“Plus Up” The Copy to Get the Most Out of Your Year-End Fundraising

What difference could a handful of copy changes — some rather subtle — plus a few handwritten callouts make in the performance of a direct mail fundraising appeal?

You might be surprised.

A recent test for one of our valued clients proved that careful word choice — good writing is nothing more, or less, than word choice — along with some proven fundraising tactics, can make all the difference:

• 11.3% more responses
• 4.7% higher average gift
• 27.1% more net revenue

That’s no small amount. And it’s all due to some well-considered copy tweaking on the carrier and in the letter — in particular, how a challenge grant was presented. That, plus two “hand-drawn” callouts in the letter, made all the difference.

Read and believe . . .

You just saw for yourself, some of these enhancements are pretty subtle. But when combined with other techniques, such as judicious underlining, bolding, handwritten notes and callouts, paragraph indents, short, scannable, easy-to-read blocks of copy — all of the tactics we know work — you can improve your results.

Your humble blogger lives to, as the biz world says, “plus up” fundraising copy so that it wrings the maximum result from an appeal letter, newsletter, email or other campaign.

What’s stopping YOU?

‍