Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.
But we started raising a LOT more money.
One part of our journey as an organization was learning how to design fundraising materials that donors could actually read.
I remember one day a colleague a few years older than me called me up to say, “Can you please make the font bigger? Donors are having a hard time reading the print.”
I took a quick look at the piece she was talking about, shrugged, and said – “It’s fine!”
At that point I was still in my thirties, and it WAS fine… for me.
When I started to learn more about designing for readability, I wished I could have that moment back so I could respond differently.
Making things readable for donors is fundamental for them being able to respond with a gift. If they can’t easily read it, they won’t give.
My organization started to pay more attention to readability, and we adjusted three main things:
- We made the font bigger — minimum of 14pt for everything
- We stopped using reverse text (white print on a dark background)
- We used black font for body copy and dark, saturated colors for headlines
These design choices were fairly simple to implement, but we had to be smarter about our copy choices because the formerly-used option to just “make the font smaller” was no longer on the table when we had too much copy.
Our donors responded in a way that let us know we were on the right track.
I even had a board member’s wife tell me, “Finally you printed something big enough that I could read it!”
Making these few design tweaks improved the readability of our fundraising pieces and helped increase giving without raising our costs. That’s a win!
Read the whole series:
- How a Strong Fundraising Offer Changes Everything
- Get to the Point FAST to Raise More Money with Your Appeals and E-Appeals
- Make Your Copy Clear and Easy to Understand to Raise More Money
- Design So Donors Can Read, and They Will Thank You by Giving More (This post)
