Recruit families and save Gen X

Will members of Generation X give of their time and income to your cause?

If they don’t, will you know why?

Researcher Mark Ottoni Wilhelm wants to help you find out. He’s the founding director of the Center of Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS), the most nationally representative study of giving over time ever conducted.

By studying COPPS data, Wilhelm and his colleagues discovered a correlation – not necessarily a cause-effect relationship, but a link – between a person’s family stability when he was a child and his willingness to volunteer or give a financial gift as an adult.

His findings gave Wilhelm ideas.

“If we develop adolescents’ philanthropic consciousness, there is a direct benefit to society,” he said.

“As parents, we can make sure that our adolescent children have opportunities to donate some of their own funds to charitable causes,” he also said.

It should give you some ideas, too. In your materials, suggest ways that donors’ children can donate a portion of their allowance or summer-job income, and make sure you thank the kids appropriately when they do.

If you need volunteers and you can accept youngsters, refer to this study and encourage parents to bring their children. Point out the long-term benefits of their kids’ participation – not just to those who benefit from your organization, but to the volunteers’ families, too.

Feature their photos or stories in your publications or on your Web site.

Being involved in your non-profit can become a family affair, something most parents are craving these days.

You’ll be seen as caring about your donors. They, in turn, may care more about you.

(previously posted at Indianapolis Nonprofit Examiner)

Read Wilhelm’s story in Philanthropy Matters.

Pull the heart strings or lose the donation

A session at this summer’s Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Conference offered two tips worth repeating. As reported by the NonProfit Times Weekly, they are:

1. Support with substance (not fluff). Strategically and ruthlessly develop materials that provide real proof of what a donor’s dollars will do.
2. Inspire with stories. Materials should be rich with stories, photos and testimonies of lives changed because of their giving.

So, I went looking at a couple of organizations near and dear to my heart: the American Lung Association (my sister has chronic asthma) and the American Heart Association (my father had heart disease).

When I visited the American Lung Association’s Web site, I tried hard to find proof of how donor dollars are helping people like my little sis.

I failed.

The landing page told me that the association is making a difference with its online Flu Clinic Locator … how it was mourning Paul Newman … and that Kristi Yamaguchi is this year’s Christmas Seals chairperson.

I got excited when I scrolled down and saw “Living with Lung Disease: Stories of Hope,” but when I clicked, all I got was a place where I could login and share my story.

Where’s the inspiration?

In contrast, in the center of the American Heart Association’s site is a picture of sports celebrity Randy Jackson telling his story of diabetes. Click, and you go immediately to more stories of people living with diabetes. Back on the home page, you’ll find a link called “Stories of Hope” that actually links to complete stories and compelling photos – no login required.

Ah! There’s inspiration – and motivation to give.

P.S. I don’t favor one of these organizations over the other, and I haven’t worked for either one. I wish both of them the best of luck in their fundraising efforts.

Texting: What’s so uncool about being a good speller?

My toughest challenge as a writer these days is texting. Not because I don’t grasp the technology or understand the convenience — I do.

I just can’t force myself to misspell words.

My cell phone doesn’t make typing easy, so entire sentences take effort. Where my 14-year-old would type “wht RU waring 2 movie?” I’d text, “What are you wearing to the movie?”, conjunctions and all.

“Mom, by the time you do all that, I’d be on my third or fourth text.” (Big eye roll.)

“At least no one would think I don’t know how to spell ‘wearing.’”

“You are so weird.”

As a copywriter and PR practitioner, I’ve spent decades trying to get people to use clear language in their communications, to never assume their audience knows what they’re talking about, and to avoid jargon like the plague.

Textspeak goes against all of that.

We didn’t have this problem with e-mail. Users were taught that messages wouldn’t always be received the way they were intended. A concise message can seem clipped. All caps reads like shouting. Be polite.

Textspeak is this generation’s secret code. They don’t want to be widely understood. They gloat over their shared abbreviations. It makes them cool.

I’m taking a stand against textspeak. Enough adults can’t spell already; let’s not breed a generation who spells without apostrophes and writes “nite” instead of “night.”

That’s the kind of laxity that brought us words like “ginormous.”

P.S. My favorite online dictionary is m-w.com. You can hear pronunciations and play word games — tell your boss it’s your daily vocabulary lesson.

For the more philanthropic, FreeRice.com lets you help feed the world while you learn new words — even more justification for that boss of yours.

Keep designers and writers in the same room

Creatives working together

Have you ever been in one of those team-building exercises where the group’s split into two teams and given the same project but with different parameters? For example, the audience for Team A’s widget will be males age 18-24, while Team B’s widget is aimed at women 35-49. It’s a great way to force people to think outside their own experience.

