The cost of unclear writing or hard-to-read design may be higher than you think: When you make a message hard to understand, or even just hard to read, you encourage donors to distrust what you’re saying.
That’s the message in an excellent article that appeared recently in the Boston Globe, Easy = True.
The theory is called cognitive fluency, and it shows how people prefer things that are easy to think about over things that are hard. The article includes these insights:
- Shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names … outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.
- When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about.
- When a personal questionnaire is presented in a less legible font, people tend to answer it less honestly.
So by all means, make it easy. It’s hard enough to get people motivated; that last thing you need to is accidentally push them toward thinking you’re no good.
Thanks to Customer Experience Matters for the tip.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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