Ellen Bristol will be a Special Guest on the 4/17 Writing Wednesdays call and has written the below blog post. She developed the Leaky Bucket Assessment for Effective Fundraising, and the methodology Fundraising the SMART Way. Enjoy the post, and we hope you can make the conference call!

I’m a fundraising consultant. I’ve been a fundraising consultant for 18 years, but my practice really took off in April 2011, when I launched the Leaky Bucket Assessment for Effective Fundraising. Since then, I’ve collected over 300 surveys, co-authored a book inspired by the Assessment (with a fundraising rock star, which didn’t hurt), presented dozens of webinars based on Leaky Bucket results, written I don’t know how many articles and blog postings about the Leaky Bucket, and gotten I don’t know how many audiences to laugh out loud when I am introduced as the creator of the Leaky Bucket Assessment (even if they have no clue what the Leaky Bucket Assessment is all about).

So why has this five-word phrase had such an impact? To tell you the truth, it was a total surprise, but it also taught me something I should have known years ago. Good titles are important.  And in the twitterized universe, they are supremely important.  Titles work best when they capture a mood, when they’re understandable but with a twist, and when they’re easy to remember.

I always thought I had trouble with titles because I tend to think (and write) in longer phrases. It was easy for me to call my first book “What’s Wrong with Your Fundraising – and How You Can Fix It” (eleven words!) even though our publisher really, really wanted us to call it something like “How to Improve Your Fundraising” (five words). Fortunately, my co-author Linda and I talked him into the longer title; the short one gave us hives.

Titles are important because they’re kind of like mission statements. They can tell you the whole story, or the purpose, or the impact, in a few words. Titles sell books. They also sell other things you can publish, like webinars, surveys, white papers, interviews, and videos.  If they’re catchy, they go viral. Remember the Dancing Baby?

Oh, by the way, the Leaky Bucket itself has led to a big fat increase in lucrative consulting engagements, the publishing of a game used in teaching fundraising skills, a contract with a big mainstream publisher to write another book (on the methodology that inspired the creation of Leaky Bucket), and a few other income-producing things.  It’s also on its way to launching a new service for my company: benchmarking.

The success of the Leaky Bucket title has given me a couple of important insights, beyond the fact that titles are important. One is that it’s okay to let your personal voice show in a title. I came up with the leaky bucket image when I found myself trying to describe productivity in fundraising to a friend; I said “productivity leaks out of fundraising shops in ways you don’t notice.” Well, what leaks, people?  Buckets do! That one was just too easy.  So now, everything I write gets put to the Leaky Bucket test: is the title memorable? Does it go with my admittedly off-kilter personality? (I mean, if I don’t like the title, nobody’s gonna like it, right?) Can people remember it? Can I re-use it, or a version of it, as a metaphor or jumping-off point in the article/white paper/book/video/blog posting that it honors?  For example, you can get one of four scores when you take the Leaky Bucket; the lowest score is “Leaking Like a Sieve!”  Get it?

Think about your own titles.  As useful as the “Seven Steps…” or the “Fourteen Fundamentals…” might be, can you challenge yourself to find phrases that reflect your point of view, represent your uniqueness, and yet are still accessible to others?  If the title meets the “like me, unique, catchy” test, it still needs to be easy for a search engine to locate.

You may have spent tons of time working on the content of your writing but it pays to remember that your titles are just as important. And they just might be more important. Especially if they can launch your writing career into the stratosphere.