Letters to the Editor

JUST ONE THING…

I think Herschell Gordon Lewis overlooks one issue in his excellent lambasting of fundraising letters that don’t work — the executive directors of nonprofit organizations who write their own letters assuming that “everyone” shares his or her commitment to their work. It just ain’t so, but they don’t know it (“‘We Need Help.’ You Certainly Do,” November).

It’s not that these people couldn’t write more productive letters. They could. But by starting from the premise that all prospects and past donors share their enthusiasm, they don’t even think about the need to sell their organization’s mission.

That’s why, I think, so many small but worthwhile nonprofits never make the grade. Their management is so wrapped up in the work itself while laboring under the assumption of shared enthusiasm, it never occurs to them that they have to be selling their mission every day. Thus what marketing they do is ineffective, as Mr. Lewis pointed out.

Lewis R. Elin
DR Consultant
Chicago

TAPPED OUT?

I’m not sure I completely agree with Tom Collins’ makeover of the SIFE ad (The Makeover Maven, Oct. 15). His copy and headline are very effective, but I think they would have been even more so had he kept the layout (or at least the visual theme) from the original ad.

“Join the Student Revolution” carries a lot of energy, but in Tom’s remake, any energy that’s created by the headline is drained by the straight advertorial(esque) layout.

My suggestion would be to keep the original layout, but instead of a justified column on the right, the left edge of copy could follow the contour of the guy in the photo (allowing room for more copy without having to crop the photo too drastically).

I don’t mean to critique Tom’s design knowledge. I just think he may have overcompensated for the lack of effective copy in the original ad.

Good catch on the ambiguous ad, though!

Justin Fuchs
Marketing Communications
Public Relations
X-Rite Inc.
Grandville, MI

Tom Collins replies: You say about my makeover that “any energy that’s created by the headline is drained by the straight advertorial(esque) layout.” I am not quite sure what this means, but I’m convinced that a great deal of interesting, well-headlined and well-written editorial matter about information products and services results in far more attention, readership, and persuasion than much of the advertising for similar products. My makeovers are influenced by that realization.

Brand-image advertising is quite another issue. It’s all a question of whether the desired goal is to affect buying attitude or produce immediate action.

Even from a pure design and readability point of view, the headline in the original ad was too small to pull prospects from out of the crowd of readers, and the text type lines were too short and too widely spaced for comfortable reading.