Web Copy: Get to the meat.

Flowery marketing copy is dead.  On the web, it’s best to get quickly to the point and talk to users as the real you.  First you need to know who you are talking to.  Let me explain:

I sat down last week with the executive director of a local non-profit to talk about how to make their website more effective at communicating with and serving their clients.

As I did my review of their site, I noticed that there was lots of copy about their mission, their vision and what they were trying to achieve but very few specifics about what the organizations actually did on a day-to-day basis.  The text was trying to speak to all their constituents at once.  As a result, it wasn’t speaking to any of them.

Finally I found the meat I was looking for buried in a resource section.  Dozens of pages of interesting and useful facts targeted to individual constituencies.  These overlooked “resources” were actually the type of content people wanted to read.  From there it was easy to break the site down into sections that had relevant information for each group of people.

The first step in creating compelling copy is to identify and define your users. In the web world, this is called created user personas. Once you’ve defined the people to whom you are speaking the focus of your copy suddenly becomes clear: you will talk about your organization differently to donors/investors than you will to clients. Make sure you’re clear about who you’re talking to and if possible create separate sections on the site for each of your user persona constituencies.

This is a theme I see in many of the organizations with whom I work: the words on their website don’t focus on any particular group and consequently read like a mashup of marketing copy. Mission, vision and values are great tools to steer your internal decisions, unfortunately they don’t always clearly convey what you are all about. They can make your website read like a grant application.

Don’t be shy about putting the real content right up front and sectioning off parts of your site based on your personas.

Once you’ve done this, you can focus your content on what matters to each group and get quickly to the meat.

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