In On The Art of Writing Copy, Herschell Gordon Lewis shares his four great laws of copywriting.

You can read them all here. But if you employ creatives to develop your fundraising materials, you really need to pay attention to number three. That's the one that can get severely hammered in the briefing and comments stage of creative development.

It's an equation, where E = emphasis…

Picture 22
It states quite neatly that when you emphasise everything, you emphasise nothing.

If you adhere to the school of thought that believes you have to get as much information into your copy as possible in the hope that every donor will find something that interests them, you're missing the point.

Your copy should be isolating the key reason for support. Anything less tells the donor you don't really know who they are, why they support you or what they think is important.

It's a little like saying, "What interests you is in here somewhere. I'm not sure what it is, so fish for it."

Not too many donors respond well to that sort of treatment.