How Your Donor Newsletter Can Drive Your Donations to New Highs

I am a big fan of Emerson and Church's series of The Mercifully Brief Real World Guides. They are small, quick-reading gems that give you ideas you can implement right now.

I'm reading one of those guides now, The Mercifully Brief Real World Guide to Raising More Money With Newsletters Than You Ever Thought Possible. Some tips that jumped out at me include the way the eye actually reads a printed page. Research shows that the eye bounces around but in a predictable manner. Eyes go to:

• Photographs or drawings first, before they go to text.
• Close-ups first before photos showing an entire person.
• Children first, before adults.
• Big text such as headlines before small text.
• Short words, short lines, and short paragraphs (such as headlines, captions, and pull quotes).

Author Tom Ahern concludes that we have a lot more control over how the reader engages with our printed pages than we probably thought. More about this useful guide and its tips:

• Donor Newsletters: Your Route to Keeping Donors Excited and In a Giving Mood