Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Fundraising Tuesday: Do Your Donors Need Watering?

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watering plants

Tend your donors all year round

I put a plant into the ground.  Then I forgot about it.

The sun baked it.  It drooped.  It withered.

Oops!  Well, no problem.  I’ll just water it now.

Wait, why isn’t it coming back to life?

When your organization ignores a donor for months at a time, you are scorching and burning your relationship.

You may get lucky.  Their feelings for you may be so hardy that you can bring the relationship back to life with a really good appeal.  Most often, though, you’ll be watering a dead plant and wondering why it isn’t growing.

Real communications are the water of life.  Give your donors some water every week, and watch your relationships flower.

This post first appeared on Communicate! in 2016.

Reasons to Believe

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What is the best method of spreading actual facts to people so that they will actually believe the truth? How do you get people to believe facts that do not fit their narrative?

What doesn’t work is myth-busting, debunking, or refuting false statements. Resist the temptation! By repeating the falsehoods, even to expose them, you just ingrain them deeper into people’s minds.

What does work:

  1. Spread your own narrative, without referring to theirs.
  2. Structure it as a story, with a hero encountering a challenge and overcoming it. If possible, invite your audience to be the hero.
  3. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
  4. Use social proof. Show that many people familiar to your audience share your point of view.

 

Self-Promoting Puffery, Technical Tripe, and Creative Crap

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cut out bloated wordsPeople’s time is scarce, and their attention is precious. If you want to get your audience to read your emails, newsletters, posts, etc., then follow Jill Konrath‘s advice and cut the following words out of your writing.

They fall into three categories.

Self-Promoting Puffery

  1. One-stop shopping
  2. Industry leader
  3. Breakthrough
  4. Partner
  5. Groundbreaking
  6. Impressive
  7. Unique
  8. Innovative
  9. State-of-the-art
  10. Powerful
  11. Outstanding
  12. Cost-effective
  13. Experienced
  14. Number one
  15. Premier

Technical tripe

  1. Next-generation
  2. Disruptive
  3. Flexible
  4. Robust
  5. World-class
  6. Easy-to-use
  7. Cutting-edge
  8. Value-added
  9. Mission-critical
  10. Leading-edge
  11. Turnkey
  12. Best-of-breed
  13. Enterprise-class
  14. User-friendly
  15. Scalable

Creative Crap

  1. Outside the box
  2. Revolutionary
  3. The big idea
  4. Synergy
  5. Dramatic
  6. Strategic
  7. Game changer
  8. Customer-centric
  9. Voice of the customer
  10. Critical mass
  11. Buzz
  12. Make it pop
  13. Break through the clutter
  14. Next level
  15. Impactful

Jill has given us a good list of the jargon that annoys people in business. What would you add to her list?  What are some of the cliches, buzzwords, and overused terms you see in the nonprofit sector?

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