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.

How Far Can You Take Readers
in Just 1 or 2 Sentences?

You want to bring readers to a specific perspective on your cause, right? Let’s imagine that perspective as a gorgeous view from a mountain peak. You describe it perfectly, instantaneously transporting your readers to this place where the planet is laid out before them like a wrinkled blanket, and you say, “My work is to guide people up this mountain! Isn’t it amazing?”

You wait with bated breath, while they squint at the sun, scratch their mosquito bites, yawn, and finally reply, “Yeah, it’s nice. When’s lunch?” And your heart falls into your hiking boots. Your writing has skillfully depicted the most incredible heights achieved through all of your hard labor, but your readers understand nothing about the mountain beneath their feet.

How Your Writing Can
Build Community to Change the World

To truly change our cultural practices and values, we need to bring people together to share and live a new vision. We need to create community. This Flight Log will look at the need for community on three levels – societal, individual, and organizational – and how you can structure your messaging to address all three.

3 Ways to Inspire People with Your Writing

Writing is powerful. Even a single sentence or phrase can instantly uplift or deflate our spirits. To propel our mission-based work forward, we need to use this power strategically. There are times to connect people with the sadness, fear, or anger that are indispensable for truly understanding a problem and being spurred into action to solve it. Generally, though, the best way to make the most positive difference is to leave people feeling inspired by the time they finish reading your writing.