Writing for Fundraising Success (www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com), Jeff Brooks offers these tips to improve the copy you write (or approve).

Write the call to action before you do anything else. Fundraising, says Brooks, is more about the destination than the journey. You’ll arrive a lot more successfully if you know where you’re going.

Think of 25 reasons why a donor should give to you. Then, he counsels, get rid of all the reasons that are about you and not the donor.

Ask, “How would The National Enquirer write this?” According to Brooks, The Enquirer knows the value of the amazing, the lurid, the outrageous, the unexpected — and it milks it. Are you doing that, he asks, or is your writing as colorless and purely factual as possible? The Enquirer’s approach gets more readers. It raises more funds too.

Ignore your brand guidelines. They’re all about you, not about your donors. They’re all about self-focused communication, Brooks asserts, and that will hurt your fundraising. “How can I say that, never having seen your brand guidelines?” he asks. “I’ve read a lot of nonprofit brand documents and not yet have [I] seen one that’s nontoxic to fundraising.”

Show, don’t tell. It’s easy to say that something is sad, or great, or special, or cutting-edge. Brooks reminds you to prove it, to give the facts that add up to those things.

Overdo it. Be too dramatic, or too emotional or too strong, he encourages. Most of the time you won’t overdo it at all. If you do, it’s a lot easier to tone it down than it is to pump it up.

Use your data. You know quite a bit about the people you’re writing to — their names, their cities, what and when they’ve given, and more. Brooks urges you to use those facts to make your copy more personal and relevant.

Forget what your English teachers told you. When writing fundraising copy, paragraphs don’t have to start with topic sentences. Passive voice is not all that bad, he says. Neither are sentence fragments.

Repeat yourself. Say what you want people to do again and again and again. You don’t know if they understood or even noticed it the first and second times. Hardly anyone starts at the beginning and reads straight through to the end.

Annoy yourself. You are not your donor. That’s one of the most important truths you can know, Brooks asserts. Messages that motivate donors very often will turn you off. Learn to make your own distaste a good barometer for effective fundraising