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Fishing. Maybe you hate it, maybe you love it. (Maybe it's not even on your sonar.)

Regardless, in fundraising, a fishing metaphor can be helpful.

For example, "The one that got away..."

Your donors are not fish, I know. (Blech!) You don't "catch them" against their...

Do you ever hear a song lyric wrong ...

... and then it stays stuck in your head that way?

Take, for example, Prince's song "Little Red Corvette."

Brett's (11-year-old) ears in 1982 somehow misheard the "little red Corvette" chorus as "steal away, come on, hey."

In...

Brett here:

I used to write "Daily Thoughts" – aka, me trying to be quotable from 2014 to 2021.

I wrote one every day... 2,519 in total. The process taught me a lot about writing.

1 big takeaway?

"Last words echo."

Here's how...

Ask yourself if the last word in a sentence, in a section, in...

Isn't it weird that we all have bones?

Even as a kid, you know they're in you, under your skin.

But they're out of sight. So, you forget.

Right?

Donor newsletters are the same way. If you don't "X-ray" them to see their bones, making sure everything is in its right place... you might be in for...

"Don't put that in there!" 

This is how Julie replied to my beloved first idea for a subject line for this newsletter.

She deemed my idea "gross" and "not good."

She was right, of course. (As she usually is! )

Still, I can't resist telling you my bad idea anyway...

Skip over the ...

Our son Baye was once a beneficiary – at age 7, when he lived in an orphanage run by an American nonprofit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He has many stories to tell.

But turning beneficiary stories into moving fundraising stories of need for an appeal letter is more challenging than...

I love a good cliffhanger – don't you?

Question: are you using cliffhangers in your fundraising?

More on the why soon. But first...

(spoilers ahead... for those of you still avoiding Star Wars)

Consider the power of a good cliffhanger.

–Star Wars: The Empire Strikes...

You can find a lot of cool stuff tucked away in the nooks and crannies of a person's brain.

For example...

Before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple Macintosh, computers did not offer multiple fonts. You got 1 font and 1 font only. (Don't like it? Too bad!)

Jobs came up...

 In a way, subject lines are a microcosm of fundraising.

Writing them can be maddening, mysterious, marvelous...

They are tantalizingly short. They can be infuriatingly tricky. But, if you're up for a challenge, they're good fun.

That's why I like to study subject lines, to turn them...

In your donor appeals, your endings are so important! 

A misplaced story ending means your appeal might not end well.

Here's an except from page one of a pretty typical appeal letter story.

It’s a terribly sad story of a boy named Ian who has nightmares of a parent killing him....

       As a donor, I sometimes daydream about the charities I support and wonder what it would be like to be there to see my gifts at work ...

       … to see a child as she wakes up from a sight-saving surgery on the Flying Eye Hospital …

...

Your name is important to you. It's true, isn't it?

Even if you are in a room with many people chatting, you likely have "selective hearing" for your name.

When someone says your name, your brain has an amazing ability. It can focus on that one bit of information while simultaneously ignoring...