By: Bob McKinnon, President, and Allyson Conwell, Project Director

These days, it seems everyone is competing for something – funding, awareness, media coverage. The need for foundations and nonprofits to deliver powerful communications is at an all-time high.

Fortunately for all of us, there’s abundant research guiding us as we produce these messages. We don’t know about you, but we’re wonks for communications research. We know writing is clearly an art, but research and sound science can inform the process.  

Many of us are already applying lessons from linguistics and neuroscience to help us shape messages. And many also invest precious time and resources to test specific messages with various audiences.

The end product is often a messaging guide complete with best practices and talking points. We share these internally and within our field with the hope that they will apply them to subsequent pieces of communications.

This has its limitations, of course. Too often we fall back on old habits or others in our organization question the research and feel as though we are “dumbing things down.”

Through a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have developed a custom built natural language software that works to address these challenges. VIOOLY distills years of research and communications best practices into one tool that analyzes your writing and shows you what your audiences actually see when they read it.

It’s basically like spell check, except instead of showing spelling mistakes, it tells you what in your writing may be keeping someone else from understanding the impact of your work. 

Intrigued? Skeptical? We were too.

When we first started this project, we had intended to address some of the bigger misperceptions about foreign aid. Organizations like the Gates Foundation are making incredible strides in global development, but their messages of success aren’t getting through to audiences.

For example, most people think the U.S. gives up to 30% of its budget to help other countries. In truth, it’s less than one percent. More troubling, too many think giving this money is largely a waste of resources and time.

Changing perceptions is never easy, but when we started exploring natural language processing software, we uncovered a way to make it a little less challenging.

By customizing this software, we found it was possible to check or “proof” writing to find common issues that get in the way of people understanding the impact of your work. Issues like readability and tone that affect people’s perceptions of what you say. VIOOLY highlights this text and shows you what may or may not work well in connecting with audiences.  

A pilot study that is still ongoing with leading global development organizations has shown that using VIOOLY for even a few minutes can improve communication measures by up to 30% — meaning more people understand the work being achieved and become more engaged in the issues. Most people would count that as a win-win.

While this tool was created specifically for the foreign aid community, many of its features address issues that apply to all causes (such as word complexity, jargon use, and data).  Importantly, we’ve also identified ways to customize new analytics to apply research related to specific causes.

Whether you work on issues related to health, education, inequality, or climate change, and if you have research that points to “what and how to effectively talk about your issue,” then chances are we can customize software to ensure your organization and partners can easily apply that learning.

If you’d like to see it in action for yourself, schedule a 15-minute session with us at The Lab. We’ll give you a demonstration of how the tool works and you can learn more about the future of messaging development. You can even take VIOOLY for a test drive by bringing an example of your own communications. During your demo, you will be able to cut and paste anything from a tweet to an annual report, and VIOOLY will show you how well it’s connecting with your audience.