Writing style

Photos: Eberhard Grossgasteiger and Daniel Fazio, on Unsplash

The section won’t try and cover “everything you need to know about writing” – as you’ll quickly learn when you see what’s missing and what’s elsewhere in the sections covered by the “general proposal writing” menu. However, there are some distinctive points about how you write anything in our field that are worth bringing together.

Conform to expectations – but do it well

As a student of rhetoric would point out, the basic style in which you come across should fit your audience’s preconceptions, or you will look possibly out of place. The English funders general see is:

• Business English. I recently read an impassioned plea for money to a funder that was beautifully written in emotional, conversational English and the first thing that struck me was: they probably aren’t experienced as a grant-writer (and a set of questions about their application/fundraising followed straightaway). Likewise, if your application reads like a research thesis or an explanation to a service user, say. Cover notes and thank you letters might be more informal (as long as you remember that your audience, if you don’t know otherwise, are likely to be grammar/private school educated men in their sites and older).
• The right length and format. Whilst I’ve seen trusts give to different weird things purporting to be applications, if you’re doing something different, think: will it raise questions about your understanding of what you’re doing?
• Appropriately emotional. You might come in on the two-dozenth week since you had a good holiday and sit there kind of processing things for the charity/the funder, but that experience may differ from what’s going on for the funder.

However, that’s just the envelope within which you can be creative. My first proper manager in the trust fundraising world wrote in a very formal, businesslike way – but my goodness, was there concern and a sense of the imperative to act pouring out when you read her writing! Once it’s established that you’re both professionals doing the right thing, you can have (appropriate) fun with some funders. You can send trusts what you like as extras (e.g., floorplans of new buildings, sets of photos, short case studies or infographics, cards) as long as it is clearly appropriate (e.g., not wasteful) and they don’t have to waste their limited time on it if they don’t want to. And so on. As long as you’re inside the boundaries, you can be great.

What are all the other proposal going to do, where you can be different? Which traditions of behaviour you have to adhere to and where can you break the norms of behaviour, so that you stand out?

Don’t manipulate

Trusts dislike it if they feel emotionally blackmailed or as if someone is “putting one over on them”. Both are contrary to the Code of Fundraising Practice.

An appropriate emotionality

Imagine you were giving something to a charity. You might reasonably expect to be treated with consideration and gratitude, to read something from a charity that clearly cares strongly about the problems and is enthusiastic about the solutions.

I’ve seen a number of assessors talking about how a sense of real passion has cut through for them on a boring day (and have experienced that myself). Years ago when I helped make grants for an umbrella body to its members, our Head of Grants regularly used to tell people how much more appreciation he got from small local day centres where they’d funded a tea urn for a few £100 than he got from bigger, more institutional charities where we were funding a member of staff. If a member charity wanted to get up my nose a bit, one way to do it was to indicate a strong sense of entitlement to a grant when I was assessing them.

It’s even more true for the people involved in the funder as volunteers – they’re doing it because they think it’s a fulfilling way to spend their time. Leading major donor fundraiser Rob Woods often makes the point that you are giving people experiences that they may find amazing and important or them, that money simply cannot buy. Responding in the right way emotionally is not just being emotionally alive to what is actually happening. It is a part of helping those people find that experience.

Some people this comes naturally to. What if that’s not you, though? It’s certainly hard to fake if you don’t actually feel it. A few ideas:

• Imagine they’re in the room with you. Sometimes it’s the fact it’s an email/letter that gets in the way.
• Imagine you’re speaking to them after they’ve heard from another cause that interests them. Do you care that your service users get the support? Do you think you’ll make things better for them?
• Think about what brings up the right emotions for you, then take a break to do that. If I need to identify with the service users, I might listen to music I used to listen to back when I suffered from back depression and anxiety, or spend some time listing my experiences when I was caring for a friend who was dying of cancer. Or, I think about concerns I’ve had about members of my family, or my partner. When I’m writing the Benefits sections of proposals, I find it helps to listen to bright, high energy dance music. Working at an arts charity, I tried to remember the emotional freedom and fulfilment I felt painting and imagine what it might mean to our service users.
• List the reasons why you’re lucky to have your role at the charity and to have the funders you have. See what emotions that elicits and try to bring them out in yourself.
• It’s easy to never actually see the work at some charities. I think it’s a false economy if it leaves you disconnected from the cause. If you don’t invest time in the emotionality of it, it’s hardly surprising if you feel disconnected. If you can’t get out and see them, whatever makes it as real as possible – documentaries, reports with lots of human stories, decent case studies. talk to the services staff about the service users as people (ideally, individual people – behavioural science shows we are moved more by concrete, specific stories than abstract generalizations).
• If your writing style is cramping your emotional style, try overdoing it. Be really gushing, or panicked, or ecstatic. Use language you’d never normally consider. throw yourself into it. Then go back and take it to an appropriate level.
• If you just don’t feel it for the charity, it’s certainly one reason to consider moving. You might feel more fulfilled somewhere else (and if you think someone else would be much more engaged, then that’s at least one argument that in the long term the charity might be better off with them).

Leah Eustace, a one time programme manager at a big US Foundation, told a UK conference of trust fundraisers that, whilst you should be factual where you need to be, when you have space to do something else you’re best using that to get the reader to connect emotionally. That’s perhaps a more extreme view, but interesting.

Concern or enthusiasm about people’s education is not necessarily the same as feelings for their health, or independence. You may need to bring yourself to life emotionally around the different issues raised in a very different application.

(My one caveat with all this is: while you need to love your cause, you might need to watch out that you don’t feel TOO responsible for the situation. If you end up feeling overly responsible, worried and/or guilty, the chances are you won’t relax into your best work and you will lose your enthusiasm. There’s a time for saying, “Hey, it’s just a job!”)

A straightforward style

Rhetoricians such as Jay Heinrichs would say that the most persuasive style for a business-type proposal is simple, straightforward English. The following are some common maxims for that style of writing:

• Short sentences are easier to read
• In Politics and the English language, author and journalist George Orwell suggested six rules which seem to apply to our sector:
  • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  • Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
• Try and put the key point in any paragraph at the same place in each paragraph, whether that’s the beginning, the end of the middle.
• Whilst respecting the need to be formal, try and keep your language natural and closer to speech than an academic thesis or a speech

Leah Eustace, a case for support writer who was formerly a programme manager at a big US Foundation, told a UK conference of trust fundraisers that she writes at about age 12-13 level of understanding. It allows the narrative to sit in someone’s heart without hitting “speedbumps” where they’re having to think about it. Clearly, there are parts of the application where that is more true. It’s also worth remembering that our audience is fairly highly educated.

However, as psychologist Steven Pinker highlights, we implicitly realize that there are limits to any set of such maxims. He gives an example of a skilled writer using passive verbs in a piece of prose because to avoid it would have meant introducing extra people who would be the subject of the verb, overcomplicating the text.

As with almost anything in fundraising, it’s the understanding, not the rule that is important – and if it feels wrong, you should take your intuition seriously.