Category Archives: Nonprofits

Start with your features, but move right to benefits

[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Consider the features of your work: the components or characteristics of the actual services or products your organization offers. The details of your features often include answers to questions your most interested readers might ask. Examples might be technical specifications or information on exactly how you carry out your programs.

Benefits, on the other hand, are the tangible and intangible outcomes you are striving for: the great results and powerful impact that your stakeholders will get from working with you.

Example

An organization runs a homeless shelter for families. It offers warm beds, restrooms, and other facilities. It also hires child care workers and counselors, uses volunteers, operates a soup kitchen, and offers services to help residents find more permanent housing or jobs.

Those are all features of the organization’s work.

The benefits are the positive effects that those things have on the shelter residents and the community at-large. Here we are talking about the difference the organization makes in addressing the problems associated with homelessness, both short- and long-term.

Some of those benefits may be:

Increased stability and nutrition in the lives of the homeless families
Increased employment among homeless parents
Fewer families living in cars or on the streets
Less desperation, which often leads to crime, drug abuse, and other social ills
The sense of being a community that cares for all of its citizens

Here are three related questions that can help you identify the benefits of your work:

1) Ask yourself: What does your service or product mean for your reader and/or community—personally, professionally, financially, physically, logistically, spiritually, and/or emotionally?

Example

The Health Trust, which oversaw and partially supported the School Health Clinics of Santa Clara County, worked with me several years ago to document their benefits to the community. That language then served them for years in all kinds of successful documents. This is some of the text, focusing on economic benefits:

The School Health Clinics play a critical role in support of the educational process. They prepare children and families to be informed health care consumers and encourage self-responsible behaviors. The Clinics represent wise investments, as they lead to a healthy community and a healthy future workforce.

Each clinic visit will save the community from $160 to $2,000 in physician or emergency room costs.

School-based health care gives working parents a health care choice that allows them to access health care for their children, thus reducing costly disruption, distraction, and absence from their workplace.

Companies have better informed employees who are likely to make wise health care and lifestyle choices for themselves and their families. And healthy employees with fewer health risks give employers a negotiating advantage with health insurers. Thus, corporate financing of school-based health care can be part of a company’s community development and philanthropic strategy to benefit many constituencies.

(Website: Health Trust)

2) Ask yourself: What will happen as a result of the particular features you offer? And how does that satisfy the needs and desires of your readers?

Example

An organization that provides massage therapy to cancer survivors might say:

Your compassionate investment of $100 will buy a new clinic massage table (feature), enabling our volunteer therapists to provide 50 additional revitalizing, healing massages per week to cancer survivors like Jose (client benefit). You will be helping your friends and neighbors enjoy happier, healthier, more productive, and (as suggested by recent medical studies) longer lives (social benefit).

3) Ask yourself: For each feature you offer, ask “So what?” How does that lead to something better for my reader and/or the community?

Example

Our company exterminates termites and other pests from your home or office with natural orange peel oil.

Feature	Benefit
Proven effective within 24 hours	It will decisively solve your termite problem quickly.
Nontoxic and natural	It is better for your health with no side effects for adults or children.
Fume-free	You can use your home right afterward, with no waiting.
Plant-based	It is not dependent on petroleum.
Guaranteed to keep your home or office pest-free for at least 12 months	Saves you the expense and hassle of re-exterminating.
Consistent with overall green lifestyle	You will do your part for the planet.

The Question They’re All Asking

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[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Do you know the big question on the mind of every reader of your organization’s material? It’s this: “What’s in it for me?”

As far as your readers are concerned, it’s all about the benefits you can offer them. You want to emphasize how your organization’s product or service improves the lives of your constituents and their communities.

We tend to focus on all of the wonderful features of the services and products we offer. But if you try to see things from your readers’ perspective, you will notice that they are most interested in buying or supporting benefits that address their specific needs and values.

For this reason, writing about benefits that matter to your readers is absolutely crucial in any kind of marketing or fundraising piece. I am talking about everything from a personal letter requesting financial support, to a general flyer about a service you offer, to a special report about your industry, to a website article.

Don’t just concentrate on what specific things your organization does or makes, or how. Those are the various features of your work. While those are interesting and necessary to discuss, I suggest you emphasize what difference your organization makes—how your services benefit the users, your supporters, and/or the community at-large.