This must have been what happened with a recent Eliza Jennings Senior Care Network annual report.

Team A – the design team – must have been told, “Our audience is the children of elderly parents, so show our residents looking happy, healthy, energetic and playful.”

Team B – the writers – must have heard, “Our audience is the accountants of the children of elderly parents. Forget about the residents: Brag about the company.”

The disconnect between warm photos of residents and jargon-filled copy in this report is harsh and jarring. Next to a great photo of an older couple sitting in front of a white picket fence holding hands is this tidbit: “As part of our mission to deliver more customized care and services, Eliza Jennings Senior Care Network actively shifted its focus to concentrate on growth strategies, some of which included organizational changes designed to convert existing resources into new growth opportunities.”

“Core business,” “significant growth potential” and “expanding our revenue base” are on the page with a photo of a woman dancing with an elderly man who has to wear a helmet to prevent injury.

“Transformational change” pops up twice within three paragraphs. At least this phrase is on the page with a man using an exercise bike; maybe he’s making his own transformation.

Ten pages of financials and donor lists followed.

If I had only looked at the pictures, I’d have thought Eliza Jennings was a wonderful place for my mother. Once I read the copy, though, I was confused at best and put off at worst. This organization missed a chance to tell its story through the stories of those residents featured in full color.

Were they just window dressing? What was your reaction?

Putting our best foot (and pen) forward

Mention “civic engagement” at a party, and people are apt to suddenly need to freshen their drinks. Start an article with “Civic engagement is important,” and your readers will (literally or symbolically) do the same.

Instead, start your article by describing a man who coached a basketball game in a three-piece suit – and no shoes. Tell why he did it: to show people what life is like every day for millions of African children. Share that though he was hoping to get 40,000 donated pairs of shoes, he got 125,000. Mention that this small act touched the hearts of people around the world.

Suddenly, no one’s going to the bar. And your readers are halfway into your article before they even realize it.

This is how Ric Burrous illustrated what civic engagement means to faculty and students at IUPUI, a college campus in downtown Indianapolis (and, I’m proud to say, my alma mater). Deep into the story, Burrous gets to mention the school’s service-driven community programs, no doubt making professors, volunteers, alumni, donors and students happy and significantly raising awareness of these programs, just as a communications department should.

But without pulling his readers in with the fascinating and well-told story of the “barefoot coach,” few people would have read the rest.

Nice job, Ric.

…Our Best Foot Forward by Ric Burrous

North x East’s 50 Most Influential Female Bloggers

I can’t help but share something like this:

Find out who the North x East blog thinks are the 50 Most Influential Female Bloggers. You get a 30-second rundown, a brief “Why She Matters” and great links for each blogger.

Bravo!

Don’t say you love me if you don’t mean it

(In the following post, the Internet/cable TV provider names
have been changed to protect the irritating.)

When cable TV/Internet provider Kimcust took over Invision in my area a couple of months ago, my husband and I had to (1) change our e-mail address, (2) notify all our contacts of the new address, and (3) change our address on every auto-pay account, e-newsletter subscription and Web site registration we had. Not unexpected, but kind of a pain nevertheless.

Before we could finish, Kimcust took away our auto-pay option and raised our rates.

This week, we received a letter:

“As one of our valued customers, we owe it to you to let you know when you’re missing out on something important. And you are. You’re missing out on savings. Big savings!”

The letter encourages us to add a Kimcust service by promising to save us 30% off our current phone service provider.

Let’s recap.

(1) Kimcust took away some of our free time by forcing us to write checks to pay our bills each month.

(2) Kimcust raised our rates at the same time it took over our service.

(3) Now, Kimcust wants to save us money by having us pay the company more money.

In reality, the letter points out how little Kimcust knows about us, its “valued” customer. Kimcust has never answered any e-mail we’ve sent, never asked us if we’re a happy customer, never asked us how much my current provider is charging us and makes it extraordinarily difficult to reach someone by phone – never, in other words, treated us as a valued customer.

Does your organization write letters like this?

The marketing department can’t exist in a vacuum. Before you send your next direct-mail piece or fundraising letter, read it from your customer’s or prospect’s perspective. Check with your call centers and review your client satisfaction surveys. Look at your renewal rates.

Make sure your organization has treated your customers as valuable, because simply calling them valuable won’t make them feel so.

When is a space like a speed bump?

Neighborhood moms and dads may profess to appreciate speed bumps, but once they’re out of their own cul-de-sacs, they curse the forced slow-downs as much as the rest of us. Likewise, when a ‘speed bump’ makes me stumble over an otherwise smooth bit of reading, I feel just as jarred and aggravated.

