To engage your readers, you want to pull your ideas down from the ether and express them through the things of the world. Copy that’s abstract won’t grab donors. Verbal images will.

A verbal image is different from a story. Fundraising stories are narratives — this happens, then that happens and so on. A verbal image, even though it may have some narrative elements, is essentially a snapshot — a succinct, sharply focused picture that readers immediately get. And that’s where it draws its power.

A verbal image is concrete. You can write in your appeal, for example, that your charity has 1,000 pounds of medical supplies to distribute. But that’s abstract. It’s unlikely to have much of an impact, because your donor can’t envision 1,000 pounds. Instead, you can write that your charity has boxes and boxes of antibiotics, bandages, vaccines, stethoscopes and crutches, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, filling up the entire warehouse, just waiting to be shipped. That’s concrete. It’s something your donors can see in their mind’s eye.

You can use verbal images to make just about every part of your offer and your appeal more compelling for donors, keeping in mind that the images should be based in fact and not just made-up.

Just as you use photos and other visual images, you can make your appeals more compelling and more effective with verbal images. To pull donors in, don’t just say it. Show it with verbal imagery.