I was thumbing through a canary yellow, three ring binder, found while Covid cleaning.  It had that musty paper smell and more than a few cobwebs.

This book in binder is, 86 tutorials on Creating Fundraising Letters and Packages, and the author is Jerry Huntsinger, who we’ve brought in on a client gig or two over the years.

Jerry’s widely regarded as one of the best fundraising copywriters to have picked up a pen.  And yet, Jerry like his good friend Roger, has an attribute that far exceeds writing skill, a passion for lifelong learning (long before that became a turn of phrase).  That passion isn’t unrelated to the skill, in fact it’s largely causal.

The desire to learn is fueled by a prerequisite belief; there’s always more to learn.  He never approached an assignment with bravado and ego, instead, openness to new ideas.  It’s a rare trait among ‘experts’ as so often, the thimble full of knowledge is mistaken for an ocean.

It’s in that spirit of openness to being better at one’s craft that I was drawn to Tutorial 27, “Here’s the way I would rewrite it”.   Jerry dubbed a letter from Children’s Village Home for Children as the “before” letter.  His critique was short as was, per his admission, the time he took to do the rewrite, creating the “after” version.

We scored both with the Copy Optimizer and used the scores and diagnostic guidance to write an “After the After” version.

Here is the bird’s eye view.  Recall, further to the right (Involving vs. Informational) and up (Narrative vs. Non-Narrative) is better.

Jerry noted the “before” letter talks about a ‘warm and loving family’ but the copy never really gets very warm.  He’s right, the Involving score for the “before” is, a word, atrocious.  Off the chart, atrocious.

Jerry, in very little time, and without the aid of the Copy Optimizer, took that score from a -17.5 to 2.3.

However, the Narrative score got worse, which Jerry himself alluded to in saying, “the After could benefit from a case history”, which I take to mean, a story.

As an aside, there are several tutorials where Jerry illustrates the power of a story well told.  He also laments the generally crappy nature of narrative from his vantage point of 20 plus years ago.  Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same on this score (literally).

So, how did we get the “After, After” in the upper right?  First off, Jerry’s correct.  The original lacked decent, narrative “bones” but we edited this in the way he did, working with what limited grist the Before provided.  We pulled in and reworked a few more lines of the Before that Jerry cut, lines that needed editing but did provide a bit more story around the kids.

We wouldn’t have had a clue this needing doing without objective scores.  We’d have had even less of a clue how to improve said scores without the detailed diagnostics indicating the parts of speech associated with narrative that were way under-represented.

We were also able to ‘paint by numbers’ to improve the Involving score given the 20 plus linguistic features making up this Dimension.  Those features serve as ingredients for better writing and delivering even more on what Jerry noted as a lack of warmth in the Before.

We took Jerry’s embers and stoked the Involving fire to a very solid place by removing prepositions, adding amplifiers, 1^st and indefinite pronouns, discourse particles and a few more contractions.

The chance for Agitator readers to dive in on this tool in a DIY, online environment is coming soon.  Don’t miss out.  We’ll be sure to promote the beta site, once live, but will give special attention and extra, as-needed guidance to those who already expressed interest or who will between now and then.

Consider this a chance to register your interest and/or questions and/or healthy skepticism.  Drop a note to me at kschulman@thedonorvoice.com or leave a comment on the post.

Thanks,

Kevin

P.S.  You don’t need a paper copy of Jerry’s book. You can now tap into Jerry’s wisdom in the form of 86 Tutorials in digital form, Covid-free thanks to SOFII.