Four New Articles:
 1.  PUBLISHED in The Journal of the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation DMA ARTICLE: The Way We Write is All Wrong
 2.  DRAFT: Examples of Linguistic Structure in Right & Wrong Fund-Raising Discourse
 3.  DRAFT: How Hand-Personalized Mail Boosts Response 
 4.  PUBLISHED in The Nonprofit Quarterly Writing the Voice of Philanthropy: Fixing the Broken Discourse of Fundraising
      (features world's oldest fund-raising letter, besides the Pauline epistle to Corinthian believers, written ca. 100 AD to Cornelius Tacitus by Pliny the Younger)

 A Call for Additional Organizations to Conduct Discourse Audits:
          I'm interested in analyzing the written fund-raising discourse of additional nonprofit organizations. The linguistics study reported in my dissertation profiled the writing of 880 U.S. nonprofits. Among these were all 735 that raise at least $20 million annually. My research was actually motivated by a desire to refute an earlier study by Indiana University's Ulla Connor and Thomas Upton. They had painted a bleak picture of fund-raising discourse, based on a profile of 316 direct mail letters written by 108 Indianapolis-area nonprofits. Connor and Upton characterized the linguistic substructure of the typical fund appeal as closer to academic prose than a conversation or personal letter. And the texts they studied were virtually devoid of narrative.

         Well, I didn't buy it. As an Ohio State grad, and having studied at Purdue one summer, I knew the Indiana area well. Rather arrogantly I surmised that their findings were skewed. I reasoned that the texts they studied had been written by less-skilled writers who worked for small nonprofits parked amid the cornfields of Central Indiana. "Surely," I thought, "the writing of my elite nonprofits, produced by seasoned professionals, would be superior to the work product of nonprofits in a "fly-over state" like Indiana.

         However, in addition to being terribly arrogant in these assumptions, I was dead wrong. Like the Connor and Upton corpus (body) of texts, the writing of my supposedly "more sophisticated" nonprofits also contained few of the linguistic features that create interpersonal connections with readers. What's more, the texts written by nonprofits in my study population contained even less narrative than their Indiana counterparts. In fact, they had less story content than the genre of official documents!

          To paraphrase the famous words Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert: "Fund raisers, we have a problem!"

          From a representative sample of your organization's fund-raising texts, we can profile your discourse—determining whether it's warm and personal or cold and detached . . . whether it's filled with narrative or uses the abstract language of mission statement-speak. However, a linguistics profile on its own is no better than a mirror. Statistics only reflect reality. Numbers alone are powerless to change anything. But based on the profile that emerges, we can suggest ways to change the rhetorical superstructure and linguistic substructure of your writing so it connects with readers and puts a human face on your organization's work with narrative. Download the research prospectus below for more details . . .

          Click Here for our Prospectus -- How A Discourse Audit Can Improve Your Fund-Raising Texts.

       A Call for More Organizations to Test Paratextual Variables:
          I'm also interested in testing with additional organizations, the two paratextual variables evaluated in my dissertation: 1.) HandScript-personalized direct mail and 2.) the cancellation of nonprofit stamps to make discount mail look first class. Through my production company, High Touch Direct Mail, I'm offering to produce campaigns using these features at no risk to participants. I will match the estimate any participating nonprofit organization had already received for a conventional direct mail campaign through September 30th (save matching donated or in-house subsidized pricing). Copies of the actual direct mail pieces tested by the American Heart Association are summarized in How Hand-Personalized Mail Boosts Response . In a longer article, The Impact of Paratextual Variables on Response and ROI, I have reproduced the packages described in my dissertation, and several additional projects have been posted in a gallery at HighTouchGreetings.com.

          In my original research and subsequent follow-up studies, Computer HandScript-personalization has as much as doubled response.

          And canceling nonprofit stamps has increased response by as much 27.27 percent.

          Increasing response is obviously important. But canceling nonprofit stamps can be crucial for nonprofits that mail at the first class rate. For example, I calculated that had the American Heart Association used canceled nonprofit (rather than first class) stamps on mail sent to 1,077,067 households, the postage savings alone would have been $301,578.76. That's 36 percent of the $828,726.87 net income raised! In subsequent testing, we have found that when nonprofit stamps are canceled, postal carriers often mistake such pieces for first class mail. In fact, the organizations using this technique often receive address corrections on mail the DMM (Domestic Mail Manual) mandates should be discarded when it's undeliverable. So if mail carriers mistake nonprofit mail bearing canceled stamps for first class letters, donors probably will too. As a result, more mail will get opened and ROI will improve.

