Writing with Confidence that’s Contagious to Your Reader

How confident should mission-based writing be? You need to make your reader feel confident in your work and in you, even when you may be writing about things you are unsure of, like what you can do with funding you’re not at all sure you will be awarded. How do you balance your fear of over-promising with the need to promise enough to entice participation and support? Does it sound like vain assumption to write like you are sure your work will be funded, or does it sound insecure to write like you’re not sure? If you come off either too insecure or too vain, then no matter how well you demonstrate the merits of your work, you will turn people off and won’t be successful.

Let’s start by thinking about what it looks like to write too humbly. How many words or phrases do you see in the example below that express uncertainty?

Birch Park is just a small wildlife refuge with a few educational programs, but we believe that if you decide to fund us, we should be able to maintain our paths and clean up litter every week or so. We will also try to start keeping records of some of the species in the park, so that we might be able to tell if their populations decline, and then see if we can help them.

Click to page 2 below to see the answer and keep reading the article.

Mission-Based Writing as Creative Writing

Many people see grant writing and copywriting as necessarily dry and boring, but they’re actually most effective if you use your creative writing skills. The more you can bring your work to life, the more persuasive and memorable your writing will be. And one of the best ways to bring your work to life is to use sensory language that makes readers imagine what it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels like.

Here’s an example of a purely factual description:

Suzie’s House provides beds, meals, and fun activities for youth experiencing homelessness. We have adult mentors facilitate the group activities, and the youth and mentors cook and eat all meals together. We even have a foosball table.

And here’s another description that’s about the same length, but feels completely different:

Suzie’s House finds youth sleeping on hard park benches in the cold, and brings them inside for cozy beds, foosball, and laughter. Youth and adult mentors connect while cooking and eating favorite meals together, such as pizza and spaghetti.

Try looking at your writing and thinking of where you can add sensory details that will make your readers imagine the challenges you address, how wonderful it feels to participate in your work, and how much better life can be afterward.

This Tiny Word Can Do Wonders
for Your Work

The way you describe your organization or business defines how people connect to it – or don’t. Your word choice matters, even down to what pronoun you use.

You may be thinking, “But we don’t have a choice; an organization is an abstract noun, so grammatically we have to use it.”

Not so.

An organization is also a group of people. As a member of the group, you can use the pronouns we, our, and us. Or if you are a solopreneur, you can use I and me.

4 Ways to Make Your Brand Story Compelling

The word “brand” probably makes most of us think of sterile corporate logos, but in my last Flight Log article, I wrote about how a good brand story actually advances your work by adding human warmth to an overly commercialized and anonymous world. In this Flight Log, we’ll look at four traits that can make your brand story so compelling that your audience not only remembers it for years, but wants to connect with and support your business or organization.

Succeed through Storytelling:
How to Advance Your Work with a Brand Story

There’s a lot of hype about brand stories, but can they really advance your work?

Take my own business is an example: most of you know that I started from scratch in a new field and a new region where I hardly knew anyone, and I quickly created a thriving business … but you may not realize that my primary business-building tool was (and is) my brand story. Many of you first met me at a cafe for tea or just at your office, and I began by telling you how I got to be sitting with you. It felt (and was) genuine, not sales-y, and it got many of you interested in hiring me. That was my brand story.

Endings Matter:
How to Leave Behind the Right Impression

Endings linger. They remain in our minds after we look away and move on to check email or cook dinner. Have you ever read a book or watched a movie that was great right up until its ending left you feeling completely let down? Most of us have, and I’d be willing to bet that whenever you remember it, you think, “It would have been good, but it had a bad ending.” Yet how much attention do you pay to the ending of the marketing or outreach materials, grants or articles you write to advance the great work you do? Here are two tips on writing good endings.

Make People Like Your Organization
Before They Walk in the Door

You want people to feel connected with your organization, to see it as a supportive friend or mentor and feel a sense of loyalty to it… even if they don’t yet have warm relationships with staff members. Writing is often your organization’s first introduction to prospective clients, donor, or grant funders. How can they feel connected with you before they have even met you?

The answer is simple to understand, but more difficult to achieve: humanize your organization by giving it its own personality when you write about it.

How to Write About What Went Wrong

You know you didn’t measure up. Your nonprofit didn’t meet its objectives, or you made a mistake on your customer’s order, or maybe someone even complained to your boss about you. No one’s perfect; it may have been an honest mistake, or there may have been unforeseen circumstances that transformed a simple task into something like trying to fly a kite on a windless day, or sitting on the ground in a perfect breeze, muttering and grumbling as you picked at the knotted mass of the kite’s tail. Whatever it was, something went wrong and you need to write to a stakeholder about it. What do you do?

4 Simple Steps
To Creating a Voice that Connects with Readers

In this world of anonymous crowds overflowing with written chatter until we can hardly pick out a single voice, let alone remember it, people respond to your writing only when they feel a connection with you. To earn their attention, your written voice must show real personality, so they feel another human voice speaking to them – one they want to hear. If you actually sit down and think about what you want your voice to convey and how to convey it, the process is simple and the benefit huge – people will listen.

Two Little Words that Create Community

How you frame your work in speech and writing can make all the difference. If your messaging fosters a sense of community, people will want to be involved. Certain words can subtly and powerfully undermine the atmosphere of equality and mutual support on which real community is based, while other words just as quietly and compellingly boost community feeling, transforming how people feel and what they do. Replacing just two tiny, common words can dramatically shift both your messaging and your results, so that people feel eager and gratified to be part of your community and support you.