Six Simple Suggestions for Making Your Charity Appeal and Fundraising Letters More Reader-Friendly

Six Proven Pointers for making your written charity appeals far more appealing
1. Increase the size of the type font that you use. The bigger the type font size you use the more your readers will like you, trust you, and absorb your message.
2. For webs and emails, use a type font that is specifically designed to be used on a screen. For example: Use a Georgia type font instead of a Times Roman type font. And use a Verdana type font instead of the 'dreaded' Arial narrow type font. My reason for using the word 'dreaded' in connection with an Arial narrow type font is because while Arial narrow may look fine on printed material... it just looks mean and scrawny on web sites or email messages which are read on a screen.
3. Don't ask a question in a headline which requires a negative or 'I dunno' answer. This only makes your readers feel small or inadequate and that's not exactly going to make your appeal letter, web site or email appeal... far more user friendly. You know the kind of question I mean... e.g.: Can you tell us how many Irish people are illiterate or semi-literate?
4. Never - ever - have a paragraph of text which is longer than 6-lines. Research from direct-mail readerships shows that most people skip-read a paragraph which is longer than 6-lines. Break up your paragraphs into short bites of information and you'll quickly find that most of your readers will happily nibble them all up.
5. Remember, a black type font on a white background is the easiest, fastest and most absorbing type font for most people to read and to retain the information they read. Think newspapers! After black on white comes 'blue on white', while way down at the bottom of the legibility table comes red on green and purple on black.
6. Never - ever - have a picture without a caption. Keep in mind that a picture has a much stronger magnetic pull on the eyes than words of text. Make sure you harness the 'pulling power' of a picture by writing a caption under every single picture on your web site. Whatever you do... avoid the temptation to superimpose text on a picture. From an 'easy-reading' perspective that's just a mess.
And now for a seventh heaven tip, which is:
ALWAYS HAVE A HIGH U-COUNT in every single page of your appeal letters, web pages, and email communications. By this I mean, count up the number of times the magic communication words: 'You', 'Your' and 'You're' appear in your text on each page. If you have at least one U in every single sentence on every single page, you are doing fine. It you only have one U per paragraph; you are not doing too well in the friendly communication stakes. And if you have no U's at all in a paragraph, then take my advice and go and re-write it quickly... because, do you know something?