We received an e-mail the other day that illustrates how organizations can write more effective solicitations. It asks us to support a new credit reporting system, a genuinely worthy cause. All it needs is a more worthy message, one the average reader can understand. We have some suggestions.

The release currently begins:

The Political and Economic Research Council (PERC), the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) seek your support in helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US by endorsing efforts to permit the full inclusion of fully-reported non-financial payment data in Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulated consumer credit files.

Come again?

Try this. Move the alphabet soup to the end of the release. If you make readers care about the case, they’ll find out who you are. Then, explain the problem in plain English. Instead of “helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US,” why not say, “Because many poor people pay their bills in cash, they don’t build up a credit history. This means they can only borrow from payday lenders, who slam them with insanely high interest rates.” A blander version of that statement appears about halfway through the current release, but most readers won’t get that far.

Here’s the point: Before readers can become interested in helping your cause, they have to understand why the status quo is no good. Put the problem up front and only offer the solution after you’ve explained it.

(Note that this is the opposite of the advice we’d offer an organization sending out a press release announcing success. For that type of communication you’d want to mimic the classic newspaper “inverted pyramid” construction, where the most newsworthy information comes first.)

The rest of the release is generally clear and well-written. For instance:

Non-financial payment data, both positive and negative, would be provided by utilities and telecommunications firms to national credit bureaus. Currently, only negative data, or delinquent payments, are reported. We believe that consumers should be rewarded for timely and accurate payments, not simply punished for delinquencies and defaults as is currently the prevailing practice.

The release could make an even stronger case by saying, as in the sign-on letter that a better credit reporting system could have mitigated the credit crisis. Not everyone cares that much about low-income consumers, but the broader economy matters to us all.

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