Ask Yourself: How will your service or product improve the lives of your readers and their community, in the short and the long term?

Did you notice how I said both your readers and their community? That is because we work in the public interest sector and not the conventional business world. Our stakeholders want to find ways to benefit both themselves and the world around them. So we might want to edit their big question to now read: “What’s in it for me and us?”

Simply put, your job is to refine your text (your “copy”) so that it makes your readers feel good about the benefits you are offering. You want them to feel so good that they are willing to take a chance on you with their time, money, energy, or other resources.

Your writing has to persuade them that your product or service will help them achieve their goals, benefiting them and their community.

Personally speaking

This “feel-good” imperative reminds me of the old toothpaste commercials that implied that you would find love and romance if only you brushed with their minty fresh taste. Or of today’s cell phone ads suggesting that their products will win you lots of new friends and dates. While this is a blatant use of persuasive power, we can use that power in the public interest too.

You can, over time, compile especially effective phrases, paragraphs, and statements to recycle in your materials. But, of course, you will have to tweak everything to make sure it uses language that speaks most persuasively to your specific intended audience.

Your (Customer’s) Brain on Computers

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[Dalya’s Note: This guest post by Anne Michelsen was originally published on April 8, 2013 on her website, Green Ink Copywriting.]

How much time do you spend online?

If you’re anywhere close to average, it’s somewhere between 25 and 27 hours per week. ¹

That’s right. We spend nearly a quarter of our waking hours plugged in, and that’s not including the time we spend on other electronic devices, including our cell phones and our kid’s handheld gaming devices (admit it!)

Now, hold onto your chair. When you surf the web, you’re accomplishing more than shopping for shoes or chatting up your Facebook friends. Behind the scenes, what you’re really doing is rewiring your brain.

It’s true. And you may not want to hear what you’re doing to it – but I’m going to tell you anyway.

How the Internet affects our brains

Research on the Internet’s effect on brain activity indicates that it contributes to attention deficit, addictive behavior, scattered thinking, loss of focus, and reduced ability to read human emotions. In some cases, the effects can be physically measured: one recent study of 18 college students found that excessive internet use actually resulted in atrophy of gray matter in the brain. ²

Clearly, this is a serious issue. Due to my occupation, I admit to spending far more than the average amount of time online, and I can personally attest to feeling some of the effects. I am starting to take steps to limit my (and my kids’) time online, and I highly suggest that you consider doing so, too.

But no matter how much we limit our own time online, the fact remains: our customers probably don’t. To put it bluntly, our biggest source of competition anymore may not be our competitors, but what’s going on in our customers’ heads!

So we need to take special care to structure our messages to both capture and keep their attention despite any adverse effects their brains may be experiencing.

Read Part 2.

Read Part 3.

References:

Millennials Up Their Time Online, MarketingCharts.com, Jan.21, 2013
Does Life Online Give You ‘Popcorn Brain?’, CNN Health, June 23, 2011

Go beyond promotion for its own sake

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[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

When you are writing to make a difference, your two-fold goal is both to promote your organization as a part of a socially responsible solution AND to educate your readers about key things they need to know in your issue area.

Constituent education is often the first step in marketing, especially if you are tackling a complex, often misunderstood problem that involves many variables, processes, or actors. Most of your readers are not specialists in your area, but their interests make them want to know more. You would be wise, then, to build an educational component into your organization’s branding.

EXAMPLE:

As a socially responsible business, you offer environmentally friendly laundry services to people in your neighborhood. While your customers obviously know their need for clean clothes, many of them may not be aware of the hazards of chemicals often used in the dry cleaning process. Your marketing, then, would need to include information about why you offer green services, as well as how you do so.

In this world of information overload, we all could use a guide to the most critical aspects of the issues important to us. We also want to hear about how we can personally get involved, presented in a way that we can relate to.

And that information is precisely what you and your organization excel at providing! Give it to your readers—repeatedly and consistently. The more value you can deliver, the more they will see your organization as worthy of their support, investment, or patronage.

Promoting your brand and appropriately educating your community go hand-in-glove.

BONUS TIP:

Just remember that you can never be 100% objective, no matter how hard you try. While your readers know you have a perspective, they also expect you to be clear and honest with your facts and opinions, and to explain your frame-of-reference.