When you are looking for fundraising options and you have something on the page already, that is a significant achievement for most people. However, a draft and a campaign are not the same thing.
The difference between a draft and a campaign is not in the elegance of wording or a headline. The difference is that when someone reads the campaign, in a few seconds, anyone who will fund your campaign should understand if they are the target audience.
We have seen a lot of great messages that had almost no effect because they were talking to the wrong audience, even though they were perfectly worded and grammatically correct.
Nowhere is this truer than when you are fundraising, where they will not just read your message but judge whether you deserve their money. Below are some tips that will help you in rewriting your first version of the campaign in such a way that it appeals to the donors.
Getting to Know the Person Reading This
Before editing your draft, imagine the people who will fund your campaign. Not a persona, but a real person, trying to quickly skim your text while dealing with a dozen other competing signals.
Your first draft is frequently aimed at an abstract audience. To remedy that, simply think of one particular donor you want to address before putting pen to paper.
Think about what that person might be apprehensive about, what they wish somebody would just plainly say to them, and what part of your campaign they need help understanding.
A first draft is frequently concerned with abstract audiences. A quick trip through an AI text detector will undoubtedly highlight a few phrases that the software interprets as overly formulaic. However, that leaves the more difficult judgments to you, the writer, where they belong.
Clarifying What You're Actually Asking For
Every message asks the funders to take an action, even if it is only implied. Perhaps you want them to give you money immediately or be long-term investors in your business.
Maybe you want them to connect more with your business. If you can't define what you want the reader to do in one sentence, your draft can't do it either.
Your donors will know the vagueness, even if they can't put it into words. Vague questions lead to vague responses, and vague responses aren't helpful for your fundraising campaign.
This is also a good time to write a mission statement for the campaign plan, separate from whatever mission statement you may have hanging around in your organization's shared files.
A sentence or two about what this message is supposed to accomplish will help you stay on track as you edit and revise later. It will help you cut things that don't serve the purpose of your fundraising campaign.
Finding the Emotional Centre
At some point in your fundraising campaign draft, there is one moment that is more important than the rest, despite potentially being hidden in the third paragraph while finding its place.
Now, your task is to identify this moment and delete everything else that surrounds it, including things you may be particularly proud of having written.
To do this, we think it can help to read through the draft and find where your own voice speeds up or slows down, where you lose track of time; that is likely where your emotional center is.
Once you have located this part, the rest of your campaign should revolve around it so that your donors are also clear on the message.
Statistics and facts are important, but if the funders need to wade through them all to get to the part that made them connect to your campaign, then you have misrepresented what is important.
Choosing Language That Sounds Like You
Polished language and honest language are not always synonymous, but your donors should be able to determine the difference between the two within a couple of sentences, and often subconsciously.
By reading through your writing and deleting any word that you would not use when speaking to a friend, you can remove any unnecessary flourishes.
Plain words have weight, precisely because they aren't strained. For example, the phrase "I am looking forward to working with you" carries more impact than the slightly more formal and complex "I wish to be bestowed with your blessings."
Sounding formal does not mean sounding trustworthy; something that you need to understand for your fundraising campaign.
Furthermore, there is an almost intangible tangibility to messages in plain language; your investors will remember these simple words long after the meeting is over.
Turning a Point Into a Story
Facts appeal to the rational part of your investor’s mind, the part that keeps score as he/she reads. Stories appeal to them too, as it helps them connect to a company, and they decide whether to release their funds or not.
Take your main idea and ask yourself: What small, short scene would illustrate it truthfully? Not an abstract idea, masquerading as a story, but something real: a moment that contains the decision that you want your donor to make.
Add a moment, a character or two, that fully portrays the story of your campaign. A specific detail (what time it was or what the character was holding when she stopped) will carry more emotional weight than a summary of events.
Specificity is what makes a story feel real, which is something different than simply being illustrative of a point that you want the investor to understand.
Keeping Emotion and Credibility in Balance
An emotional message that has no grounding in anything else comes across as manipulative after a while. In fact, most investors will probably quickly realize that this is the case, even if you do it unintentionally.
The solution to this problem is not to tone down the emotion or the grounding. Instead, you should add something to the latter that makes it more attractive.
Perhaps a description of what you just said, a detail, and an admission that the message has some shortcomings can make your message more meaningful to the ones who will fund your business.
We think it is important, when writing emotionally, to keep alternating between paragraphs that simply express the emotion and paragraphs that ground the emotion in reality.
That way, you avoid both being too analytical and too emotional in one message. The investors get both sides, and thus feel as if they are receiving exactly what you want to tell them, based on the situation.
Final Thoughts
A campaign message that you write to raise funds from investors takes its strength from the same sources as an open and honest talk. It comes from the careful listener and the willingness to make changes, improvements, and revisions as needed.
Your initial message may have been more of a working draft, but it always needs to be developed further. As you refine it, always keep in mind that you want your funders to connect to the story of your campaign.
Remember that the value of using plain wording often outweighs the benefits of more stylized approaches, and remember that the thoughts of one particular investor can be more important than making assumptions about a larger group in general.
This may be where many of you will be able to win the hearts of your investors!
