This weekend, I learned a valuable lesson. Content isn’t king. Or at least, to be more accurate, content isn’t always king. Copy does have to be top-notch to have an impact and to inspire people to buy, sell, share, offer, sign up, oppose…and sponsor. It has to induce a reaction. But there’s more to it than clever writing.
If you’ve read some of my recent blogs, you’ll know that I am taking part in the London Marathon for the first time this year. I’m running for the charity Sense – the leading national charity that supports deafblind children and adults.
It’s a wonderful cause and one which is close to my heart: for the past nearly 14 years, I have worked both full and part time for a company called Deluxe Media (formerly ITFC) as a subtitler for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. One day I might be tapping away “newsroom style” the subtitles for Celebrity Big Brother. And once I’ve finished weeping and whimpering, “how did my life come to this?” I might be thrust headlong into subtitling a Bond film, or even a DVD about art in Sicily…or Jeremy Kyle, and so the cycle continues.
The company also provides audio description for the visually impaired. So you can see why running for Sense seemed like such a great idea and a natural choice, tying in so well with my work.
Leaving aside the actual training aspect, which I have to say I’m loving much more than I thought I would (I just ran my first half marathon race in Watford last Saturday, in fact, coming in at a Farah-esque 1h50m – and that’s despite having physio for a gammy knee), I confess that maybe I was a little blasé initially when it came to the fundraising aspect.
In exchange for Sense allocating me a guaranteed “gold bond” place on the start line, I had to pledge to raise a minimum of £1,500 for them.
No problem, I thought. I have at least three things going for me:
1.) I am vastly popular. I mean, I have over 300 friends on Facebook, for heaven's sake – and I regularly keep up with, oooh, a good 2% of them. Oh. Er...
2.) Deluxe has literally hundreds of employees: 200 in the UK alone and many more worldwide. Given that I'm running for a deafblind charity, I somehow expected waves of donations from my sympathetic colleagues without having to try much beyond emailing the database to let them know I was running. (I did, however, send out a cracking email).
3.) I'm a copywriter. So my fundraising page is bang on. It's interesting, informative, has a touch of humour. Even the lovely folk at Sense told me how good it was. And leading on from that, when I send out a “please sponsor me” email, I make sure I gauge it just right. Again, it's informative, has a touch of humour, the tone of voice isn't too pleady, but I clearly want people to click HERE. They even get several goes at the call to action throughout the email. And there's the all-important PS at the end.
I'm not even new to writing fundraising copy. I've had endorsements and emails of thanks from clients based on how successful my copy made their campaign.
And yet, for some reason, I've found the whole "sponsor me" process for the Marathon to be akin to getting blood out of a stone.
Over the weekend, I attended a Meet The Experts day for the London Marathon. Among other talks, there was one from Alex Heasley from Virgin Money Giving. Although I knew quite a lot of what she said already, it turns out that I had one thing in particular way off in terms of my assumption.
People are busy at work, I thought. Their inboxes will have 200-odd emails in them on a Monday morning. The last thing they want is to read one from me when they first get in, asking for money – especially when the likelihood is that there’s nowhere else they'd rather be. No, I'll email them at the weekend when they have free time – that's what I'll do.
In fact, according to Alex, the very opposite is true. The weekends are when people are out having fun or being with their family. They'll probably want to be away from their computer as much as possible. Yes, they may have 200 emails in their inbox on a Monday morning, but for that very reason – and the fact that they probably don't want to be there – they will do anything and everything they can to avoid starting work.
Research by Virgin Money Giving shows that Monday morning between 8am-11am is statistically the window when they see the most traffic on their website – the very opposite of what I thought.
So there we go – lesson learned. I may have this copywriting lark mastered to some degree or other, but simply producing great copy when it isn’t timed correctly is to miss a vital trick.
Ashley is a copywriter, editor, blogger and now a marathon runner
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Michael Tomes February 5th, 2014, at noon
No link to your sponsorship page Ashley ;-)