I’ve begun encountering such a bump in a perfectly good word with jolting frequency, and I’m getting whiplash. See if you can pick out the culprit in this example:

“If you can not attend the meeting, please let me know.”

Did you hit the brakes over that needless space in “cannot”? I don’t know who started making writers doubt themselves, but it must have been someone of significance, because even the most talented of my colleagues are now inserting a space where no space need ever have appeared.

I started to doubt myself, in fact. Maybe I missed some trend, where “cannot” joined the ranks of things your old English teacher taught you that no longer apply. However, I am blissfully happy to learn this isn’t the case. “Cannot” as one word is still correct, according to:

The University of Sussex, which says:
The negative of can is cannot (one word), not can not (two words).
I cannot do X = I am unable to do X.
I can not do X = I am able not to do X.

Online, someone asked the Chicago Manual of Style experts:
“Clearly, the word ‘cannot’ is in the dictionary as one word. But does this mean that it is incorrect to say ‘can no’” as two words? This controversy is raging in my office and has some people very upset. What are your thoughts?”

Chicago answered thus:

“Sometimes you can not say something more easily than you can say it. In the preceding sentence, ‘can not’ is accurate and ‘cannot’ wouldn’t make sense. Constructions like that, however, are often confusing or ambiguous, in which case rephrasing is wise, e.g., ‘Sometimes it’s easier not to say something than to say it.’”

OK, that’s a bit hard to follow, but Chicago’s point is this: “can not” as two words means “capable of not doing something,” which is quite different from cannot do (incapable of doing) something.

Merriam Webster lists one form of the word: cannot, with no space. “Can not” isn’t even listed as a variant.

The Associated Press Stylebook simply has one word for this entry: Cannot.
(No explanation needed. It’s obvious, isn’t it?)

I encourage you to go back to bravely using “cannot” as one word without a space when you mean “can’t.” Anything that makes your reader hesitate over what you really meant to say is getting in the way of your message.

And I cannot stand it anymore. I’m incapable of standing it. I can’t stand it. Can you?

 

 

Strunk’s “Elements” is easy listening on CD

Every writer needs six books on her shelf:

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White.
The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer.
The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists by Arthur Plotnik.
A dictionary (I prefer Merriam-Webster).
A thesaurus.
The Associated Press Style Manual (or the Chicago Manual of Style if your employer demands it).

You don’t generally read these over a cup of coffee on the front porch, so their content is a bit challenging to take in. But thanks to Recorded Books, you can now listen to one of them – The Elements of Style – on CD, narrated by award-winning writer Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes.

McCourt’s Irish accent and thoughtful rendition animate E.B. White’s first-person introduction. White (the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little) met Strunk while his student at Cornell University, where the professor used his own textbook, The Elements of Style, for the class. White rediscovered Strunk and his book years later, after he was getting paid to be a writer himself (for The New Yorker). McCourt’s voice reflects the pride White felt in being asked to edit his learned professor’s masterwork.

McCourt’s voice resonates with credibility as he pronounces Strunk’s grammar rules. “Omit needless words!” he intones. “Use the active voice. Avoid a succession of loose sentences.” The essay even made me chuckle a couple of times – a feat few grammar books can boast of.

The reading gets a bit drier once McCourt moves into the chapters and examples, but not by much. The benefit to listening is that you can’t skim through anything, so you don’t miss anything.

After a while, you start to get it.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

I borrowed my copy of this wonderful audio book from the library. Get yours and sharpen your own writing skills.

 

 

Hit your audience where they live

When you think of driving right now, what do you think of?

The price of gas.

It’s in the news every day. Presidential candidates are discussing it. People are altering travel plans to minimize it. Airlines are going under because of it.

What if someone told you that the simple act of putting some air in your tires is like saving 10 cents a gallon on gas?

Actually, I don’t know the correct figure and can’t even estimate it. I’ll bet the Rubber Manufacturers Association can, though.

So during last week’s National Tire Safety Week, in all the RMA’s press releases and consumer materials, why wasn’t that the message?

Instead, the big news was that 25 states issued proclamations or statements supporting the tire industry’s motorist education efforts, and that an RMA survey showed that only one in seven drivers check their tire pressure.

I’m not arguing with the need to check your tire pressure. Under-inflated tires contribute to hundreds of fatalities and thousands of injuries each year – important information to share with consumers. But first you have to catch your audience’s attention, and there’s no better way to do that than to start where they are, with what affects them immediately and personally.