Is your fundraising like a scary message from the lab?

There was a “concerning” spot on the bridge of my nose. I went to a dermatologist, who cut part of the spot off and sent it to a lab to examine it.

A few days later, I got the result from the lab. It was a paragraph describing what they found. I won’t violate my own privacy (or bore you) by sharing that paragraph, but here’s what it was like:

• 85 words total.
• 5 sentences (average 17 words; not too bad).
• Reading ease grade level of 16. This is the level where reading ease scores break down because it’s almost unreadable.
• 11 words completely unknown to me. Technical and medical terms (like “fibrocollagenous stroma”).
• 11 words I know, but used in unfamiliar ways, rendering them effectively unknown to me.

I had no idea what it meant. Not even a wild guess. It was so obscure, it seemed likely to be bad news. My heart rate increased.

Then I read the next paragraph, written by the dermatologist:

Good news, the pathology showed a benign hair follicle growth and not a skin cancer.

Whew.

I do a lot of fundraising for health organizations and hospitals. I’ve written hundreds of stories that began just like this one. They often include some impenetrable “doc talk” that I have to make understandable and dramatic so they can motivate donors to donate. There are usually several steps of translation between the doc talk and the story. The meaningful stuff comes mainly from the patient talking about how the whole experience felt.

This experience — being inside the “story” — makes me wonder: Do medical professionals really have to write the way they do?

I’m asking. Because I don’t know.

If they’re talking among themselves, and all parties to the conversation fully understand it — that’s okay. And I do want them to be detailed an accurate in what they’re saying.

So I’m giving my docs a pass on this. They can be as impenetrable as they want or need to be. Though I have to wonder if they could practice something closer to plain language, even among themselves.

This issue comes up a lot in fundraising. It’s not as extreme as one physician communicating a complex diagnosis to another, but it’s the same idea. We start talking to ourselves instead of our donors.

Because, like doctors, we are professionals. We have specialist knowledge about our cause. We have an advanced vocabulary for understanding it and talking about it. That’s as it should be.

But when we use our advanced knowledge and language when connecting with donors, who are non-experts, it’s like we’re sending them the initial lab report.

Nearly meaningless.

Hard to read and comprehend.

Certainly not emotional.

And destined to do poorly at bringing in donations.

That’s why every time you go to donors, do these three things:

1. Check your vocabulary for in-house jargon. It can be hard for people fluent in the jargon to realize it is such. Get someone who is less expert (or more attuned to non-expert discourse) to get rid of technical terms.
2. Check for ease of reading. That means Flesch-Kincaid reading ease level of Grade 6 or lower, or 80+ if you use the other Flesch-Kincaid measurement.
3. Screen your copy for “explaining.” Turn it into storytelling.