How To Make Your Good Work Stick

Whether you think it ruins the purity of your non-profit or activist work or not, it can be a good asset to learn how for-profit entities get themselves out there and maintain relevance in order to have your work do the same. Especially in an era where corporations are actively fighting against the desires of these non-profits and activist orgs, sometimes you need to beat them at their own promotional game. One of the most important ways to do so, is to establish a decent level of retention, or stickiness, to the content you’re creating to get the word out. While coined and popularized in the business marketing world, it shouldn’t be seen as shameful or selling out to utilize it for non-profit based means.

To start, stickiness can be defined as a person’s willingness to return to and prolong their usage and visits to an online site or platform. This can be incredibly important in order to get Google searches up, and therefore more traffic towards outreach for your cause. One of the most consistent pieces of advice I found in order to increase the stickiness of any online effort is to make sure whatever your making is of high quality. Be it the visual quality of photos or videos, the linguistic quality of text, or even the UI/UX quality if a full website is being created for your cause. Whatever you’re making, make it as good of quality as you can.

While UI/UX, photo, and video quality can be relatively self explanatory, making quality text that will improve the stickiness of your work is a bit more complicated. While nothing is set in stone, there are some methods of writing that can be utilized in order to make what someone is reading more eye catching and increase retention and them remembering what you wrote.

Unless your audience is incredibly specific and it is vital for the written piece to make sense, don’t use jargon. Try to simplify the language of how you explain your topic to people as much as you can without it coming off belittling. For a broad general audience, try to keep the writing to an 8th grade reading level. If you decide to focus your audience on those with college degrees, then you have leeway to bump it up to a 12th grade reading level if you wish. Avoid compound sentences, since a lack of breaks in sentences can exhaust a reader.

Regarding the actual content of the text itself, focus your discussions on already popular subject matters, but find an unexplored niche or angle within the subject matter that has rarely been discussed yet. When making an argument for or against something, provide non-hypothetical and relatable examples to support them. When possible, describe your subject matter in a way that involves all the human senses. Finally, always remember to back any claims or statements with easy to find, authoritative sources and data that is framed in the way it was intended to be used.