Why some letters outpull others.

In 1975 1 was copy chief at American Fund-Raising Services, then presided over by its founder, Andy Andrews, one of direct mail's few authentic geniuses.

At that time we were managing the membership program of The Cousteau Society. The Society was new and had experienced phenomenal

No direct-mail company likes somebody else's package to outpull its own. The Walsh package predated our management and we wanted badly to beat it. We threw everything we could think of at it, with zero success.

Frustrated and angry by our inability to beat the Walsh package, Andrews once said at a staff meeting, "Well, we all know coPY makes no difference."

But if copy makes no difference, whY was the Walsh package beating our brains out?

The Walsh letter began: "A friend told me a curious story I should like to share with you."

Then as now, tailoring letter copy to different lists was popular, so we tested what we thought was a slight variation on that line in a mailing to subscribers to Skin Diver magazine:

A friend told me a curious story I should like to share with you. I thought that as a fellow skin diver, you would be especially interested in it."

Response to that package, which as I recall had no other changes in it, was roughly half that of the control.

Why did what seemed to us a minor and sensible alteration in its first paragraph cut response in half.?

I think it may have been because people who got a letter from a great teller of tales, Jacques Cousteau, that said, "A friend told me a curious story I should like to share with you," felt like reading on.

Walsh got the reader's attention. The "as a fellow skin diver..." phrase just got in the way. The words Walsh chose were simple, direct and personal and engaged the reader right away. The phrase we added distracted the reader from the story and perhaps changed his mood from someone ready for a story to someone getting ready to say no to something.

It's been demonstrated so many times: People respond to fund-raising letters that tell stories. Do you approach the writing of your own fund-raising letters in a storytelling frame of mind? Do you hear good stories inside your institution? And can you tell them well? Because that's the other thing you should know about the Walsh package - Walsh is a great storyteller.