Fundraisers should— MOO, interrupting cow! 🐮

Learn when — and how — to strategically interrupt your fundraising stories for better results.

I don't know about you but I'm old enough to remember "children should be seen, not heard."

Those days are thankfully long gone.

However, we still teach kids not to interrupt.

That's good.

Except when it's not.

Sometimes, interrupting is necessary. For example:

Fundraisers should— MOO, interrupting cow! 🐮

Okay, I can't resist the "interrupting cow." And I think it's a good visual for fundraisers to remember that we should sometimes be interrupting.

I'll get to that soon. But first, this...

Photo Credit: Ethan Mollick

And this...

Photo Credit: Ethan Mollick

You know the joke, right?

The point is, I want you to think of interrupting as sometimes being a good thing.

Interrupting is good for "interrupting cow" jokes.

Interrupting is good for a good cause.

You need to do this in your appeals, to be effective.

Here's a simple outline of how you can do this:

JOHNSON BOX

SALUTATION

LEAD

STORY

INTERRUPT & ASK

CONTINUE STORY

INTERRUPT & ASK

CONTINUE (SHARED VALUES, ETC.)

CLOSING & SIGNATURE

PS: ASK AGAIN

And here's a glimpse of what implementing this can look like in action:

Written by Brett Cooper

Interrupting is rather like going to a commercial break. You interrupt something interesting (your fundraising story) for "an important message from our sponsor," then you get back to the interesting bit (your story again).

You can vary this. For example, you may sometimes tell a general fundraising story rather than a specific one.

But the interrupting is always important.

So channel your inner "interrupting cow" and interrupt with confidence — swagger, even. It's for a good cause!