Sample Donation Fundraising Request Letters and Thank You Letters

Do lift notes still lift response rates to fundraising letters? Yes, as long as they stand out. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email from a fundraiser who is about to lose her job. Her board of directors has decided they cannot afford her salary. They see her salary as just a line item in the budget, one found under the heading of Costs rather than Income. They blame their decision on the recession. I blame the board. And I sympathize with my fellow fundraiser. Read the rest of this entry »

Your organization needs to find more major donors for two vital reasons. First, major donor fundraising is the most cost-effective use of your time and money, costing somewhere between two cents and fifteen cents to raise a dollar. Second, many organizations are finding that the top 20 percent of their donors contribute 80 percent of the charities income. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Donate to Your Competitors One of the quickest ways to learn the craft of direct One of the quickest ways to learn the craft of direct mail fundraising is to donate money to your strongest competitors. Pick the Top 10 organizations you admire and mail them a donation of at least $20. Then watch your mailbox. What you’ll get is a correspondence course in raising money with paper and postage. Read the rest of this entry »

The main difference between direct mail fundraising and major gift fundraising is simple. Direct mail fundraising solicits small gifts from many people while major gift fundraising solicits large gifts from few people. One tactic solicits on paper, the other in person. Here are some tips to remember when you begin a major gift program. Read the rest of this entry »

The key to securing large gifts from your donors is relationships. Relationships that are warm, professional and mutually beneficial. But how do you nurture or cultivate those relationships with prospective donors who have little or no connection with your organization and your cause? Read the rest of this entry »

I was handed a challenge last week. If I am brave enough I will accept it.

I taught a class at a college in Toronto. The professor invited me to teach his students about direct mail fundraising envelopes. So I spoke at length and, with examples, class participation, question-and-answer sessions, brainstorming and group exercises, taught the basics of envelope dimensions, indicias, envelope teaser copy, envelope graphics and more. The students were engaging and creative. We had a hoot. Read the rest of this entry »

How long should your next fundraising letter be? One page? Two pages? Six pages? What is the correct length for a direct mail appeal?

I’ll tell you in a minute. Read the rest of this entry »

What would you do if I broke into your office at midnight, sat down at your computer, and jumbled the mailing addresses of 1,200 of your current donors so they became undeliverable? Read the rest of this entry »

My wife can still remember the name of her math teacher from grade four. You know why? Because he, um, paused every few words, and ah, ahhhhh, you know, ahh, added an ahh to what he was saying, ah, so that Ruth, was driven to, um, distraction. Read the rest of this entry »

If your non-profit organization is typical, your direct mail program raises 50 percent of its revenue with one mailing-the Christmas appeal. More people give more money to the “Holiday Season” letter than they give to any other single mailing all year. Your goal this Christmas is to persuade these generous donors to give again. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want your fundraising letters to sound more vigorous, get tense. The present tense, that is.

Listen to the sports news on the radio and you’ll hear the announcer saying, “tomorrow the Atlanta Falcons take on the Minnesota Vikings.” The announcer doesn’t say, “the Atlanta Falcons will take on the Minnesota Vikings.” He doesn’t say that they will, but that they do. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I listed our house for sale last Monday and sold it on Wednesday. The buyer offered us a few hundred dollars more than our asking price, so we accepted. But we have lingering doubts. Maybe you would, too.

You know how it is. You name your price, and your buyer agrees immediately. So you immediately wonder if your price was too low. Maybe that’s why the buyer agreed to your price so quickly.

In direct mail fundraising you’ll find this same challenge. How much should you ask a person to donate if they have never donated before? Read the rest of this entry »

You should literally think twice before offering your direct mail donors a back-end premium. And neither of these thoughts has anything to do with net revenue. Read the rest of this entry »

The most valuable thing in direct mail fundraising isn’t your donors, but your donor data. Your building could burn down this afternoon, and all your staff could quit, and you’d still be able to recover if your donor data remained intact. But if you lose your donor data, you lose, period. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to improve your direct mail fundraising program is through testing. Don’t follow fads, board whims, or a gut feeling that turns out to be indigestion.

