Writing letters at harvest pace

Fallowmark Credit lends to farmers and waits a full season to be paid back. Its letters did not wait for anything. Reminders went out on the first of every month, in the tone a phone company uses for a missed bill.

We started with the farming year instead of a list of adjectives. Planting, growing, harvest, frost. For each season we wrote down what a borrower is doing, what they worry about and what they have no time to read. Then we moved every letter to the season where it would be welcome, or at least not resented.

Nothing urgent goes out at harvest now. The repayment reminder arrives with the first frost, when the crop is sold and the evenings are long. The words changed less than the timing did, and complaints fell by more than a third in the first year.