Yesterday I suggested that competition amongst nonprofits for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of donors might become more fierce; that this would be good for the causes served; and this trend would force more attention to communicating the core defferentiating qualities of competing groups.

In other words, your "story" had better be about why you are special. And how your "special-ness" carries through changing times.

Often the chore of distilling and capturing an organization’s "special" nature, and making it relevant today for the donor, falls by default to a fundraising copywriter, who — hopefully — is gifted in this art.

Our Guest Agitator today, copywriter and independent fundraising consultant Bob Levy, writes about this challenge. Here’s Bob …

Moving Beyond the Missionary Position

One of the many challenges to non-profit copywriting (to paraphrase Abe Lincoln), is trying to please “some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time.” Since we are all taught to write at an early age, most believe it is part of their skill set.  The knowledgeable question data … everyone it seems has an opinion about copy.

But as master copywriter and fundraiser Roger Craver once wrote to an organization struggling to emerge from its message miasma, there a significant difference between organizational positioning and copywriting.  While we preen, pick or puzzle over fundraising appeals, the world can turn in the inverse direction of where organizations expect it to turn.  And when that happens, dedicated non-profits may find themselves out in the cold staring at the dark side of the moon, when they could well be basking in the warming light of the sun.

Okay, enough wordplay, what’s my position? Simply this: while we agonize over the next topic needed for the next fundraising appeal to meet that schedule to meet the budget to sustain an organization’s annual nut, we might spend just a little time defining the core messages that drive home just what that organization stands for.   Just as we agonize where the “ask” gets placed, or whether we mentioned someone’s pet fact in a discrete piece of copy, we be might be equally focused on whether the organization’s core identity underwrites this particular fundraising piece, not to mention every communication that the donor is asked to read.

In the incessant drive to maintain the fundraising status quo of highly inflated budgets, this discovery process has become a luxury.  So when the numbers go down the current solution is an organizational “rebranding.”  Often that boils down to little more than changing a logo and a name.  And in the process of searching for that magic bullet, regrettably, organizations may well lose whatever identity they worked so hard to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize fundraising is a nuts and bolts practice. I don’t deny the pressure of raising an annual budget. I don’t discount the stress of making that happen.  What I question is the degree to which process has driven down the need to think and think hard about what we are actually communicating to our donors.  And the temptation to claim that such responsibility — in the name of organizational compartmentalization – belongs to another “department” that has “message” or “communication” in its name.   I thought that “Development” implies the need for  smart growth.

If you examine donor surveys which mine the understanding of an organization’s programmatic content, invariably you discover that donors’ knowledge, at best, is skin deep. What sticks, if you’re lucky, is a commitment based on shared values. Sometimes that comes from the sheer impact of the organization’s name and history.  But without that built-in “assurance” policy, the strength of that identity – that moral connector to donor loyalty, as it were — has to be forged.  That requires more than good copy.  It requires strong organizational positioning that recognizes changing times and changing mindsets – a quality, that again, is often overlooked in the mad race to get through the fundraising year.

So let me urge that we all take a well earned “cleansing breath” – slowly, breathe in and breathe out – and take the time to figure out just what we are trying to “sell.” 

Yes, I’ve heard that old Madison Avenue adage, “It’s not the steak it’s the sizzle.”  But just maybe in the Age of Obama — after we’ve been fried in our own sizzle for so many years — we can begin to re-examine the driving force behind our beliefs and work to translate that power to others who want to believe.  We might begin to consider why a given organization was formed in the first place … and why it’s still needed today.  And we can begin to convey this power through organizational positioning that is honest, fresh and real. 

Lacking this impetus and this drive, it is easy to get caught up in a schedule driven copy chase where the process drives the product instead of the product driving the process.  We become nothing more than used car salesmen looking for the right words, gimmick or slogan to off-load our clunkers.  We lose the fun, the excitement and the stimulation of being part of a world-changing “cause” or a worthwhile mission.  And aren’t we … and our donors … better than that?

Bob Levy