Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

I asked whether this blog’s readers find that they write too much, too little, or the right amount in their first drafts, and about 60% answered “too much.” Here are six tips for editing your first drafts when they are too long.

1. Drop the first few sentences. Lots of people (including me) need to warm up as they start writing and don’t really get to the point until a few sentences in. Warming up is good for working out, but not for writing at work. Get right to the point.

2. Jettison the background information. We often assume that people need more history than they really do. Sum up any critical background in one sentence and tell the readers where to find additional background or to contact you if they need it.

3. Focus on what you want from the reader. Are you expecting the reader to take a particular action based on your memo or whatever it is you are writing? If so, focus your draft around that. What do you want them to do? Why should they do it? How should they do it? Cut everything else that doesn’t contribute to moving that reader to action.

4. Watch for tangents. It’s easy to stray from the main point. Watch for tangents and babbling streams of consciousness. Turn those sections of your draft into separate memos or articles.

5. Cut the the wordy phrases, redundancies, cliches, etc. Shorter is better. Cut out all the words that don’t contribute meaning. You’ll find lots of tips on writing more clearly and concisely here.

6. Read it out loud, then cut any parts you read quickly or skipped over. If you find yourself zooming through sections when you read something out loud, it likely means that section isn’t that important and can be edited out.

Do you have any favorite tips for editing your own work? Leave them here in a comment.

Whether it’s a board meeting, a seminar, or a conference, the events your organization hosts or attends can provide great fodder for newsletter articles — if you highlight the most important points and forget about the rest.When you start writing an event summary, you may be tempted to regurgitate the agenda with a few extra details sprinkled in. We’ve all read these kinds of articles and have been bored stiff by them. “John opened the workshop and welcomed the speakers. Fred talked about ABC. We broke for lunch. After lunch, Jane talked about XYZ. It was a successful workshop.” There’s no value for your newsletter readers here.

Instead, pick just a few highlights from the event. Think of the event as a whole and pick the best resources or information from the day. What three things did you learn? What three points surprised you? What would someone who attended the event go back and tell her co-workers around the water cooler? What points would she highlight to the boss, to emphasize that the registration fee was money well spent? If you feel strongly that you need to mention every speaker, pick the single most important or memorable point from each presentation and focus only on that point.

Leave all the boring, mundane and pro forma details out of your article. Welcoming addresses are typically devoid of real substance and don’t need to be mentioned (unless they were given by a very big name). We also don’t need to know what was served for lunch. It’s not unusual for at least one speaker to bomb, and if you were bored in person, imagine how bored your newsletter readers will be if you try to summarize that person’s entire presentation.

Also think about different article formats that you could use to summarize the event, rather than straight reporting. Try “Top Ten Insights from the Workshop” or “How To (Insert Task): Lessons Learned at the Workshop.”

You can wrap up the article by mentioning speakers you didn’t highlight and suggesting ways that newsletter readers can get more information on the topic. For example, if you hosted the event, ask speakers to provide electronic copies of their presentations or handouts for your website. You can also ask readers to mark their calendars for the next event.

I’m interested in hiring a handful of freelance writers/editors who are familiar with InDesign, Dreamweaver, Wordpress and/or Joomla to help me get a number of exciting projects off the back burner. You’ll find the details here. Help me find some good help and I’ll be able to double the amount of resources I can get out to nonprofit communicators.

Copyblogger is showing people how he would rewrite some of their blog headlines, including notes on why he made the changes he did. I do a similar exercise in my newsletter writing courses and it’s always fun. So, let’s try it here. Either leave a comment or send an email to me at kivi *AT* writing911.com. Provide a link to a newsletter article or blog headline you’d like to see rewritten. If you don’t have the article online, email me the original headline and the lead paragraph.

A good newsletter will have several different types of articles in it, and some formats are harder to write than others. Which type of newsletter article is toughest for you to write? Take the poll, or add your own answer. You can also leave a comment on this post. In a week or two, I’ll provide some tips on how to write whichever article you, my readers, say is the hardest.

You realize that it is time to publish your newsletter or that your website hasn’t been updated in months, and the dread sweeps over you. “What are we going to write about this time?” you wonder.

You can take much of the anxiety out of the publishing process by creating an editorial calendar for each of your publications. You can use them for newsletters, websites, blogs and anything else that you publish regularly. An editorial calendar can also help you stay focused on your audience and your goals for the publication. As an editorial project manager for several clients and for my own publications, I simply can’t live without this tool.

It’s easy to create an editorial calendar. Create a table in a Word or Excel document. Across the top of the first row, list your newsletter publication dates. For websites, if you wanted to shoot for monthly updates, list each month. For a more frequent publication schedule (e.g. for blogs), you could list each week.

In the first column, list the categories of articles you include in each edition of your newsletter. For a website, you could list the various sections. For your blog, you can list the main categories or tags that you use.

Then start filling in the grid with a few notes on the article topics.

Here is a sample editorial calendar for a local animal shelter newsletter. I’ve only listed two issues here, but I would normally try to work on four to five issues at a time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Every Issue: Pets Available for Adoption, In-Kind Donations Wish List, List of Donors Since Last Issue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You don’t need all the details worked out in advance. Notice for example how I list TBD - to be decided - in the Adoption Profile section. This would give me the flexibility to pick which family I wanted to highlight when I started to write the newsletter, while reminding me that I needed to alternate between a dog and cat adoption.