Instead, test. And, to save money and time (and further indigestion), follow these eight rules. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email the other day that reads as follows:

–letter starts–

Hello Mr. Raiser,
My name is _______. I work for a non profit organization, the ____________. We are in a season of taking the ministry international and also growing and empowering the ministries within. I would like to draft up a professional letter, that will go out to major corporations and empowered people, asking for donations, and for it in return be a tax write off! My goal is to mail/email a donation letter to different large companies and multi-millionaires example Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump. I’m not sure at all as to how to even begin the letter. Please help! Read the rest of this entry »

One of your best sources of direct mail donations is people who have stopped giving you direct mail donations. We call these people “lapsed donors” and “expired members,” two uncharitable ways of referring to friends who have not given a donation in 12 months or more. Read the rest of this entry »

Your donors do not respond to your direct mail appeals because you include a postage-paid reply envelope. They respond because they believe in your cause, admire your organization, and want to help the people you serve. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 1997, as I sat in the departures lounge at Ottawa International Airport, I didn’t know if Ruth would accept my proposal of marriage. I fidgeted. I procrastinated. Finally, as they announced the final call for her flight back to Ohio, I popped the question.

Ruth said yes. Yes!

That’s the tough part about asking someone to marry you. You have to ask them. You don’t know what their answer will be until you ask, and unless you ask. Read the rest of this entry »

Search engines are the most common way that potential donors will find your website. A non-profit website that appears near the top of search engine results will witness a dramatic increase in traffic compared with competing websites that appear further down in the results.

Like every other charity, you want a high ranking on the search engines. Unfortunately, many charity websites appear poorly in search engine rankings-or not at all-because they are not written and designed to take advantage of how search engines work.

So how do search engines rank your web pages? Read the rest of this entry »

I have on my desk a direct mail fundraising envelope that I have never opened. And never will. Perhaps you can learn a lesson from its failings.

The offending article was mailed by the Canadian Red Cross. It is a full-colour envelope, 6.5 inches wide and 5.75 inches tall, with a window. The envelope promotes the organization’s lottery.

This envelope fails most of the tests in my book.

Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

When you write your donor newsletter stories, do you write to one reader at a time? One person writing to another? Or do you make the common newsletter mistake of writing from “us” to “them?”

Direct mail donors are individuals. They donate as individuals. And they read your newsletters as individuals. If you want your newsletter stories to inspire them to donate again, you must write to them as individuals. And write as a human being. Read the rest of this entry »

The quickest way to improve your donor newsletters is to start seeing your world in story form. Behind every person there is a story. And behind every story there is a person. Your job is to uncover both. Your donors want to read about people, not projects. So write about people. Show photographs of people. Let me give you an example of what to avoid. Read the rest of this entry »

Your fundraising newsletter will attract more readers, raise more funds and retain more donors when you publish outstanding photographs.

Photographs are the most important images you can feature in your donor newsletter. Good photos make your newsletter pages more interesting. They help your non-profit organization communicate immediately who you are and what you do and who you help. Photos, more than any other element, help you distinguish one issue of your newsletter from another.

Readers tend to look at photos first, then headlines, then photo captions, then the article. Which means your photographs must grab the attention of your readers. Here’s how to recognize a great photo when you see one (or take one). Read the rest of this entry »

Do you use direct mail fundraising letters to drive donors to your website to make their donations? If you do, make sure your website donation page answers the three most common questions asked by donors. Read the rest of this entry »

The good news is that 62 percent of adults visit a non-profit’s website before donating (according to a recent online survey conducted by Harris Interactive).

That’s also the bad news.

For many non-profits, the quickest way they can scare away donors is to direct them to the organization’s website. Too many non-profit websites are making blunders that discourage donors from browsing, donating, volunteering or referring others to the site. Here are four common blunders, and how to avoid them. Read the rest of this entry »

The secret to reducing your direct mail fundraising costs is counterintuitive, like fertilizer.

Next time you’re out in the boonies, watch as a farmer spreads fertilizer over his field. As he passes over the parts of his field that always produce the smallest yield, he spreads little or no fertilizer. As he passes over those parts of his field that traditionally deliver the highest yield, he pours the fertilizer on thick.

