How to Bring Your Work to Life with Participants’ Words

You need potential participants or clients to see why they should jump up and run to you, and you need potential donors and funders to see why they should give as much as they can. You can describe all of the benefits in perfect detail, but that won’t make readers imagine what it feels like to receive them. So what will?

Quotations! Never underestimate the power of a real person’s words. Direct quotations from participants bring in human voices that the reader can hear and can’t help relating to, voices that sound like people they know.

How to Organize Your Writing: Quick Tips
that Illustrate Their Own Points

Most people probably don’t think very deeply about this topic, but the choice you make will affect your readers’ experience of your writing. Whether you want to organize complex items or emphasize simple ones, and whether you want your reader to pay attention to every one of a long list of items or to compound them all together, your choice of when and how to use lists will either aid or thwart the impression you actually want to make. The following quick guide includes a bullet list to describe when you might want to use a list, a numbered list to illustrate when you might want to use a bullet or numbered list, a sentence-form list to explore when you might want to use one of those, and a non-list paragraph to discuss when you might be best off not using a list at all.

Be Concise and Show All
the Positive Impact You Make

You want all of the people who benefit from or assist work – or who might do either one – to understand the full positive impact of all you do. It is crucial to quickly and effectively impart this understanding to your actual and potential clients, constituents, referral sources, staff, volunteers, donors, funders, investors, and promoters. If they all know how great the work is, you will get more and better suited recipients, more and better quality volunteer and staff work, more and larger financial and in-kind contributions, and more and better quality promotion.

Yet all too often nonprofits and mission-based businesses express only the most basic and obvious ways that they make a difference, and don’t paint a vivid picture of the depth and breadth of benefit they provide. Frequently this omission is in the name of conciseness, yet it is possible to concisely describe each level of impact, and it is very worth the space, for it may be the most powerful way to inspire people to come receive or give as much as they can. A concise bullet or numbered list of every level of impact is an excellent piece to use in websites, brochures, donor solicitation letters, social media posts, grant proposals, and more. It is quick and easy to read, and the list format emphasizes that there are many levels of positive impact that people might not immediately see.

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.

A Quick Tip to Make Readers Feel Close
to Your Work

Small words can make a big difference.  There are many pairs of words that you might use interchangeably, but their differences could markedly change how well your readers connect with what you write.

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.

The Most Common Mistake I See:
Can You Guess it? Are You Making It?

Whether I am drawing from previously written materials to write new content, or editing copy drafted by my clients, I see many people’s writing. In this Flight Log, I will discuss the most common mistake I see, both because it’s possible you are making it, and because your competitors probably are. Excelling in areas where your competitors are weak is a great way to stand out from the crowd and get the attention you want.

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.