Over at Future Fundraising Now, Jeff Brooks argues that online fundraisers shouldn’t scare off donors with long copy:

On the web, keep your copy short, simple, repetitive and easy to read (short paragraphs, short sentences, small words). Zoom ahead to the action you want readers to take. Skip the philosophical foundations — you can get to that later if you manage to stir them to action now.

Last fall, we decided to test this for ourselves at Heritage.

Our control page featured a donation form above the fold with 85 words of introductory copy:

Our treatment, with a revised design, included fully 886 words above the form to explain the value of a membership donation to the page’s visitors, who are almost universally prospective donors:

The results? The treatment, with almost two printed pages worth of copy, increased revenues by 274%. It wasn’t even close.

Brooks is half right, especially the points about simplicity and readability. A detailed history of your organization, for instance, may be out of place on a donation form, though a list of major accomplishments is certainly in order. Long blocks of text may discourage people from continuing the process, so these should be broken up with bullets, headers and graphics. Your copy should in all cases be readable, scannable, and jargon-free.

Brooks falls short, however, in prescribing a particular length of copy. Forcing your copy into short form for the sake of shortness can be counterproductive. Short copy poses a challenge in that it limits your opportunity to explain your value proposition. The real challenge is getting the right copy rather than copy of any particular length.

When writing donation page copy, keep in mind your audiences and their motivations. One of your current supporters may not need much encouragement to open his wallet again, though you certainly can’t take his giving for granted. A prospective donor may need more selling than a current donor, so you should explain what it is you do and why his donation will make a difference. Donors on mobile devices may have different needs altogether.

Most importantly, remember that you, the fundraiser, are not the target audience. Remember also that your intuition may not be correct. Test to find out what works, and particularly challenge the conventional wisdom. Direct mail fundraisers used this technique to discover, to their continued surprise, that long letters perform better than short, to-the-point letters. But this is not true in all cases.

Have you found that copy of a particular length works better online? In what context?

Brian Christian explains how firms are using A/​B testing to improve their online marketing:

Over the past decade, the power of A/​B testing has become an open secret of high-stakes web development. It’s now the standard (but seldom advertised) means through which Silicon Valley improves its online products. Using A/​B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior—gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases—it will displace the original; if the new version is inferior, it’s quietly phased out without most users ever seeing it. A/​B allows seemingly subjective questions of design—color, layout, image selection, text—to become incontrovertible matters of data-driven social science.

Google runs thousands of such tests every year to improve its search results and other products. In fact, Google runs so many simultaneous tests, Christian says, that “the percentage of users getting some kind of tweak may well approach 100 percent.” Using these same principles, the Obama campaign in 2008 used A/​B testing to increase e-mail signups by 40 percent.

It ran similar tests in the 2012 cycle.

Christian points out, though, that A/​B testing is best for identifying incremental changes rather than the overhauls that may be necessary. In other words, effective marketing remains an art as well as a science. Marketers and web designers “may find themselves chasing ‘local maxima’—places where the A/​B tests might create the best possible outcome within narrow constraints—instead of pursuing real breakthroughs.”

Tell me in the comments: how have you used A/​B testing?

“Clarity trumps persuasion,” MECLABS president Flint McGlaughlin reminds audiences at his seminars.

Yet too often, writing lacks any clarity at all, and we find ourselves unable to comprehend an author’s point–in no small part because of his impenetrable jargon and (perhaps inadvertent) obfuscation.

During one recent lecture I attended, the speaker went on at length about his firm’s “overseas entities” and how his customers “leveraged” this or that. Even the business school students he was addressing had a hard time puzzling out his real meaning.

This problem is particularly acute in non-profit writing. Those who market non-profits to the wider world, including fundraisers, often fall into the trap of writing material their audiences fail to understand.

Fortunately, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has assembled an insightful and highly amusing series of three articles by Tony Proscio to help non-profit writers (and anyone else) identify and root out jargon and improve clarity.

In the third and final booklet (link in PDF), Proscio synthesizes his argument:

Whenever I set out to write anything—and almost anytime I start to read anything more demanding than a cereal box—I find myself asking the two questions I’ve described here: Who’s supposed to do what to whom with how much? and* What are we against?* These are not the kinds of questions taught in great writing courses. They do not necessarily lead to more beautiful writing, if that is judged by aesthetic standards alone. But they have one overwhelming virtue that too much of today’s public-interest writing sorely lacks: They lead to the kind of information that nearly everyone wants and needs to know.

What techniques do you use to maintain clarity in your writing?

Brian Clark at Copyblogger has the scoop:

Long copy works, because people want as much benefit-oriented information as they personally need to make the purchase.

Some won’t read much of it before buying. Others will read every word.

The key is to make the presentation of this information — your copy and the visual elements of the page — context appropriate. It needs to look and feel like your audience expects content from you to look and feel…

If you try to throw garish colors, exclamation points, and yellow highlighter at your audience when that’s not what they expect to see, you lose. In more ways than one.

• Lydia DePillis says Washington, D.C. needs a fiscally-conservative alternative to the lefty D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, the only think tank focused on the city’s local government.
• Are participants in marathons and other event-based fundraisers really donors in the same sense as direct-marketing donors? Tom Belford says no.
• Pork Barrel Barbecue has released a barbecue-scented fragrance. Really.
• It’s not clear why repairing ill-maintained local transit infrastructure ought to be a federal responsibility.
• Last but not least, Conan O’Brien spoke last week at Dartmouth’s commencement.