Are you falling into "the AI trap"? (Please no!)

Multiple reviewers can dilute your fundraising message until it sounds exactly like AI copy.

 Does your org's fundraising copy review process involve several people giving direction disguised as feedback?

If so, you may be falling into "the AI trap."

This is where you channel too many voices, you say too much, you lose focus. Instead of harnessing one human voice that rings clean and clear through the noise of modern life, you play it safe by going middle-of-the-road.

Just like an AI.

Today's chatbot AI are trained by consuming the internet. They are constantly finding and mimicking patterns.

The patterns are "the middle of the road."

This can be super helpful for creating generic content, for doing some research or brainstorming, or for bouncing ideas off of as you gather your thoughts.

For fundraising, middle-of-the-road is cringe.

For fundraising, you want your donors to feel the urgency of an important problem they can help solve right now.

Donors who feel more, care more and give more.

Middle-of-the-road messaging won't make your donors feel much of anything.

You need a writer who listens to all relevant voices and then synthesizes all of that (keeping only what's necessary) to convey a single, powerful, focused, fundraising message that moves your donors to give. Whether the writer is you or someone else, their unique human voice must be preserved in the review process.

Otherwise, your message will be spread thin, muddied, and muted. It won't sound like an actual person. It will fall flat.

Listen to every voice... in the beginning.

Then empower one voice: the writer's.

Keep feedback as limited as possible.

Good fundraising is a relationship. As with any relationship, your donor comms should feel intimate, like one person talking to another in conversation, authentically, passionately.

Not like a committee.

Not like a group.

Not like an AI.

Please don't fall into that trap!