Support. Give. Donate. Which one is best for year-end fundraising (including #GivingTuesday)?
The answer, of course (and annoying as it is) is–it depends.
As you can see, all of them show up in the red category, meaning they’re used a whole heckuva a lot. So that’s not so awesome. #Drat And they’re used pretty equally by all sub-sectors. #DoubleDrat
Let’s look at results for support:
For give:
And for donate:
But don’t despair! There’s a litany of data that drives The Wordifier–the tool itself is just the tip of a worderific iceberg!–so I took a look at the individual results:
- Support is used most often
- Give second most often
- Donate third most often…by a pretty wide margin
So, if you’re wondering which word would stand out the most, it would be ‘donate’. Because it’s used the least. But it’s kind of a blah word.
‘Give’ is used way more often than ‘donate’, but it has the virtue of being direct. Even directive. So when coupled with something like ‘now’ (e.g. Give now), it could be an excellent call to action because people tend to respond well to simple, direct language, especially on social media.
There’s not much to recommend support as a verb to use in your year-end fundraising efforts (or your fundraising efforts period). It’s vague, over-used and boooooooring.
The Wordifier can be a great tool for seeing if you’re using the best words possible. But it’s only one tool among many that you should use. Two others I swear by are:
- The Hemmingway app, which is based largely, although not exclusively, on the Flesch Kincaide Reading Ease research.
- The Headline Analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute. I just discovered this one and it’s–wow–super spiffy.
Now you can venture forth armed with data to drive your verb-erific decision-making. Verb on, my friends, verb on!