Some sections of your newsletter may be repeated with some quick and easy updates that don’t require much research or writing, so you can list those at the bottom of the chart as I have with the “In Every Issue” heading.

Charting your articles like this will also help you see where shifts are needed. For example, I can see that the Spring issue is currently “dog” heavy. I might decide to switch the order of the Adoption Profile or the Donor Profile to make it more balanced. This kind of juggling is much easier to do with an editorial calendar in front of you.

ALT tags are the bits of text that you can attach to images on webpages and in email messages and e-newsletters. As I explained yesterday, using the ALT tag is essential when including images in email campaigns and e-newsletters, because if the people reading your email have image blocking turned on, they won’t see the image, but they will likely see the ALT text. ALT tags are also needed by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers.

ALT stands for alternative — this text will be shown as an alternative to showing the image itself. Many people advocate that you simply describe what is in the photo, especially for ALT tags on websites. But ALT tags can also be used as marketing text, and this approach makes sense for email where you are most likely trying to encourage some type of action on the reader’s part.

Here are a few tips for your email ALT tags.

1) Always use them! You don’t need them on decorative items like bullets, but use them on all photographs and artwork of significance.

2) Keep them short, but not too short. Don’t use “Logo” when you can use “Smith Community Library Logo.” Shoot for three to seven words.

3) Use words that are meaningful to your readers. Treat writing your ALT tags like you do headlines and captions. Use keywords that will grab your readers’ attention. Don’t say “Kittens at the shelter” when you can say “Kittens ready to be adopted today at the shelter.”

4) Encourage readers to turn images on. Your newsletter will look much better and be more effective if people see the images you placed there. You can use the ALT tag to encourage them to turn on the images. For example, ALT tags like “Turn on images to see why Jim is smiling” or “Turn on images to see what your donations purchased last month” give the reader an incentive. A tag like this on every image would be annoying, but using them sparingly may convince some of your readers to take that extra step to see your images.

Last week I received an invitation to a fundraiser from a local American Red Cross chapter, and it really turned me off. Here is what part of the invitation said verbatim (except for the italics I added).

Fine Art Auction

The Auction will showcase 5 artists, and we will have a live auction with a variety of mediums: paintings, mosaics, hand made jewelry, pottery, wood turning, Photography and much, much more. Hors d’ oeuvres and cash wine bar.

Contact: a phone number, $25.00 adm.

Saturday March 17, 2007
6 pm - 10 pm limited reservations

The event location and address

I realize that as a professional writer and editor, I notice bad writing more than most people, but the sloppy style of this invitation is a real problem for me as a potential donor. If they can’t go through the trouble of producing a well-written invitation for what is supposed to be their major fundraiser, how careless would they be with my contribution?

So what’s wrong here? Lots.

–5 artists should be five artists. No matter what style guide you use, none of them recommend that you use a numeral in this case.

–Five artists are showcased, but there are more than five art forms. I suspect that more than five artists are donating to the silent auction, and I’d like to know whether that’s correct or not. If it is, what does it mean to be “showcased”?

–Inconsistent capitalization. Why is Auction capitalized and live auction not? Why is Photography capitalized, but the other art forms not? None of these words should be capitalized in my opinion, but it should be all or none.

–Hand made should be handmade. Look it up in the dictionary.

–They almost got bonus points for spelling hors d’oeuvres correctly, which is butchered all the time, but they put a space after the d’ where it doesn’t belong.

–A name or organization should be listed with the phone number. Am I calling the Red Cross or the place that is hosting?

–What is with $25.00 adm.? I assume this means that admission is $25, but why abbreviate it to adm.? $25.00 per person would be so much better.

–The date. They need a comma between Saturday and March. Saturday, March 17, 2007.

–The time and reservations. First, these should be on two separate lines, but more importantly, what does “limited reservations” mean? Can I only come if I RSVP? If so, by when do I need to RSVP? Or does this mean that a limited number of tables can be reserved while the rest are first-come, first-served that night? The invitation should be explicit about that.

A poorly photocopied insert with sponsor logos was tucked inside. You can tell that they put four or six on one page and cut them out. You can also tell that they held too many sheets at once when wielding the scissors, because one edge is all frayed, the cut is crooked, and the sponsor logos are off to one side and lopsided. Don’t get me started on the graphic design of the invitation.

And here’s another issue: March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day. It seems like that would be worth mentioning in some way. I can think of several possible taglines revolving around “luck” that would have worked for this.

Typos happen to the best of us (I missed two bad ones myself last week). Honest mistakes slip by from time to time. I hate the Grammar Gestapo too and am not trying to join them with this post. If I’d spotted only one or two problems, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But an invitation like this, with so many problems in so little space, is just pitiful.

I’m sure many people would defend the person who produced it with the refrain that all leaders of small organizations sing from time to time: “I’m one person. I can only do so much. I can’t be good at everything. Cut me some slack!” I hear ya, sister. But that only takes you so far.

If you aren’t good at writing or design, find a volunteer or board member who can do it for you. Or take an extra fifteen minutes to do it right yourself. Or hire a freelancer. When it counts, like on your major fundraising event materials, you need to get it right. Present yourself as an amateur and you are an amateur. I give money to professionals.

P.S. If all this looks too familiar, check out my two “Writing for the Real World” e-courses, “Making Your Writing Correct” and “Making Your Writing Clear and Concise.” They are designed for busy professionals who need a writing refresher. Registration is $99 and you can start the course any day you like.