There seems to be an article of faith in direct mail fundraising: bold and underline the important stuff.

Do a Google search for fundraising copywriting advice and some version of the same rationale appears again and again.

• • People don’t really read fundraising letters.
  • They skim them.
  • So bolding and underlining tell the donor what matters and, more importantly, help us decide which bits they are most likely to notice.

Then come the rules. Don’t use too much or too little, emphasize the need and/or the ask and make sure you bold this sentence but not that one.

All of which assumes something that rarely gets questioned: people are inevitably going to skim.

Are they?

People certainly skim things they don’t much care about. But do they skim a letter they actually want to read? A note that feels personal? A story that pulls them along?

There’s at least another possibility worth considering. Maybe donors don’t skim despite all our bolding, underlining, boxes, arrows, Johnson boxes, PSs and other devices designed to accommodate skimming. Maybe some of that stuff helps teach them that the letter itself isn’t worth reading closely.

That’s a different problem and one where evidence would be useful, because “fundraising best practice” has an unfortunate habit of becoming accepted wisdom long before anyone bothers asking whether it works.

There is a decent academic literature on what researchers call text enhancement, particularly with ESL students. Researchers have experimented with bolding, underlining and other ways of making parts of text more visually salient in the hope of improving attention, comprehension and recall.

The findings are spectacularly unspectacular.  Sometimes enhancement helps a little, sometimes not at all.  Granted, learning a second language is not fundraising. So I went looking for actual fundraising experiments.

Surely someone has tested this?  Researchers have managed to study whether ducks produce echoes and whether giving cows names affects milk production. Bolding a fundraising letter seems comparatively accessible.

I found one field experiment involving a Dutch health charity that tested different amounts of bolding and underlining in an actual fundraising appeal.  The result: no meaningful difference in response rate.

That alone doesn’t prove bolding and underlining never matter. One experiment is one experiment.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle. The researchers tested several other letter characteristics at the same time. The postscript mattered. A detached reply form mattered. The identity of the signer mattered.

In other words, their experiment was perfectly capable of detecting effects. Bolding and underlining simply wasn’t one of them.

Perhaps there is a Goldilocks version we haven’t found yet, with exactly the right number of underlines applied to exactly the right words. Perhaps it helps in some circumstances and not others.  But that is a very different claim from calling it a best practice.

“Best practice” ought to mean we have some decent reason to believe a practice is better, otherwise it’s just a habit with good PR.

Kevin