A cure for fundraising acronym agita: Why those clever initials aren’t the shortcut you think

October 6, 2014

The following guest post from Lisa Sargent was originally seen in The Loyalty Letter (you should totally sign up).

A fundraising friend of mine recently sent me a thank you letter someone had sent her for review. And that’s when I saw it, the same snappy ‘all-cap’ acronym, over and over, all over the page. Here’s what I told her:

(Disclaimer: all names changed to protect the innocent!)

Whatever Acronyms are handy, I know. But the fact is, the brain — make that your donor’s brain — doesn’t process them the same way as names.

So by using only the acronym, FFoP, for your organization — Faithful Friends of the Poor — your writer sucks power out of the thank-you in two ways:

1. You make your donor work too hard: don’t make him/her noodle it out, and do not assume h/she knows what FFoP means, even if your nonprofit’s name is in clear view on the letterhead. (Assuming they know is a cognitive bias the Heath Brothers call “The Curse of Knowledge.”)

2. You lose the inherent power of your name, especially true of faith-based organizations. (For a cool experiment on the power of names, see this article from Drunk Tank Pink author Adam Alter.) Faithful Friends of the Poor packs a lot more emotional punch than FFoP, don’t you agree? Your brain likes it too.

Cures for fundraising acronym agita are as follows:

1. Write the name out at least once wherever you use an acronym, and officially you should write it as Faithful Friends of the Poor (FFoP) the first time.

I don’t always do this. For example, again using my client Merchants Quay Ireland, we do as follows:

2. And/or: Alternate spelling out the full name, the acronym MQI, AND the half-name, Merchants Quay. Why?

Because that’s also how donors refer to it.

Enough said.

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