Your United Way Needs a TLDR!

As a member of Gen Z, I was raised on the internet. And part of being raised on the internet includes learning the internet lingo. IYKYK (if you know, you know), TTYL (talk to you later), LOL (laugh out loud), ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing), and of course TLDR (too long, didn’t read).

TLDR has always been an interesting aspect of internet culture to me. One of the main places you’ll see TLDRs are on Reddit. Reddit is a website that was designed to create spaces for members of different groups and communities to come together on “subreddits” and discuss different aspects of their hobbies, interests, and lives. Members are able to write posts to these subreddits and often they can get rather long. This is where the TLDR comes in. TLDRs are written by the post author at the end of their post, summarizing in one or two sentences the entire post so that those with limited time can get the gist of what was being said without having to read the whole post.

Often United Ways try and communicate a lot of different information to their donors and community members. They try to talk about statistics, results, programs that United Way is running, programs that United Way funds, volunteer opportunities, upcoming events, asking for donations, highlighting companies during campaign, and the list goes on and on. Like Redditors (those who use the website Reddit), many donors and community members don’t feel like, or have the time to, read every bit of information on your website or in your materials. Your United Way needs a TLDR. But how do you make one?

There is an easy way to write a TLDR and that’s by remembering a different acronym, IAR. IAR stands for Issue, Actions, and Results.

Issue: The first part of a TLDR is to figure out what issue you are talking about. What is the subject of the two sentence summary of your United Way. You will need to pick one issue or problem that your United Way is trying to solve in your community. This could be any number of things including, but not limited to: poverty, hunger, third-grade reading, graduation rates, kindergarten readiness, homelessness, etc. It is important to note that you can have multiple TLDRs that you give to different groups, but each one should only focus on one issue for clarity.

Actions: Next, you will want to include the different actions that your United Way is taking to impact the issue you selected. These can include direct actions, such as an in-house program run by United Way or indirect actions, such as local agencies your United Way funds in relation to the issue. You can select more than one action, but we would encourage you to keep to three or less.

Results: Finally, you will want to share the results of the actions your United Way is taking to address the issue. Again, these results can come from your United Way’s own programming or from partner agencies.

If you would like to learn more about IAR, you can watch our webinar The Simplest Way to Explain What Your United Way Does.

Once you have identified your issue, actions, and results, you are ready to create your two or three sentence TLDR to better help donors and community members understand your work quickly.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need TLDRs. Everyone would have the time and desire to read your entire website and understand every aspect of your United Way’s work. But unfortunately, that isn’t realistic. People are busy and they need an easy to digest message about what United Way does. Creating a TLDR will help you do that. So go forth with your new internet lingo knowledge and create TLDRs!

P.S. We at Perspectives have spent the first month of 2023 updating our own work. Part of that has included switching the platform that we use to send out our blog posts. Starting with our next blog post we will be using our new system to mail our posts to your inbox. If you are already subscribed you will automatically be set up to receive our blog posts from our new system. That being said, keep an eye on your inbox (or check your spam folder) on February 23, 2023 and let us know if you do not receive our next blog post. You can email us at info@focusedperspectives.com if any problems arise. Thank you for being a blog subscriber!