Lifting/lowering response rates
File under: Passing 4 easy tests
How to kill a good message with a bad color choice
The murder weapon? Low contrast
Don Trembath writes cases for the Hospital Foundation at the University of Alberta, a research hub with international ambitions in health care and other vital areas.
A couple of times a year Don will call, looking for an outsider's opinion re: some health case he's trying to get out the door.
Don gave me permission to share with you a new case. It's impressive. The research is supremely important to vast numbers. I had almost no suggestions to offer.
Couple of things maybe....
See below: this was the original cover of the case.
The cover passes the "3-second test." It grabbed my attention. It got me interested FAST. It has huge human relevance. And the headline offers an amazing promise ... backing by a beckoning photo (that's a real wife and mother with Alzheimer's; her story is told throughout the brochure).
But it didn't pass the "you test."
Obviously, your cover is the first thing most people see. It's an incomparable opportunity to really hook me. The subhead says: "...being part of the team that makes this happens." Intellectually, it's a great offer.
But does "team" have the same penetrating power as the most important word in English-language sales, the word "you"?
It needs to be my story, not your org.'s story.
Forgive me for shamelessly quoting from a book Simone Joyaux and I co-published: Keep Your Donors, page 200.
"... your brain is a creature of habit. You're addressed as 'you' countless times from the day you're born — by family, friends, teachers, doctors, strangers, and eventually by the nothing-if-not-persistent world of advertising.... [So your] brain quickly learns to respond to this simple stimulus. Your brain — involuntarily and automatically — pays a bit more attention whenever 'you' is uttered or written. 'You' becomes glue. And for the rest of your life, that one brief word keeps you interested and reading."
So Don did a tweak, introducing the word "you" on the cover, in the subhead. See below.
Yet something's still not quite right ... due to a color choice:
The subhead is set in dark purple against a black background.
Maybe the designer was trying to visually link the thing seen on the top of the page (the foundation's logo, which contains the same purple) with the last thing seen (the subhead), thus drawing the eye across the whole page and its arresting headline and photo.
If so, low color contrast ruined the plan.
The subhead in dark purple fails the "squint test."(Simple test: squint ... and what can you still read easily? It was the earliest test a professional designer taught me.)
There's almost zero contrast between the foreground (a subhead set in dark purple type) and the background (mostly black). Which means the most important sales word on this cover, you, is hard to spot.
The high value of high contrast
We're exposed to tens of thousands of words every day: it's brutal. To quickly traverse, absorb, understand, accept (or dismiss) this mountain of language, average eyes and brains REQUIRE high contrast.
If there's an immutable law in the donor comms' universe, it's this: never serve your audience ANY mental labor. Dark purple type on a black background is the epitome of mental labor (or, as Don would spell it, labour).
Was the subhead set as white type against a black background, as the headline was, all would be fine. No labor.
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As for the insides? See below. The image shows pages 2 and 3 of this 4-page brochure.
It passes the "skim test." Don't bother trying to read the small print. Just look at the headlines. They're brilliant. There's a true-life love story. There's a reassurance headline about the science: "It's real." And then there's an invite that's absolutely one of the best I've seen: "Take your place in medical history." That could have been the cover subhead as well.
Here's the back cover, where the story concludes with a daughter's hope for other moms:
University Hospital Foundation? May you raise a trillion ... or whatever's really needed to conquer Alzheimer's. Like the rest of you, I've lost so many dear brains, loved ones, personalities.
And of course we all wonder: "Am I next?"
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