C’mon, you really wanted to correct that headline, didn’t ya? 

And it’s just that schoolmarm tendency in folks that makes for so much bad direct response fundraising copy.

That’s the conclusion I draw from a fascinating dissertation by Frank C. Dickerson, Ph.D. as part of his doctoral studies at The Peter Drucker Management Center and Claremont Graduate University.

Frank is the President of High Touch Direct Mail, a veteran fundraiser of 40 years,  and a linguistics scholar to boot.

In a remarkable research effort, he data-mined 1.5 million words of online and printed fundraising texts of 2,412 web and print-based fundraising documents across nine philanthropic sectors.

The quest?  To find out which, among 67 linguistic features, make for winning fundraising communications.

The conclusion?  Most fundraising messages suck.  Well, those are my words.  Frank’s words: “My research discovered that the discourse of fund-raising is broken.”

Here’s what his linguistic MRI reveals:

• “The focus is all too often on transferring information, rather than creating interpersonal involvement”;
• “Rather than sounding warm and friendly like personal conversations, fund-raising texts sounded cold and detached like dissertations;
• “Rather than gaining reader attention with emotionally rich human-interest stories, these texts contained less narrative than academic prose.  They had even less narrative than official documents.”   !!!

But Frank didn’t stop there. He tried to understand the mentality of the culprits who actually wrote this stuff.

• Only 5% of the writers rated argument-centric or an expository style as having high importance;
• And 45% of the writers said they believed that the use of narrative (emotionally rich with human interest stories) was the most important.

In short, the linguistic evidence of their writing revealed a yawning gap between what they believed about how something should be written and what they actually wrote.

Ranking highest among the messages analyzed was one by copywriter and Guest Agitator Jerry Huntsinger whose mantra has always been: “Write like you talk.”

Ya done good, Frank.  And ya deserve a raise.

Roger

P.S.  Frank has summarized his findings and you can download the document here.   Included at the end is a BONUS – the results of a postage test Frank conducted using first-class, pre-sorted first-class, non-profit naked (not canceled) and canceled non-profit stamps.  Read Frank’s downloadable findings and see why he believes you can boost response rates by 25+% and cut postage costs on high-end mailings by as much as 70%.

P.P.S.  In a few days you’ll be able to download the full reports on both the linguistics and non-linguistics (postage, envelopes, etc) studies conducted by Frank at his new website, www.TheWrittenVoice.org