CAUTION

Sometimes your readers will be very interested in the specific features of your service or product, and somewhat suspicious if you only focus on benefits. If that is the case, respect their need to know and give them the data they need to make up their own minds. Explain how and why the features of your organization’s service or product can lead directly to the benefits your readers might seek. This situation exemplifies the importance of knowing your readers.

BONUS TIP

What if you know your reader is comparing two or more similar products or services with similar benefits? In that case you may want to talk about individual features that set you apart from others. Chances are good, though, that if you can identify a particular set of benefits that you alone can offer, the relevant features will help back you up.

Example

Let’s say that your reader works at a funding institution or an organization that works in a field closely related to yours, and is concerned about the issue or challenge your organization addresses. Then, she stumbles upon your document.

She would be interested in learning about your work in terms of benefits to her and her organization, such as how it will:

• Fit with her overall mission and strategic direction

• Work in conjunction with other things she already has or does

• Help her fulfill her responsibilities to her community

• Help her avoid a negative outcome

• Make her look good in the eyes of her supervisor, colleagues, and/or stakeholders

BONUS TIP

Interestingly, many marketers have found that people will reward you if you slightly understate, but then over-deliver on, your promise of features or benefits. If your readers are pleasantly surprised, they will come back for more.

Examples

1) A wealthy donor is interested in contributing financially to his community on a global level, but is unclear about how to go about it. Let’s say that your organization is involved in international work focusing on women and girls, and you want to reach out to this reader. How would you do it?

In a letter to him, you would touch on the benefits—both tangible and psychological or emotional—that he would receive from investing in you and your partners overseas. Depending on what you know about the person, you may mention things like:

• Your organization hopes to offer him the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of women and girls around the world by partnering with the experts on your team
• Your organization has a great track record of success stories
• His generosity now is a way for him to “give something back” and “do his part” by empowering others and helping prepare them to join our global community
• By joining your circle of donors, he will be able to meet regularly with others who share his commitment
• Your organization is a registered nonprofit and all gifts are tax-deductible

2) Your organization’s products—t-shirts made of organic cotton and sewn in factories certified to be sweatshop-free—display award-winning local artwork that is silk-screened by a union shop using soy-based inks. Your prices are competitive with other high-quality t-shirts that sport none of these special features.

I am sure you can name several of this product’s many benefits for the individual consumer, the community, and the environment!

(See Part 2 of this article: HERE)

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

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)

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).

Example

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