Trying to make your fundraising sound “professional”? You’re doing it wrong

Will this be the year your organization finally represents itself in public as the dignified, professional, in-control people you strive to be?

If so, this will be the year your fundraising death-spiral starts.

I’m not making that up. Your professional dignity and your fundraising are almost completely at odds. You can have one or the other. Not both.

As the Agents of Good blog says, at The 2016 forecast:

PLEASE stop being so damn worried about how professional your look, sound, act, talk, move, etc — you seem more robotic and less human all the time — and who wants to give to an uncaring robot?

Fundraising is not business correspondence. It’s not journalism. It’s not scholarship. It’s not your resume cover-letter. Those careful, clean, precise forms of writing have nothing to do with the approach that gets people to donate.

Fundraising belongs to a messier, more passionate world that includes love letters, ransom notes, pleas for mercy, and outbreaks of religious fervor.

That’s how you cut through the clutter and connect with donors. And raise more money.