Storytelling is a hot topic in fund-raising and philanthropy. Andy Goodman is arguably the leading evangelist for storytelling in fund-raising; the folks at NTEN (membership organization of nonprofit professionals who put technology to use for their causes) regularly hold storytelling webinars; and my friend Thaler Pekar consults with nonprofits about storytelling and writes about story on PhilanTopic.
Thus, you might think that discourse about fund-raising is story-laden. Not so, says Frank C. Dickerson, PhD, whose doctoral-dissertation research revealed that fund-raising discourse:
- focuses more on transferring information than creating interpersonal involvement; is
- cold, detached and abstract rather than warm, connected and concrete;
- is lexically complex rather than informal like person-to-person conversation; and
- is more like argumentation aimed at the head than human-interest narrative aimed at the heart.
Dickerson, who wrote to me this past week to share his research, deployed discourse analysis, using methodology from the field of “corpus linguistics,” to address the research question: “What common text genre does fund-raising discourse most closely resemble?” Dickerson further describes his methdology:
The protocols used were developed in the 1980s at USC by Douglas Biber. . . . computer routines based on factor analysis that profiled 23 genres of texts. Biber’s seminal study made it possible to tag and tally counts of linguistic features in discourse.
Once averaged, these feature counts made it possible to profile written and/or spoken discourse of fund raisers. I examined the fund-raising discourse produced by 735 of America’s elite nonprofit organizations whose IRS form 990s identified them as raising at least $20 million annually in direct public support
Dickerson derived his findings from an evaluation of patterns across 1.5 million words of text in 2,412 fund-raising documents. “I performed a ‘linguistic MRI,'” he says, “to reveal the underlying linguistic substrate of what fund raisers write.”
Dickerson calls his findings provocative. “They are opposite what most would have expected.”
In fact, Dickerson continues:
Nothing about this is comforting. The message is a bit like that of an Old Testament prophet, uncovering a dysfunctional pattern in the way fund raisers communicate that has implications for
- fund-raising practice,
- future research, and
- the education and training of development professionals.
“Although the study examines written texts,” Dickerson says, “the data apply equally to anyone who communicates with donors — whether raising significant gifts face-to-face from individuals of high net worth or soliciting entry-level gifts online or by direct mail. Anyone who talks with or writes to donors will benefit from this information. But like a mirror, statistics only reflect reality. They’re descriptive . . . not generative. But knowing how WRITERS WRITE and TALKERS TALK is the critical toward making incremental improvements in fund-raising discourse.”
Dickerson titled his dissertation Writing the Voice of Philanthropy: How to Raise Money with Words. “In my consulting over the past 40 years,” Dickerson explains, “I’ve observed that individuals need to learn how to write the VOICE OF PHILANTHROPY (the voice of the FRIEND-OF-MAN). That is, they need to write as if they are speaking for a PERSON in need or a cause affecting PEOPLE — whether the hurting and vulnerable poor, education, the arts, the fragile environment or defenseless animals.”
Fundraising writing at its best, Dickerson asserts, “should read like a conversation sounds. It should read like the banter between friends over a cup of coffee — filled with personal views, concerns, stories, and emotion about what matters to them. But fund raising has a serious problem.”
At his research site, The Written Voice, Dickerson offers two articles that review samples of actual texts studied and the results of several fund-raising campaigns conducted. He says:
One article (the longer version of The Way We Write is All Wrong) is a 35-page version from which my published pieces were derived. Near the end of this article I reproduce the world’s oldest extant fund-raising letter, written circa 98 A.D. to Cornelius Tacitus by Pliny the Younger [pictured]. It was penned during the reign of Roman Emperor Trajan to raise money for a school in Pliny’s hometown of Como Italy. Pliny’s letter is significant because it’s better constructed than most modern-day fund appeals.