How Poetry Can Boost Your Fundraising

A piece of advice I give writers now and then goes like this:

You’re writing fundraising, not poetry. Make it sound ordinary and human, not elevated and writerly.

I stand behind that advice.

But there’s something else that needs to be said about effective fundraising writing, and Roy Williams recently said it in his Monday Morning Memo, at Writing Great Ads is a 10-Step Dance:

Do you want to become a great ad writer? Follow these ten steps and you will rise high and go far.

1. Read poetry every day.
2. Memorize at least two dozen poems.
3. Recite them out loud when you are alone.
4. Perform them spontaneously when you have an audience.
5. Feel the pulsating rhythm that is the heartbeat of every poem.
6. Wiggle your way through the unexpected twists and turns that are its dance.
7. Ask a few business owners to evaluate the ads that you have written for them.
8. Listen respectfully to everything they tell you. Even when they are wrong.
9. Do not try to change their mind about anything. Just write exactly what they would say if they could write as well as you do. Remember: This is their business, not yours.
10. Never write ads that rhyme. Use the heartbeat and the dance instead.

The pulsing heartbeat is called poetic meter. Study it.

Successful advertising is not informational. Successful advertising is emotional. Powerful ads do not speak to the mind. They speak to the heart. Like a poem.

He’s talking about commercial advertising, but it applies equally to fundraising. Maybe even especially to fundraising, where long-form printed messages are still the center of what works.

Powerful fundraising looks ordinary. Home-made. Off the cuff.

But it reads as smoothly and beautifully as poetry.

(Something AI hasn’t figured out yet.)

Read the good stuff. Let it seep into your heart and mind. That’s how you’ll produce the winning fundraising.