Free copywriting guide for fundraisers
Howard Lake | 24 February 2005 | News
Direct marketing creative agency Flying Kite is offering a free copywriting guide to help fundraisers, available to read or download from their website.
The free guide, “How to improve your fundraising letter in ten simple steps,” has been written for people within charities who are involved in writing or critiquing fundraising letters.
Included in the tips are helpful examples which illustrate the point being made. For example, Fyling Kite suggest avoiding using “I”, “me”, “my”, “we”, or “our” too much. Instead these should be turned round to “you” or “your”.
Advertisement
They then give the example sentence: “We want to provide aid to people suffering in Basingstoke.” They suggest making this more reader-focused by changing it to “You can help us provide aid to the people suffering in Basingstoke.” Alternatively you could rewrite it as a question: “Will you help provide aid to people suffering in Basingstoke?”
The guide is realistic and not overly prescriptive: “Yes, you can break the rules – but shouldn’t you know what they are first before you do?” it suggests.
The guide has been written by Jon
Ireland. “Creating a powerful and emotive fundraising letter isn’t easy,” he said. “But thankfully there are copywriting techniques we can learn to improve our persuasive writing skills.”
The Flying Kite site includes a range of other free guides, quizzes and glossaries on copywriting and direct marketing.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.