Your readers will only gobble up small pieces of information at a time. Writing concisely has always been an important skill for nonprofit communicators, but email and social media have made it a necessity. To get your message across, you have to say it well and say it fast. You can’t expect supporters to dive…
The end of the year is BUUUUSSY. Stressing out about trying to come up with social media posts or ideas for your blog or newsletter is the last thing you need to be doing. Use these writing prompts taken from our Monthly Nonprofit Writing Prompts email newsletter to help you think a little more creatively about your…
Let’s start with a cartoon in honor of Halloween: This is a mock up of my new business, an October #HauntedHouse#amwriting #amreading #vss #TrueStory #PicOfTheDay #ThursdayThoughts #TuesdayMotivation #horror #Grammar #Syntax #TurnBack #scary #house #Halloween #MyFavoriteHalloweenTradition pic.twitter.com/9N8Dn1YoS0 — Arthur Unk (@ArthurUnkTweets) October 16, 2018 <SHUDDERS> Yesterday, I shared a few things that scare me and what…
A few months ago, we talked about How Your Nonprofit’s Personality Influences Content and broke down why we need to see your nonprofit’s personality in your communications. At the end of that post, we listed 50 positive personality traits and asked you to pick three to five that you wanted your supporters to associate with…
No doubt, you’ve struggled with some of these situations before: Program staff who are supposed to be reviewing for accuracy instead want to argue with your punctuation choices. Your executive director pulls the plug on an appeal letter right before the package is supposed to go to print because “it doesn’t sound like me.” Five…
Get Straight to the Point When You’re Writing While a warm-up is essential when you’re exercising, it only slows down your nonprofit writing. We often feel like we have to give our readers more background than they actually need. It’s that whole “Curse of Knowledge” thing we’ve talked about so many times. (The “Curse of…
You’ve probably heard that you need to make your supporters the hero of your story. It’s really at the heart of creating supporter-centered communications – talk about how awesome your supporters are for helping as opposed to how awesome you are. But every hero needs a villain, right? While you may not have a nemesis…
If you have never been to a Waffle House, the title of this blog post made absolutely zero sense to you. If you have been to a Waffle House, then you know they have yummy hashbrowns. And you also know they can be ordered in a variety of delicious ways: Scattered on the grill (in…
We are planning to refresh our website design later in the year, but there’s one thing we decided to get rid of sooner than later: the image slider we had at the top of our homepage. Image sliders and carousels were all the rage several years ago, and MANY nonprofit websites (maybe yours) have them…
Are you struggling to inspire your readers? It may be your style of writing. Many of the words we use in our writing would never come out of our mouths in everyday conversation. You need to write like you’re in a conversation as opposed to a lecture. Who wants to be lectured to? Not your…
Nonprofit leaders often complain about limited resources — and with good reason. After all, even the best-run nonprofits lack the money or the staff to accomplish everything they set out to do. But while money is tight, there’s one resource that is almost always in ample supply: words. Often, nonprofit websites and print materials are…
Every workplace has it. Every fandom has it. Every group of like-minded people has it. I am speaking of the dreaded JARGON, of course! Whether it’s very technical terms or phrases that permeate a specific genre, if you aren’t a part of that group, you have no idea what anyone is talking about. See if…
