Make your fundraising materials more inviting and easier to read, so more people can join you in your life-changing mission.
Your work is important! But that doesn’t mean people will read your emails, blog posts and newsletters. Sorry. It’s the truth.
Why don’t people read all that wonderful content your organization puts out?
- We’re tired
- We don’t think there’s something of value for us
- It’s boring (think story instead of reports)
- It’s too long or too difficult
In this episode, I tackle the “too difficult” problem, with simple tips to make your content easy for donors to read.
According to the Literacy Project, about half of Americans read at an 8th-grade level or lower. If your writing is above an 8th grade reading level (some would say grade 6-7 max), you are not communicating with your audience as well as you could.
Even people who read at a higher level will appreciate a story that’s easy to read. Great writers embrace simplicity. Novels are generally written at a grade 5-7 level, while non-fiction titles come in at grade 8-9.
Your donors are giving you their time and attention. Don’t make them spend that time wading through complex prose. Your writing can be beautiful and easy to read.
Reading level is affected by:
- length of sentences
- word choice
- grammar
- content structure
- active voice vs passive voice
- wordiness
- use of adverbs
Tools to help simplify your writing
Word will give you a reading level score and Flesch Reading Ease score. Find out how to locate these tools on the Microsoft support site. I like to use the Hemingway App. Hemingway highlights hard-to-read sentences and words that make your writing more difficult to read. This highlighting action lets you go straight to the problem areas, and shows you in real time how your changes affect readability.
After Hemingway, I like to read what I’ve written out loud. You can also get Word to read to you. When you’re listening, you can hear mistakes. You can hear when the writing gets monotonous or repetitive. Once you have that done, go through once more for spelling and punctuation. Now you’re on your way to communicating clearly with your audience!