Does your DM copy look like this?
Friday, July 24, 2009 at 7:40PM | Jules Thanks to an old post I recently found on Jeff Brooks’ Donor Power Blog, I’ve just discovered the joys of Wordle. And I love it. Wordle generated this Word Cloud from a job I'm working on right now.
If you haven’t used it yet, try it out. It’s both fun and instructive. Just like a tag cloud on a blog it features the most prominent words used in your copy. The bigger the word... the more you’ve used it.
What you get is a wonderful snapshot view of just how emotive, warm and donor focused (or not) your copy is. A great fun tool for fundraising copywriters like me. But for the fundraising departments of some non-profits, I think it's considerably more important than that. The pressure to sanitize emotive copy in order to bring it in line with a supposed "organisational ethos" can sometimes be hard to resist.
In such situations, Wordle could prove to be a last gasp vaccine against otherwise good copy being turned into a jargon laden snooze-fest destined for the nearest wastepaper basket. Like an actual example of website copy I just found that produced this...
Copywriting, donor focus, emotion | in Copywriting, Fundraising
Reader Comments (4)
Nice post Jules. I think think you're right about this. A timely reminder, and a great tool to keep internal organisational speak out of donor communications. Thanks for the renewed focus.
You know what I'm going to say, don't you? You need to get more 'You' into that job you're working on ;)
Thanks Damian. I knew someone would mention that. But the words 'you' and 'your' actually appear in that job no fewer than 54 times. Twice as many times as 'Home' in fact. Thing is, you have to toggle off 'common words' (which includes you), or you get a wordle full of 'is 'of' 'it' 'and' 'but'... etc.
A friend recently showed me wordle and did one of my delicious acount. Try it out on my delicious 'actionmail' account