Great. Thank you. Okay, here's another question about page length. If recipients decide within the first three paragraphs of an appeal message—you must have said that, Tom—why do two to four page appeal letters test the best and are the most successful?
Man, is that a gotcha?
Yeah, it's not a gotcha. We don't know why longer letters work better. We just know that they do. I mean, there's all kinds of theories, and my sort of most cynical theory is length of letters signifies importance to the reader, even though they don't read it. That might be the thing. I kind of hope it's not, but it might be the reason. We just know that it's smarter to write a longer letter. You're more likely to do better with a longer letter. We just we don't know what they do. I mean, with email, we get some hints what people do, but even then we don't really know.
Yeah, and remember the slide that talked about the bouncing eye? This is people don't read these four page letters, 1-2-3-4 and I'm done. They're looking all over the place. And we know this from eye motion studies. So you know the fact is, they may read a couple paragraphs on the first page, they may read the PS on the fourth page, and that brings them to their decision whether they're going to give or not.
Can I give you a story about how I sort of learned this? Okay? And I've told this before, so it stopped me, if I've told it here, but when I was young, starting in my career, at one point, I'd written this letter. It was a four page letter, and I was really proud of it. And I said, I'm going to show my mom. So I took it to her, and I showed it to her, and I didn't say, Mom, I've written this letter. I said, "Hey, what do you think of this letter?" And she did what we know a lot of donors do, which is, you go to the back and you read— you know, you look for the signature, and then you read the PS. Okay, she did that. I was watching her the whole time. And then she proceeded to read the whole letter backwards, backwards, paragraph by paragraph, going up the page and into page three, starting at the bottom. She read the whole thing, but backwards. And I thought at that moment, okay, she's she was a little eccentric, you know, but, but I realized we don't control this transaction. We can't. We start at the beginning, and we read every word all the way through to the end, and we're thinking about structure and in order, that's not what donors are doing. They're doing any old thing. Probably the most common thing is they hop around like Tom described—that's probably more likely what they do. But what if you knew that, you know, 1% of all your donors read your letter backwards like my mom did? Boy, I kind of rethought how you write. Is that it better work backwards, too.
