What Should Your P.S. Do?

A thoughtful reader recently wrote in with a question.  I’ve edited it lightly for brevity:

“Talk to me about the use of postscripts in asks. We currently use the P.S. as an extension of the core ask – for example, in our next appeal the P.S. asks donors to consider becoming a monthly donor. One of your podcasts suggested the P.S. should be a reiteration of the core ask. I would love to hear more about this.”

This is a great question, and one that vexes many nonprofits. 

At one level, our answer is really simple: we recommend that the P.S. repeat/reiterate the core ask because that is the approach that, according to all the head-to-head testing that I’ve done or seen, is most likely to increase the chance the reader sends in a gift.  *

So the question becomes, “Well, why does the ‘reiterate approach’ tend to out-raise other approaches?”

Here are the core ideas that are helpful to know:

• According to eye-tracking studies, when most people first look at a direct mail letter, they do not read it.  They scan the whole thing first.
• Often, after they finish their scan at the end of the letter, the P.S. is the first part of the letter they actually read.  When I started doing direct mail in 1993, I was taught that for the majority of readers, the P.S. is the first part of the letter that’s read.
• So if the P.S. is about one idea, and the person goes back to the top and starts reading the letter and finds that the letter is about a different idea, we’ve immediately caused confusion in the reader’s mind.
  • In the example where the P.S. is about becoming a monthly donor, and the rest of the letter is about whatever the need is for a single gift, then the donor might think, “Wait, I thought this was about becoming a monthly donor, but that’s not what this letter is about at all.”  Confusion increases abandonment, abandonment reduces readership, reduced readership = lower giving.
• Finally, a good P.S. taps into the power of repetition.  Brain science shows us that when something is repeated often, we become more familiar with it and we’re more likely to believe that it’s true.  This is why the best-performing direct response fundraising is often a little repetitive – and why you want to use the P.S. to repeat the core ask that’s in the letter.

In a nutshell, you never want to give your reader a second thing to consider doing before they have fully committed to doing the first thing. 

So, keep the whole letter about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the headline of the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the action copy on the reply device about whatever the letter is focused on.  Keep the descriptions behind each giving amount about whatever the letter is focused on.

Then, only after the reader has decided to give a gift and has ticked the check box next to the amount they are going to donate, then you can give them an option to do something additional – like make their gift monthly, or send in a prayer request, or contact you about an estate gift.

To borrow from the Dos Equis advertising campaign, Stay focused, my friend.

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* I have both written and seen P.S.’s that take other approaches, and suspect that some of them have worked great.  That’s because there are contextually dependent times when a different type of P.S. is called for.  But those times are few and far between.  The model is the model for a good reason.