Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

The Only Way to Make Sure They Read Your Posts

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There are 8 million stories: why yours?

There are 8 million stories: why yours?

An old TV show used to close with the line, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

Today, the Internet is the naked city–and there are way more than eight million stories out there. When you write a blog, post a post, tweet a tweet, that’s just one of them.

How can you be sure anybody reads what you write?

The only way is to make yourself useful to your readers.

The Question You Need to Answer

The reader you’re trying to reach will look at your post for three seconds before deciding to delete it or read it.  In three seconds, they will ask the WIIFM question: “What’s In It For Me?” You need to give them the answer.  Are you:

  • Telling them something new that they would hate to miss?
  • Answering a burning question that’s already on their minds?
  • Giving them an online tool that will help them solve a problem?
  • Making them feel smart?
  • Entertaining them better than a cute cat video?

These are ways to make yourself useful to your readers. They are also the ways to get read.

It’s Not About You

Please understand: no one, not even your best friend, has to read what you write.  It’s their choice–and they have many other choices.  So, what you want them to read doesn’t matter.  What you think they ought to want to read doesn’t matter.

All that matters is making yourself useful to your readers. Or else you won’t have any.

 

The Golden Rule of Nonprofit Writing

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Golden Rule

You know it and I know it: a lot of nonprofit writing is just painful to read.

We donate to our favorite causes. In return, we get newsletters full of jargon, emails full of typos, fundraising letters that sound like they’re written in French because the organization says “We, we, we.”

As people who work for nonprofits, and to ensure their success, we can and should do something about this! Make sure your organization asks itself these five tough questions:

1. Are you listening long enough before you write?

2. Do you think longer and more complicated is more impressive? (Your readers don’t!)

3. Are you writing memos when you should be telling stories?

4. Are you burying the lead? (Does the reader know from the start why he or she should read on?)

5. Are You as Good a Communicator as Shakespeare’s Fools? (Will people invite you to speak truth fearlessly to them because you leaven it with humor?)

None of us wants to cause pain to our supporters. But that means we must think what our supporters want to read! The golden rule of writing is to write unto others the way you wish they wrote unto to you.

How NOT to Survey Your Readers

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Enough about me, what do you think of meIt’s a good idea to get to know the people who read you. But there are ways of doing it that make them feel welcomed…and ways that make them feel used.

Here’s an example of the wrong way.

My dear wife Rona Fischman received an email that said:

“Rona,

When I started ___ 3 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined how much we would achieve together. ____has grown from a small community to a global one of over 5.5 million members, in nearly every country in the world. It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far, so fast.”

“But what’s next for ___? What will the next few years look like? As we start to think about those questions as a community, it’s critical to hear from as many voices as possible. It’s important to know what we think about what our community does, how we can be better and what we should work on together.”

“Our surveys are put together by a crack team of survey expurrts [picture of  cat at keyboard] and they don’t take very long to fill out. We’d love to find out what you think.”

Here’s what Rona thinks:

I don’t know who you are, and you want to trick me into doing your marketing for you??? Share on X

Here’s the right way:

If you want to know what people think, start out by listening. Continue by giving them something they’ll consider valuable. Get them to know, like, and trust you.

Only then will they be willing to answer your surveys. And only then will the information they give you be valuable to you.

 

 

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