Your fundraising looks too nice

Your fundraising might look too good.

I know that may sound strange, but long years of bitter experience has persuaded me that it’s clear: Fundraising that looks too polished doesn’t work as well as it could.

“Polished” is a mushy concept. Your and my idea of polished likely don’t mean exactly the same thing. But let me show you two examples that I’ve come across recently:

This little piece of design appears in the bottom-right corner of a direct mail letter. I think you’ll agree that this is engaging. Cute. Nice-looking. Telling readers to turn the page is widely known as a direct mail best practice.

But there’s a little too much flourish here. Somebody actually worked on this, as opposed to a busy nonprofit worker hurriedly scrawling “turn page” down there.

Is something like this going to sink an appeal? I doubt it. But I think minor details like this add up to a sort of unconscious gestalt for readers: Something feels more or less authentic. More or less urgent. More or less real, like something you’d do yourself while working hard on your real goal of making the world better.

Here’s another:

This is at the top of page two of a direct mail letter. It doesn’t look like a letter, with the polished headline and photo with an edge treatment only someone skilled with design tools could manage. (Not to mention the corporate-tone copy.)

It looks like it’s from a brochure, which is not at all like a real letter from a real person.

As with the page turn above, it might not be enough to turn a strong appeal into a weak one.

But I will wouldn’t do it.

Donors are drowning in a sea of skilled, polished design. But they know what the real world is like. It doesn’t look like the work of a graphic designer. Not to mention the polished, generic look you get from AI design.

The best fundraising looks like real life.

If your design is actually messy — as in hard to read, tough to follow, emotionally ambiguous — then you’re in trouble. That’s why the great designers (I’m lucky to know a few of them) are worth their weight in gold. They know how to make it look unprofessional, while never losing the power of design to make things readable and emotionally resonant.