By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
In today’s mail you receive two pieces of mail, a letter from someone you know, and a brochure.
Which one will you read first? Which one will you read all the way to the end? Likely the letter, right?
A letter is a piece of correspondence sent from one person to another. It’s personal.
Fundraising letters are no different. They communicate on paper what the sender would say if she was talking with you face to face or over the phone. The difference between a fundraising letter appeal and a face-to-face appeal is that you read the former but listen to the other.
This is the main reason your direct mail appeal letters need to look like letters and not like pages taken from a newsletter, brochure or annual report.
I’m talking in particular about photographs. Photographs have their place in your marketing and communications literature, and on your website. But they do not belong in your fundraising letters. Not in the body of the letter, anyway.
You can put a photo at the top of the letter as part of the letterhead. That’s often effective. But you must leave photos out of the rest of the letter. Photos placed in amongst the body copy, with the text wrapping around the images, immediately make your letter look informational rather than urgent.
That means your donors will be more likely to lay them aside after reading a paragraph or two. Letters that look like they are designed to inform can be put down. But letters that read like they are urgent demand to be read.
Images give your letter the look of a newsletter story, or a description of your services, the kind you’d find in one of your promotional brochures.
Photos tend to distract your readers. Photos take your reader’s eye away from the letter and slow the reader down. And since the goal of every letter you mail is to persuade the donor to read the letter and make a donation, anything that gets in the way of that aim is a bad idea.
I realize the temptation you face. I know how tempted you are to include a photo or two on page one, and another on page two, photos that present your case for support visually, photos that show your staff and volunteers hard at work making the world a better place. These photos belong in your donor newsletters, not your fundraising letters.
The final problem with photos and images in the body of your appeal letters is that they make your letters look like they are being mass-mailed to thousands. Which they are, of course. But you must avoid emphasizing that. A “Dear Friend” letter filled with photos and signed by a committee looks impersonal. But a “Dear Alan” letter with no photos, signed by someone I admire and trust, looks personal.
And the more personal your appeal letters are, the more money you’ll raise.
Learn More
Read my book Mail Superiority: How to Run a Profitable Annual Direct Mail Fundraising Program. Learn the proven, step-by-step process for raising funds and friends cost effectively, year after year. Available in paperback and as an e-book.
Very interesting insight. Let me think out loud…images make the piece feel more informational than personal, and can slow the donor down as she reads through the request for support. Makes sense – I’d love to see a study done on this and whether all donors react in the same way. Would Gen X’ers respond differently to images than baby boomers? How about new versus established donors? I also wonder about different learning styles…perhaps visual people take more away from an image than folks with other learning approaches?
I still feel a real pull to limit text and let images tell the story. As they say, an image is worth 1,000 words. With the amount of mail (electronic or otherwise) we are exposed to daily, I can’t help but want to rise above the “clutter” and tell our story differently. I wonder about innovative ways to use relevant images while maintaining the personalization factor. Thanks for your entry…it certainly has caused me to reflect on our direct mail approach for this year.