If you’re a researcher, you’re a writer. You have to be. In order to convey the facts you’ve dug up in the course of doing actual research, you have to translate those facts into words that your audience can understand and, almost as importantly, that your audience wants to read. Your audience, more often than not, is fundraisers, and writing for them is a skill unto itself. Knowing how to write for fundraisers – and, more specifically, your fundraisers – can save you time and consternation.

In this article, we’ll discuss a few ways to make your writing more relevant and meaningful to fundraisers, so it will be of the most use to researchers in shops which employ a narrative voice in their reporting (as opposed to a bulleted list-type approach), and it will focus mainly on subject biographies, which often comprise the narrative “meat” of a research report.

First of all: get to know your fundraisers.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but we all know (or have been, or are right this minute) a researcher who would rather spend hours doggedly searching for a fact when a quick phone call to someone who’s actually met the subject (i.e., the fundraiser) will fill in that blank in a matter of seconds. Go ahead, get to know them. They (usually) won’t bite. You’ll learn how they approach their work, and that, in turn, can inform how you approach yours. Are they all business and like get to the “ask” right away? Or do they prefer a long cultivation before even broaching the subject of a gift? What do they care about? What don’t they care about? In the end, knowing how a fundraiser uses the information you provide will save you time and energy. Most writers, such as journalists, technical writers, etc. don’t have the privilege of being able to communicate directly with their entire audience, so take advantage of this. A brief meeting can save you countless hours of work in the future, and it just may make you look pretty good in the fundraiser’s eyes.

Keep it short.

“The longer, the better” is something you will never, ever hear from a fundraiser. Most are busy, and they’d rather not have to pore through an exhaustive biography of a donor if a few short, expertly-assembled points will do. That doesn’t mean you can’t employ a narrative voice, of course – just remember that in this particular format, for this particular audience, you are a journalist, not a novelist. On a related note…

Keep it simple.

You probably wouldn’t be doing this kind of work if you weren’t a decent writer, so don’t feel pressured to dress up your writing with flowery prose or clichés. You can tell the story you need to tell without either, and being overwrought with your language will almost certainly bring on glazed eyes. Again, you’re a journalist, not a novelist.

For example, don’t write this:

Ms. Morganstern is, by virtue of her situation, vis-à-vis her familial links to two of the most prosperous oil families of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, in addition to a well-publicized affaire de coeur with an infamous Spanish viscount, a philanthropist of nearly unparalleled standing in a craggy, undulating section of the American mid-Atlantic. She is widely considered to be the grande dame of society in a rustic berg once known as “The Electric City.”

Instead, write this:

Ms. Morganstern is a prominent Scranton philanthropist.

This is an exaggeration to make a point, of course, but most of us have come across something approaching it once or twice in this work. (Or we’ve been guilty of it ourselves.) Don’t let words get in the way of what you want to say. Don’t say “erroneous” if “wrong” will suffice.

Sometimes keeping it simple requires you to disregard language from your source material. It’s always nice to find a complete bio online, but be careful when cutting and pasting. Delete anything that could be construed as “marketing language,” which usually appears as superlative statements designed to impress and attract business. Is the subject referred to as “the best” or “the most” or “the ultimate” at something, with no citation (such as a magazine’s “best of” list) to back it up? Leave it out. If you really feel it’s an important thing for your fundraiser to know, put it in quotes, and cite the source (such as the subject’s company’s web site).

Don’t bury the lede.

Get the important stuff up front. If a donor is an heir to a multi-billion-dollar fortune, for heaven’s sake, get that out early. A detail like that is possible to front-load even when you’re writing in reverse chronological order, which a lot of shops favor for biographies. It’s a frustrating reality that every word we write is not always read by the fundraiser. If they’re in a hurry, they might just give it a skim, so you want to make sure the most critical details are right on top.

For instance, instead of:

Mr. Patterson is a landscape painter and philanthropist.

(Then, six paragraphs later, after details about his prep school grades and unremarkable Pez dispenser collection…)

He is the sole heir to the Taste-E-Muffin baked goods fortune, which was estimated in 2012 by Forbes to be just over $350 trillion.

Try this:

Mr. Patterson, a landscape painter and philanthropist, is the sole heir to the Taste-E-Muffin baked goods fortune, which was estimated in 2012 by Forbes to be just over $350 trillion.

(You can go ahead and lose the stuff about prep school and Pez.)

Keep yourself out of it.

The way you happen to feel about a subject, her wealth, her history, or her life choices is irrelevant, and should never be included in a report. (The sole exception to this is if your shop has a portion of your report form set aside for researcher analysis, but even here, your analysis should be professional, unemotional, and entirely supported by facts.) Hopefully, none of us would ever write “Mr. Donor is a miserly jerk who would never stoop to support our organization,” but subjective language can be much more innocuous.

For example, this will not do:

Ms. Rarity’s enormous art collection includes some of Marc Chagall’s finest pieces, as well as beautiful works by the impressionist masters Monet and Degas.

“Enormous” is way too subjective. If you really want to say how big the collection is, go for more tame adjectives like “sizeable” or “considerable.” As for the works themselves: whose opinion is it that her Chagall holdings are some of the artist’s finest? Or that the Monet and Degas works are beautiful? If it’s a critic’s opinion, cite the critic. If it’s your opinion, leave it out. As for Monet and Degas, a lot of people, even those of us who haven’t taken an art appreciation class, know those names, and know they’re a big deal. Calling out well-known artists as “impressionist masters” is irrelevant (and slightly showy).

Let’s rewrite it like this:

Ms. Rarity’s sizeable art collection includes works by Chagall, Monet, and Degas.

Of course, all of the above points are subject to tweaking, given your fundraisers’ particular wants and needs. But keeping it short and simple, not burying the lede, and leaving your emotions out of your writing can provide a solid base on which to build. As long as all the facts are there, no one will accuse you of using too much brevity.