Recently, we were asked to speak at the 2024 CauseVox Summit for Personalized Impact about Building An Impactful Website to Inspire Action.
CauseVox is a donation platform helping NFPs secure more donors in less time. So it was only fitting that we tailored our presentation help the attendees secure more funding through clear messaging and streamlined user experiences.
Today we’re looking at the how to develop winning headlines for your organization. These rules are universal, so whether you are a not-for-profit or for—profit, we can all apply the same principles to our copywriting and write headlines that inspire action.
Read time: 3 mins
The Golden Circle
When writing winning headline copy, we have to take a few steps back in the process. First, it’s critical to understand the difference between your why, what and how. This is often a tripping hazard when it comes to good headline architecture, but one that’s always avoidable. This needs to be understood internally before we can effectively communicate it outwardly.
Your Golden Circle
WHY: the reason your organization was started
— This is often reflected your mission statement
WHAT: the pain points that our audience is experiencing, and what the organization is doing to ensure the WHY happens
HOW: the services and products we offer to solve the pain points
Once we have this, we can ask ourselves….
What is Job #1 for our website?
We need a clear picture of the goal that the website serves for our organization before we can answer what action we want users to take?
This is where copy becomes an extension of our website’s user experience. By answering to Job 1, we can guide users seamlessly to drive the results we want.
3 Steps to creating a personalized impact story for our audience.
To create inspiring headlines that convert, we need to do three things:
(1) Be a toddler: Ask, why? why? why?
Our WHY from the Golden Circle exercise should always tie back into your headlines. Now more than ever users what to know this! 79% of consumers buy based on values. This is the most impactful piece to create an emotional spark with the audience, if we don’t communicate WHY, then we’ve skipped an important step to creating an emotional connection with our audience.
(2) Connect impact to the users’s daily life
Explain to them them the impact they’re creating with their donation. Focus on the positives and eliminate barriers to the feelings of “sacrifice.
(3) Use the A-C-E Formula
Is it actionable? Is it clear? Is it emotional?
Using this formula for headline copy, we can let users know what you want them to do, and invite them to take the next step, side step limited attention spans and get right to the point and evoke empathy through a personalized message.
Case Study: Ending Starvation, Starting at Home
We chatted about an example of a not-for-profit that could have been converting more donations with a few simple copy tweaks and applying the Golden Circle formula.
