Writing well is hard.  Hunter S. Thompson famously re-typed a fiction book just to know what if felt like.  That’s either crazy or brilliant.  Either way, it’s commitment.

Hemingway rewrote the first part of “A Farewell to Arms” at least fifty times.  He also advised, “don’t get discouraged, there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing”.

What are the mechanics for writing well?  Here it seems the fundraising copy business has suffered from a bad case of reductivism.  You’ll find these three in damn near every “Top X Tips to Great Fundraising Copy” blog post.

• Make the reader the hero. This invariably comes with the 2^nd person pronoun recommendation (co-mingled with guidance to avoid 1st person) which is thin guidance at best since we know 2nd person pronouns are only one of 24 linguistic features to create Involving copy.  Not to mention 1st person pronouns are a plus, not a con.
• Keep it readable – Flesch-Kincaid grade level scores to the rescue except it’s like using a rubber mallet for a precision surgery.
• Tell a story – ok, good start but barely so.

The rest of these lists are no more illuminating.  This shorthand to writing fundraising copy is not serving us well.  We’ve been scoring copy based on a more expansive set of rules and comparing our scores to response rates (i.e. back-test).  This Copy Optimizer product is over 80% accurate with a solid and growing sample database.   That’s the good news.  The bad?

You’ll recall from our recent post What Makes for Good Fundraising Copy  there are two critically important dimensions —  “Narrative” and “Involving” –that make for successful copy. The fundraising copy we’ve analyzed over the last few months, as a whole, doesn’t score well.  It tends to read a bit better than academic prose where “Involving” scores  are concerned but no better on Narrative.  The commercial sector doesn’t fare much better.

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Conversations with early testers are encouraging – lots of interest, a desire to do better and loving the notion of using scores to help carry the day with   “writing committee” antagonists hell bent on unintentionally making the copy worse.  This glass half-full view uses scores to show good vs. bad to prevent the latter from ever seeing a stamp or send button.  We’re equally encouraged by the genuine desire to write better with better, copy specific guidance.

[Sidebar:  Because the accuracy of the optimizer process is so promising we’re making our request for samples a standing one to build up the library of proof.  Send non-premium letter and/or email appeals with response rate (can include open and click for email) – one good and one bad per sample set – to me directly.  We’ll analyze your copy without charge and automatically include you on the ‘insider’ list for the beta, online product and send the report on your copy.  We’ll never share your specifics with anyone, nor will we use it any way other than as aggregated reporting.]

This isn’t Artificial Intelligence (AI).  AI would (currently) write sort of an ok or barely intelligible piece of copy and would give you no advice because the set of AI rules is so complex as to defy human explanation.  It is a black box.  That said, we’ll have an AI-type infrastructure to refine scoring over time and perhaps, other insights.

At  its heart what we’re developing  is scoring based on rules along with guidance on how to improve scores.  The system is built using an expansive set of predictive.   The rules aren’t grammar-based but instead they’re tied to frequency of linguistic features – 67 total – and how those various features tend to co-occur to predict communication type.  Want to write an academic abstract?  We can give you the linguistic ingredients to do so.

Successful fundraising copywriters will want to write in an involving, narrative style.  The Involving “ingredients” are very different from an academic abstract and different still from narrative, telling a story ingredients.  But, doing Involving and Narrative well is doable with works of Fiction serving as the gold standard.  And the unicorn of fundraising copy that delivers on both also exists.  But, to breed more unicorns takes a bit more work and the right set of more expansive rules.

And we’ll be the first to note that having the right ingredients doesn’t guarantee the cake will be pretty or taste good.  However, having the right ingredients is a solid start.   Here are but a few missing or overused ingredients we’re seeing across all the copy we’ve analyzed so far:

• Too many nouns. This makes the copy dense and hard to read.  It often means the copy has rattled off multiple issues or programs and is losing focus
• Too much tell, not enough show. Telling me the child is hungry or the dog is abused or the mother is sick and the need is urgent is the polar opposite of showing me.  Imagine dropping your prospective donor into a virtual world for 60 seconds to witness your missions need.   Conversion rate would be 100%.  You wouldn’t need to say a word.  Now, do that job with words.
• No story means we’re missing past tense and public verbs and 3^rd person pronouns
• “Involving” copy means you not only can but should be using 1^st person pronouns
• Need more private and public verbs – these are the verbs that let the reader inside to see opinions, beliefs and feelings.
• Fewer adjectives
• More (within reason of course) amplifiers (really, very, definitely), discourse markers (oh, well, now, then, you know, and I mean) and demonstrative pronouns ( this, that, these, and those, as in “This is an apple,)

Stay tuned. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the Copy Optimizer.

Kevin

P.S.  Don’t miss your chance to get copy scored, get more of the inside scoop and be on the beta product list.  Send non-premium letter and/or email appeals with response rate (can include open and click for email) – one good and one bad per sample set – to me directly.