Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

For Small Businesses: Search or Referral?

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Take a good look at your business. Where do you get your customers?

Maybe, they find you. They’re already looking for the product you make or the service you offer. They look it up online, check out your website, and give you a call.

If your customers find you, you want to be easily found. So, you want to work on getting good reviews on Yelp and Craigslist. And you should optimize your website to show up high on the list when potential customers Google you.

But maybe, they get introduced. Your best customers often come through referrals from other satisfied customers!

What can you do to ensure great referrals? It’s not search engine optimization. (They’ve been introduced, so they already know your name!)

  1. Give great customer service.
  2. Stay in touch with customers after they buy (through email, blogging, and social media).
  3. Continue teaching them how they can solve their problems.
  4. Ask for referrals. (Surprisingly easy to forget!)
  5. Use your website to show new customers how you can help them. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them!

You need to decide: do I want to be found, or do I want to be introduced? Then, put your marketing budget there.

Fundraising Tuesday: You’re My Hero

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Every Tuesday this season, I’m offering a tip on how to write better fundraising appeals. The first post, about greetings, was Call Me By Name. The second was about postscripts: Last Things First.

 

Let’s try an experiment. You’ll need your latest fundraising letter, a blue pen, and a yellow highlighter. Put them all on your desk. Ready?

highlighter

Highlight your donor, not your organization

Pick up the pen and circle every mention of your organization. It could be the agency’s name. It could be the word “we,” used to refer to your organization. How many blue circles do you see? A lot, I’ll bet.

Now, pick up the highlighter and underline every mention of your donor. Yes, you can count the salutation if you called them by name. You can also highlight the word “you”–if that means the donor who’s reading the letter.

Is there more yellow on the page than blue? If not, you’re losing donors with every letter you send.

To Renew Their Support, Focus on Donors

A lot of us in the nonprofit world are under a misconception. We think that the reason donors give to us is because we do good work.

No, that’s the reason we’re proud of our organizations. It’s not the reason people give!

If doing good work were enough, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting donors to renew. They’d get to know, like, and trust your organization, and then they’d keep on giving into the indefinite future. But about 70% of the people who gave to you in 2014 didn’t renew their gift in 2015.

Don’t focus on what you do. Focus on how the donor feels.

Make the Donor the Hero of the Story

Seth Godin writes:

Why on earth would a rational person give money to charity–particularly a charity that supports strangers? What do they get?

A story.

It might be the story of doing the right thing, or fitting in, or pleasing a friend or honoring a memory, but the story has value. It might be the story that you, and you alone are able to make this difference, or perhaps it’s the story of using leverage to change the world. For many, it’s the story of what it means to be part of a community.

For your donor to renew, she or he has to feel like the hero of the story. You are the one who is going to make donors feel like heroes. And the fundraising appeal letter is just one of the many times during the year you have an opportunity to do that–but it’s a crucial time.

Spiderman emblemUse your fundraising powers for good.

Write fundraising appeals that tell the donor, “Because of you, this happened. You are my hero. And you are needed, now.”

 

Writing With and Against the Rules

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Help a thief, or Help, a thief?If you’ve been reading Communicate! for a while, you know I’m not a grammar snob. In fact, my writing online would make my high school English teacher cringe.

Using sentence fragments. And starting sentence with conjunctions.

Repeating words for emphasis, without changing or alternating or varying them or combing through the thesaurus for other options.

Writing one-sentence paragraphs when I really want to make a point.

Why It’s Sometimes OK to Break the Rules

Part of the reason I write this way is that I do most of my writing online. Reading something on a screen is harder than perusing it in print. So, be kind to your reader. When you write for online publication, use shorter sentences and paragraphs, and leave more white space, if you want to be read.

The main reason it’s sometimes OK to break the rules has nothing to do with the medium, however. It’s all about the message. You should write in a way that helps to make your point.

Great writers have always known this. Jane Austen used the passive voice and split infinitives. Ernest Hemingway wrote sentence fragments. Charles Dickens’ sentences went on and on, even though he lampooned German writers for doing the same thing.

And Winston Churchill ended sentences with prepositions (although he probably didn’t say, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put”).

But the Rules Are Our Friends

Most of the time, the rules are there to help you. They’re like the street signs and traffic lights when you’re out driving: they make your direction clear to your reader and keep you from smashing into obstacles on the way to your conclusion.

You need to know the rules before you decide that in this case it makes sense to flout them. (And please, know the difference between “flout” and “flaunt”!)

Otherwise, you could end up saying the exact opposite of what you meant to say. Or at best, you could distract readers  from what you meant to say, and have them grinding their teeth about how you said it, instead.

Apostrophes

Thanks to Robert Bruce of 101 Books for inspiring this post.

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