As anyone who followed @MayorRahm and @BronxZoosCobra knows, you can practically write novels on Twitter. Poetry and haiku- it’s a no brainer. The 140-character format just lends itself to these types of expression.
But does it have a use in the formal, even hide-bound world of traditional philanthropy? Funding agencies want brevity, true, but they also want you to follow strict application guidelines and formats. Stray from the instructions and you’re in the trash heap without ever getting read.
When I started using Twitter, I set myself the constraint of never using abbreviations or substitutions. While I’ve strayed from this occasionally, for the most part if I can’t say it in regular English within that parameter, I just didn’t post the comment. It’s an amazing exercise in really understanding what you’re trying to say. So, as came out in a Twitter chat among fundraising professionals several months ago, why not apply this to fund appeals and grant applications?
Sticking with regular English, of couse, is also a good guideline when formulating grant narratives– watching out for jargon, repetition and excess verbiage is Grantwriting 101. But I took it a step further; I went back into all my templates and tweeted the pitch as the first line. 140 characters to tell that funder my need, impact and benefit to them.
I’m not talking about posting these on Twitter. I simply took the constraint–say what you need to say in 140 characters–and applied it to my case. From there I elaborated, just like any good lead sentence in a paragraph.
What I found was that I was able to make my introductions say what I wanted them to say, in dynamic, compelling language. Give it a try. Sometimes it’s best to say as little as possible.
Juno Consulting 
What a fantastic idea. It inspired me to think: why not tweak the first line of your company’s bio into 140 characters? It would be quite a challenge, but also a lesson in impact brevity.
@askdebra
I’ve got a friend who had a professor who would only allow 2 uses of the verb to be – in any form – per page, to encourage the use of action verbs. Similarly, a helpful exercise.
I love the short form, and have fallen in love with the “short story in six words” exercise (learned it from Mark Rovner). Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story, “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn,” you come up with an entire story (or subject line or title) in 6 words or less. (This may be urban legend according to Snopes, but a good exercise nonetheless.) Of course, anyone’s who’s been through a tagline process knows the excruciating task of picking those few precious words.
“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal (often misattributed to Mark Twain)