Future Fundraising Now

Category: Writing

  • AI tools can ruin a lot more than your fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    Last week, I talked about the threat bad use of AI tools poses for your fundraising. There’s a bigger threat. For you personally, and maybe even to human culture itself: AI saves us from the agony of thinking. And thinking — the kind that’s difficult, agonizing, with no success guaranteed — that’s where most human…

  • 6 negative thoughts that can destroy your fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    When I wrote my first book (The Fundraiser’s Guide to Irresistible Communications) the first official step was to send three sample chapters to the editor. The few days between sending the chapters and hearing back were some of the worst I’ve experienced. I was sure he was going to hate those chapters. And my writing.…

  • How to use jargon the right way in fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    Excerpt from How to Turn Your Words into Money: The Master Fundraiser’s Guide to Persuasive Writing Everyone tells you to avoid jargon. That’s good advice, usually. But not always in fundraising. The right kind of jargon, used in the right way, can make you more believable and persuasive. It can connect you more closely with…

  • How AI could wreck the future of fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    I’ve written elsewhere about a moment early in my career that marked a turning point. Let me paraphrase: My mentor at the time was looking at some fundraising copy I’d written. He was clearly frustrated. Then he said the words that turned out to be the magic words: The mistake you keep making is you…

  • How to write when your mind is scattered

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    It happens to everyone who writes: Times when we can’t focus. When no matter how hard we try, are head stays filled with too many thoughts. Most of them not that useful. It makes real thinking hard. It makes quality writing almost impossible. Here are some great tips for getting through those inevitable times, from…

  • Is your fundraising trapped in the pathetic fallacy?

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    The pathetic fallacy isn’t nearly as insulting a term as it might sound: It’s a term for ascribing human thoughts or emotions to inanimate things. (As in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Clouds aren’t lonely. Read the definition here on Wikipedia.) In fundraising, the pathetic fallacy is the tendency to ascribe your thoughts or…

  • 7 ways to show not tell in fundraising writing

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    You’ve been told that your writing should “show, not tell.” That’s good, but here’s a dive into what that might actually mean for your fundraising storytelling, from OBrien on Message, at What does Ernest Hemingway eating oysters alone in a Paris café have to do with your next message?:

  • How poetry can boost your fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    A piece of advice I give writers now and then goes like this: You’re writing fundraising, not poetry. Make it sound ordinary and human, not elevated and writerly. I stand behind that advice. But there’s something else that needs to be said about effective fundraising writing, and Roy Williams recently said it in his Monday…

  • 3 ways to improve your focus

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    Pretty much the entire universe is conspiring to distract you from writing quality fundraising. Here are some ways to fight back, from the Publication Coach blog, at Do writers get shiny object syndrome?

  • Grammar gatekeeping is bad for fundraising

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    Jeff Brooks
    in

    A grammar error on the radio. On NPR! Gasp. John McWhorter, in his New York Times column tells the harrowing story: When Good Grammar Gets Snobbish. He heard it on “This American Life.” The narrator said, “As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch…” Oh no! A dangling modifier! That’s…