Copywriting
Copywriting is the art of persuasive writing.
Whisper needs copywriting help in two main areas:
- We need copy for specific fundraising campaigns. To give you an idea of the campaigns that Whisper runs, this one http://www.whisperhealth.org/christmas-challenge.html raised over £11,000 in 2014 and this one http://www.whisperhealth.org/run ran in 2015.
- We need copy for web pages to act as landing pages for online ads. Eventually we expect to need dozens of these pages. There’s a project to develop a Public website#new website for Whisper that will be mobile-friendly, more fashionably minimalist in appearance and much easier for volunteers to keep up to date. We have a £200-a-day online ad budget donated by Google, of which we’re currently only able to use about £10 a day. What’s holding us back is that most of the pages on Whisper’s existing site aren’t written as landing pages; if you were to land on them out of the blue from an online ad, they’d be unlikely on their own to convince you to engage with Whisper.
Style Guide
Section titled “Style Guide”Whisper has a style guide.
Training material
Section titled “Training material”There’s a free web-based copywriting course that looks good here: http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-copywriting/ and here’s the PDF version1.
There’s a another free downloadable “Copywriting 101” course that looks good here: http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/ They have other useful-looking free e-books here: http://my.copyblogger.com/type/ebooks/
GlobalGiving offers some writing suggestions here: https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/listicle/writing-tips-for-nonprofits/
Landing Page Design
Section titled “Landing Page Design”Some good recommendations here.
Identifiable Beneficiary
Section titled “Identifiable Beneficiary”Research has shown2 that people are much more likely to respond to a charity appeal featuring a specific individual than to an appeal featuring a group of people (even a group of 2 people) or to a statistical description of a problem, because large numbers make donors feel overwhelmed. There’s an example here from the NHS Blood Transfusion Service.
Copywriting Brief
Section titled “Copywriting Brief”A copywriting assignment will generally be more successful if it starts with a good brief. You can find a copywriting brief template here and an example of how to fill it in here.