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It’s Urgent!

If it’s Thursday… it’s time for Three Things!

On Monday, I wrote about evidence that urgency is a necessary (but not sufficient) element of any call to action. In emails and conversation since I put up that post, several people have mentioned that the prescription is all good and well in theory, but quite difficult in practice.  How, they wondered, should one generate and/or convey urgency, when shouting is rude (even over email)?

The conversations were inspiration for this week’s Three Things: Three ways to create or convey urgency:

1. Build around YOUR calendar.  Everyone sends a December holiday appeal (and you should, too), but what dates are important just for your organization or your movement?  Is there a seminal event in your organizations’ history – the day the founder’s child was diagnosed, the day major authorizing legislation passed, the day a breakthrough was identified?  Build campaigns – with deadlines, matching opportunities, and anything else you can muster – around YOUR important dates, not just those on everyone’s calendar.
2. Countdown. Set the date, then make sure your donors or advocates knows how little time they have left to act.  The research indicates that without a looming deadline, people put things off for later because they have plenty of time.  Countdown via email, on your website, through your Twitter feed, in the mail, and in any other way you can.  Make sure everyone knows they don’t have plenty of time.
3. Make an obvious change in your communications. Ditch the fancy HTML header and go with plain text. Deploy a new surrogate. Build a special landing page.  Convey urgency by demonstrating that this ask is different from the others for you, as well as for your donors or activists.  It’s different enough that you didn’t have time to send a fancy email or took the time to put together a special web page.  It’s so different – so urgent – that you recruited someone special to talk about it.

There are myriad other ways to build urgency into your asks – what has worked (or not) for you?  Boast in the comments…

And that’s the Three Things for this week! Do you have Three Things you’d like to get off your chest? Shoot us an email – we’d love to feature your ideas in this space!