Sparkle your online asks with emotional hooks
File under: Emotion-loaded website "giving" pages
When the "donor-curious" show up...
How do you make them feel?
I've volunteered to help write a new case for support. It's for an amazing charity based in South Africa, as it attempts to make up the heavy loss of USAID funding last year.
Foreign aid has covered the costs since 2011 for a well-run, rural healthcare program, that serve hundreds of thousands in remote locations. It's made a real difference across 17 countries so far.
What's not to love, right?
Here's the giving page they now offer their online visitors "above the fold":*
I had 2 reactions when I first saw it:
(1) Wow. Nice job! That ad copy ain't bad. Concise. Clear. Reasonable. Puts a focus on "you." Follows the sacred dictum: "easy to understand problem, easy to understand solution," as The Better Fundraising Co. preaches.
(2) All of that goodness...utterly murdered by a designer's uninformed
typographic choices.
I wrote Sue Paget, CEO, Rotary Family Health Days, a nonprofit with just over $1 million in annual income:
Your current giving page makes its pitch using white type on a dark blue background, and centered—two typographic choices that reduce "readability" and skimming, so let's not do that again.
She instantly agreed. (Be still my heart.) Sue also said: "Tom - I love what you have written - it is refreshing and relatable." (Double swoon. This is an actual charity boss talking. If we all had bosses like Sue, no one would ever quit fundraising.)
FY consideration: Our rewrite
The text on the existing giving page is high grade and functional: quite reasonable, with urgency. Jolly good. The rewrite steals as much as it can, with a light dusting of added emotional hooks.
Fresh from the oven:
Act now, before we shrink.
Your help today makes real medical check-ups possible ... in faraway places, for patients of all ages and complaints.
USAID? Gone. Without that—without your help instead—thousands of families in remote areas of Africa may soon lose access to free medical check-ups by trained professionals, organized by us, Rotary Family Health Days.
For families living in rural areas, the nearest clinic is miles away...and its costs are out of reach anyway. So: millions of African families go without much healthcare, all their (shortened, undiagnosed, untreated) lives.
Your support bridges this gap, ensuring modern medicine comes free to remote communities. We've worked in 17 nations so far, thanks to generous support and true believers...bringing teeth-to-toe screenings and medical pros right to rural doorsteps.
We'll heal more. For that, we need you.
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Pop quiz: Howz your emote IQ?
By my count, there are at least 34 emotional triggers micro-seeded across the rewrite above; with 3 of them buried in the lead photo alone. Statistics, BTW, do not count as emotional triggers in this instance, since our specific target audience is individuals, not grantmakers.
Read it again. Slowly. Looking for those tiny moments. How many do you spot?
* Because "below the fold" is where you put messages you don't care if anyone reads. Heat maps teach us that almost no one on a desktop screen scrolls past the fold. Now you know! Phew....
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