The Grandmother Test: How to Get Your Real Voice Back Into Your Fundraising

Most nonprofit leaders already know their writing sounds too formal.

They feel it when they reread an appeal before hitting send. Something’s off. It’s accurate. It covers everything it needs to cover. And it doesn’t sound like them.

The question isn’t whether the problem exists. It’s how it happened
— and how to fix it without starting from scratch.

How the Human Version Gets Edited Out

It doesn’t happen all at once.

It happens over years of grant applications that reward formal language. Board reviews that flag anything too personal. Communications committees that keep trimming until everything sounds credible and nothing sounds real.

By the time most nonprofit leaders sit down to write a donor appeal, they’ve absorbed so many rules about professional writing that the human version — the one that actually moves people — feels almost unprofessional to put on paper.

The result is a specific kind of flat. Not bad writing. Writing that could belong to anyone.

“Our organization provides nutritional support services to elderly
residents experiencing food insecurity.”

That sentence didn’t start flat. Someone who cares deeply about hungry seniors in their county wrote it. But by the time it cleared the grant template, the board review, and the communications sign-off, the person behind it disappeared.

That’s the pattern worth interrupting.

The Grandmother Test

Here’s the simplest restoration tool I know.

Before you finalize anything you’re about to send to a supporter, try this: explain your work out loud — as though you’re talking to someone you actually know. Your grandmother. Your neighbor. A friend who asks what you do at a party.

Say that version first. Write it down. Then refine it.

The version that comes out of your mouth before you’ve had time to formalize it is almost always closer to the truth than the version you’d write at your desk.

“Our organization provides nutritional support services to elderly
residents experiencing food insecurity.”

becomes

“We make sure seniors in our county don’t go hungry.”

“We facilitate mentorship connections for youth in under-resourced
communities.”

becomes

“We connect kids who’ve never seen their future to adults who can
help them see it.”

“Our family preservation program works to reduce out-of-home
placements.”

becomes

“We keep families together when the system is trying to pull them
apart.”

Plain. Human. Specific enough to picture.

Not dumbed down. Clear. And clear is what moves people.

Making It a Team Practice

The Grandmother Test works on a single sentence. It works even better as an organizational habit.

When a leadership team holds this standard consistently — asking before every appeal, every email, every grant narrative: would my grandmother understand this, and would she feel something? — the writing starts to shift at the source, not just in final edits.

Program staff begin capturing moments in plain language. Executive directors stop translating their passion into formal-speak before putting it on paper. Development teams spend less time softening the official version and more time starting from the human one.

That’s not just better writing. That’s a communication
infrastructure that compounds over time.

One honest sentence, said out loud before it’s written down. That’s where the repair starts.

Try It on Something You Already Have

Pick one piece of writing you already have — an email, a paragraph from your homepage, the opening of your last appeal.

Read it out loud. Ask whether it sounds like a person or a process.

If it sounds like a process, run the Grandmother Test. Say the same idea out loud, to someone you actually know, without looking at what you wrote. Write down what came out.

That version is probably closer to what your supporters need to hear.

The Generosity Engine Reliable Revenue Roadmap is a free 9-step overview of the system behind this work. If you want to understand how organizational voice connects to a larger fundraising structure — one built on donor psychology, clarity, and sustainable revenue — it’s a good place to begin. Download it here: https://nonprofit411.info/ffst_map

A few questions worth returning to:

• When you read your last appeal out loud, did it sound like a person
  or a process?

• Where in your organization does the human version get replaced by
  the official one — and at what point in the review process?

• What would it look like to make the Grandmother Test a standard
  step before anything goes to supporters?

Data and sector references in this series draw from Nonprofit411
practitioner experience, Candid, Blackbaud, and Giving USA.