It seems an article of faith that adding bold or underline in direct mail is best practice.  Google it and some version of these points will surface many times over in the first few search result links.

• Bolding or underlining signals that a sentence is important.
• But underlining also serves a second, more important purpose. The most effective fundraisers use underlining to choose for your donor which things they are most likely to read.

These sentiments always include mention that people don’t read your letters, they merely skim and then a list of suggestions on what to bold/underline and perhaps how frequently that boils down to a,

• not too little/not to much and
• focus on need and ask formulation.

Maybe the problem is that we’ve conditioned people to skim because that’s all the attention their experience suggests it deserves?  Do people skim stuff they want to read?

Maybe we should focus on a letter that reads like a personal exchange with a story well told?  Maybe all the “best practice” is the cause of skimming rather than the consequence?

We should dislike opinions and beliefs when evidence will do.   In the academic literature there’s been much ink spilt experimenting with “enhancing” the text for ESL students to improve attention and recall.   There’s a resounding middling answer from all that work –  it might help a little or not at all.

That doesn’t bode well for the fundraising world.  Who wouldn’t aspire to have your copy get more reader attention and create some memories?

But I grant ESL learning is pretty different from fundraising.  Surely there are lots of experiments on this simple to test concept?  Hell, I can find experiments on the effects of duck quacking on echoes and the relationship between a cow’s name and milk production.

Among these obscurities, I only found a single, in-market experiment for a Dutch health charity that tested none, some and a lot of bolding/underlining.   And the finding?  A nothingburger.  There was no difference in response rate.

Before you poo-poo the findings or come up with reasons why they did the bolding/underlining wrong it’s worth noting this was a multivariate design so they tested a variety of other letter features and found that postscript, a detached reply form and the signer made a significant difference in response rate.  Those are seemingly in line with ‘best practice’.

Maybe there is some magic Goldilocks approach to bolding/underlining and of precisely the exact words that does it’s intended job.  Maybe your mileage will vary.  Or maybe the bolding/underlining is opinion and belief belied by evidence.

Kevin