereafter, The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Prospecting blog summarized my piece (What Are Your Forbidden Fund-Raising Words?).

Go to Prospecting and scroll down to the comments (or check out the comments on the original post). What you'll find either place is a string of comments defending bizarre, politically correct circumlocutions. All with apparently straight faces and no intended irony whatsoever. (There are also many comments from people who get it.)

It's just depressing. And it confirms some scary research about the cold and inhuman qualities so common in fundraising copy.

The good news is, you don't have to write that way. If you don't, you'll do better than those who do. There really is a reward for getting it right.

Technorati Tag: copywriting

Comments

[Pat Bozanich]

Could the tendency to use formal, euphemistic language in fundraising campaigns (sorry, structured donation appeal opportunities) be related to fact that "Development Directors" instead of fundraisers are making the decisions? Just who/what are they developing anyway? (Just try answering that question in non-bureaucratic language.)

[Barnea Selavan]

One of the best fundraising talks I ever heard was a Syrian Jewish businessman talking to others in the synagogue about the Yad Eliezer organization helping people feed themselves etc. Close to his dramatic ending he said "when they are starving in their bellies" and rolled his hands over his stomach. It was so powerful that the speaker engaged to raise money for a girls school at the ensuing community meal did not speak, for there was no topping that performance nor distracting people from where their thoughts were. Now suppose they said he must only use the respectful word, stomachs? 

[Alan Sharpe]

I appreciate your point, Jeff. I wrote fundraising appeals for an international emergency medical relief agency that refused to use contractions. My drafts were edited by committees of doctors. I could never write "we're depending on your support." I was forbidden to write "I'm writing to you today." As a consequence, their appeals sounded academic, formal and cold. I also worked once for an editor at Statistics Canada who forbade me to use the word "abroad" when referring to countries overseas. "A broad," she told me, "is a derogatory term for a woman." By the way, about your post, what does "obfuscate" mean? Just kidding!

[John Thompson]

Keep fighting the good fight, Jeff. Too often organizations and fundraising professionals confuse constituents with donors. Perhaps the "youth" served would find the term "kid" disrespectful (or not), but in fact that's how most of the donors would likely think of them. Children just like the children they know and love. The kids in their lives.

Fundraising appeals are spoken communications that happen to be written down, comfortable yet persuasive conversations in the reader's mind. And donors, like all of us, speak in comfortable syntax and use recognizable vocabulary. And fragments. And start sentences with conjunctions.

Strangled, passive, politically correct, brand-compliant language obfuscates our primary objective: to communicate in a way that generates emotion and inspires action. The good news is it will likely not offend a soul.