          While I can't guarantee you'll get the same results other organizations have achieved, this offer represents a no-risk way to test these technologies. You'll pay no more than you were already planning to spend. Or alternatively, if you would like to send one of our flagship note card packages similar to the American Heart Association packages evaluated in my dissertation, these are priced at our 1999 rates (listed as item 6 among the eight items below). This special offer is good through August 31, 2010. For more information, download the coupon below . . .

          Click Here for our Special Summer Test Offer Coupon—valid only through September 30, 2010. Call 888-444-4868 (toll free) or reach me directly at 909-864-2798 to learn more. This price match is good only during High Touch Direct's slower summer months.

          Click Here for a Detailed Statistical Analysis of American Heart Association Renewal Campaigns.

                      Eight Additional Resources to Download:
          The following eight additional items further describe my research and illustrate some of the variables tested . . .

1.   The Way We Write is All Wrong  (35 page paper)
2.   Executive Summary of The Way We Write is All Wrong (3 page paper)
3.   The Impact of Paratextual Variables on Response and ROI (84 page paper)
4.   Executive Summary of The Impact of Paratexutal Variables on Response and ROI (2 page paper)
5.   Layout of A-6 Size Greeting Card or Note Card Fund-Appeal Package (1 page paper)
6.   Special Offer Price List for HandScript-Personalized Greeting Cards and Four-Piece HandScript-Personalized Fund-Appeal Cards (1 page)
7.   Complete University Campaign Sample with Extra Four-Page Story Piece (each item is a separate pdf you can download):
      a. Card Cover b. Card Inside c. Four-Pae Story d. Reply Device Front e. Reply Device Back f. Outging Envelope (OGE) g. Courtesy Reply Envelope (CRE)
8.   Information about Computer HandScript Simulated Handwriting (which my dissertation documents has more than doubled response rates).

                                           The Root of The Problem:
           At its best, written fund-raising and marketing discourse should read like a conversation sounds—filled with personal views, concerns, stories and emotion. But my linguistics research reveals that these genres actually read more like doctoral dissertations than the lively banter of friends over a cup of coffee. Most discourse—especially the writing of fund raisers—creates little interpersonal involvement and contains less narrative than academic prose and official documents.
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           It was this problem that framed the mission of The Written Voice—to infuse the written text with the passion of speech. At institutions of higher education and among professional associations, the urgency of this mission is reflected in the virtual absence of research agendas, course, and seminar offerings on the language of fund raising.

                      Philanthropy Fairies Don't Exist:
           Hard-won progress by researchers in many areas has strengthened philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Those who have labored so hard for so long are to be congratulated, appreciated, and encouraged to do even more. However, the vacuum of knowledge building on the language of fund raising would leave one to believe that some benevolent philanthropy fairy just tosses magic dust, waves her wand, and poof—perfect messages and money suddenly appears. But there is no magic dust, no wand, no fairy...only real people who raise money the old-fashioned way—they ask for it.

           Those working on the front lines of the nonprofit sector deserve fund-raising courses and seminars based on validated theory spawned by cross-disciplinary communication research. However, in the polite society of academia fund raising is seldom the research topic of choice. Curricula and studies seem to focus on everything but the raising of money. And when fund-raising courses are offered, they seem to focus on technique and ignore the underlying structure of the language upon which technique depends.

           And professional associations are no better. While they offer plenty of fund raising training, they almost never discuss the language that shapes the fund-raising message they train practitioners to deliver. This is shortsighted, given that effective fund raising is the nonprofit sector's conditio sine qua non. It is that without which not. Without effective writing, no money is raised, no programs are funded, and nothing else really matters.

       Drucker's View—Problems Are Not Equally Problematic:        
            This view is consistent with the undemocratic priority Peter Drucker placed on certain key result areas that he believed were "the same for all businesses, for all businesses depend on the same factors for their survival." His eight domains included 1.) marketing, 2.) innovation, 3.) human organization, 4.) financial resources, 5.) physical resources, 6.) productivity, 7.) social responsibility, and 8.) profit requirements. But "marketing and innovation," Drucker asserted, "are the foundation areas in objective setting. It is in these two areas that a business obtains its results. In all other objective areas the purpose of doing is to make possible the attainment of the objectives in the areas of marketing and innovation."

         Fund raising that builds mutually satisfying partnerships between donors and nonprofits is philanthropy's cognate of marketing. As such, it deserves the same level of academic scholarship that marketing has attracted in the commercial sector, producing new fields of inquiry like consumer behavior. I hope my study debunks the myth of fairy dust philanthropy and provokes additional studies across disciplines like linguistics, rhetoric, and neurolinguistics. Such scholarship can only strengthen the voice of philanthropy—the voice of the friend of man. As scholars better understand the substrates of communication theory at the foundation of fund raising, practitioners will be better equipped to carry out their important tasks.