Something possessed an Agitator reader to share this amazing goof with us. We’ll keep this person anonymous to protect the guilty, as well as the organization, to spare it (you’d all recognize it) the embarrassment.
Here it is:
"While with the [organization], I screwed up a letter back in the day of literally cutting and pasting. Using old boards, I pasted the first three pages of a letter about [Issue A], got distracted, and failed to paste in the new page four. So the old p4, about [Totally unrelated Issue B], remained and about half a million were printed.
I noticed that response was depressed about five percent and then noticed the error. Not one recipient pointed it out. Moral: even if it is a four-page letter, make the close on the top half of the first sheet. All the rest is just fluff. Oh, and have a strong final paragraph and PS, which are not necessarily about the issue.
PS. I never told my boss about the screwup. I was the only one at [organization] who noticed. From then on, I was much more relaxed in dealing with the bureaucratic editing of letters. Give me the first few paragraphs and you can do (almost) whatever you want in the middle of page three."
Whoa! "Got distracted" ?! OK, maybe there was an earthquake. But still …
There are a number of lessons to be learned here, but I’m not sure this culprit got them.
Does someone want to help him/her out?
Maybe start with … would you have "’fessed up? How would you react as the boss? What about the writer’s valuation of pages 2, 3, and 4 of a fundraising letter? Do you think this mistake cost any members? What "quality control" should in place? Are you this cynical?
Feel free to share a mistake of your own … but only if you include something you learned from it.
Tom
P.S. Note: this was a flat-out bonehead mistake, not a test that didn’t pan out. There’s no blame or shame in testing a considered hypothesis.
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“pages 2, 3, and 4 of a fundraising letter”
You mean four-page fundraising letters (apart from stewardship pieces to major donors) are expected to elicit an action? Four pages is a newsletter — if you want my attention, there’d better be six different options for involvement in that much wasted paper.
I agree with Lissa. I find it hard to believe that any organization — even the big ones — would use a 4-page solicitation…ever. Your confessor accidently found out something that seems quite obvious: people don’t read that much verbiage. Nor should they have to. Short and powerful is my mantra when it comes to these things.
“Oops!” can be a great carrier teaser for paper mail or subject line for email.
Like most everyone, I’ve had to do the occasional remail after something screwed up to a royal degree. In almost every case, the “corrective” mail did as well or better than the gaffe package.
But in each case, the organization never apologized. No “I’m sorry if you were baffled by this grievous error”… no blame was accepted or assigned.
The lead was just “Oops” … we goofed. And as much as I hate passive structure and politicians who dodge blame, “Mistakes were made” has worked wonderfully well.
Our donors are on our side. If anything, our “oops” humanizes our efforts, taking them out of the arena of junk mail and back to the corral of personal correspondence. No need to blame or even explain. Every donor has done an “oops” and will understand.
A great mistake: the printing plates got switched in some screwball way so the letter read Page 1, Page 1, page 4, page 4. “Oops!”
Since we write complete asks for contributions with rationale and emotion on every page, donors understood the problem and gave at a normative rate.
The printer offered to do a “make-good”, free printing, but we still had to pay postage. Worth a shot? Absolutely. Put an “Oops!” on the carrier, open the letter with a brief “gosh darn a goof!”, replicate the rest of the letter, and the make-good “oops” letter pulled in more revenue than the original… and a higher net revenue since no printing costs.
I think most folks don’t read the whole letter. However, I think the fact that no one pointed out the error doesn’t mean that no one noticed it. I suspect they noticed it and thought–”if they don’t care about their image, why should I?” Ouch–these donors don’t feel responsible for the agency. That’s a bad sign.
@ Lissa and Anne – don’t assume that a four page letter is a waste. It’s always good to test. Perhaps a two page letter v the four page?
At a previous organization where I worked, most of our letters were four pages so we could touch on a bit of a few things we did so as to not allienate anyone if it was a single topic on a program they may not support. We had to talk about a lot of programs or basically say nothing at all.
As for the person who originally sent this. Regardless of how big (or small) the mistake, if there is any outward consequence, you should have disclosed it to those that needed to know – e.g. your boss.
It’s always better to inform people and decide on the best way to correct it, move forward, and put processes in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.