If you’re a city-slicker like me, that doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t the farmer fertilize the part of his field that obviously needs the most help? Surely the poor soil needs the fertilizer more than the healthy soil, right?

Wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to learn a lesson in direct mail fundraising from Winston Churchill? He once observed that a fanatic is “someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

A fundraising letter fanatic, of course, is someone who thinks the only thing you can mail a donor is a fundraising letter. But that’s just one of more than 40 things you can mail to make friends and raise funds using paper and postage. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent last night visiting two hospitals with my four-year-old son, Spencer. I noticed that the staff at each hospital took the same vital signs (pulse, oxygen saturation, temperature, breathing) to determine Spencer’s health. Nurses and doctors miles apart, working for different hospitals, on different shifts, knew the same things to look for to determine the health of their patient.

You must do the same with your direct mail fundraising program. Here are the five vital signs to watch for to make sure your program is healthy, and remains healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

The secret to raising funds with direct mail appeal letters is not found in what you say or in how you say it but in why you say it.

Success is found not in technique but in truth. The truth of your case for support. That’s why, before you write a word of your fundraising letter you must state your case for why a donor should support you. I am not talking about a “case for need.” In donor-centered fundraising there is no such bird. Your needs are immaterial. What’s important to your donors is why they should support you. Their needs come first, not your’s. Read the rest of this entry »

When was the last time you agonized over what to put on your business reply envelope? If you’re like most non-profit organizations, your BRE never changes. You mail the same BRE with every direct mail fundraising letter. And you likely print your BREs in bulk to save on printing.

But maybe you should re-think the humble BRE. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the 1990s, I worked for a non-profit organization that mailed a multi-page, full-colour newsletter to around 14,000 people each month, at a cost of around $0.50 a piece. The majority of people who received the newsletter had never given a donation to the organization. Yet the organization had been mailing thousands of these people month in and month out, for years. Read the rest of this entry »

If your donor has the choice of reading your fundraising letter or reading the latest issue of Reader’s Digest, which one will she read?

This is not a trick question. The competition for your donor’s attention has never been greater. If you want your donors and members to read your fundraising letters from start to finish, learn a few lessons from the editors at Reader’s Digest, the largest-selling magazine in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.

Your job as a direct mail fundraiser is to give your donors both a reason for donating and an incentive for donating.

Your enemy is inertia. Your enemy is Coronation Street. Plenty of perfectly nice donors with perfectly good intentions to donate will nevertheless procrastinate or get distracted, lay your fundraising letter aside to deal with tomorrow, but then forget.

Which is why you should consider using an incentive, something that will give your appeal letter a sense of urgency. Something that’ll motivate your donor to act today. I recommend a deadline. Give your donor a deadline for responding and you will likely boost your response rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Your non-profit loses 15 percent of its donors every year, if you are typical. What can you do to reduce that percentage? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the quickest ways to win the attention of your distracted donors is to take a popular icon and make it a villain. By linking your cause with a trend or fad, and by taking a contrarian view, you demonstrate to donors that you are relevant, innovative and worthy of continued support. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to be successful at raising money with fundraising letters, the first lesson you must learn is that there’s no such thing as a fundraising letter. Read the rest of this entry »

Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

He was wrong, of course. Read the rest of this entry »

Your success as a direct mail fundraiser depends on the quality of your list. A mediocre letter mailed to the right list will outperform a terrific letter mailed to the wrong list. How you build that list is up to you. Here are three ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Your job as a direct mail fundraiser is to make new friends every and keep them for as long as possible. And to do that you need two kinds of letter, acquisition and renewal. Understand the differences between these two letters and you’ll improve your results. Read the rest of this entry »

I know a non-profit that mailed a direct mail donor acquisition package to thousands of potential donors and generated a response rate of exactly zero. That’s not a typo. Not a single person responded to the mailing. Read the rest of this entry »

The bad news about grant proposal writing is that grant makers will never fund what you want them to. They only fund what they want to fund.

They fund projects that further their mission.

They fund initiatives that meet their priorities. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to guarantee that your donors will ignore your newsletters, illustrate your stories with cliché photos. Here are the top four: Read the rest of this entry »

One day one of the greatest bores at the Player’s Club said to Oliver Herford, “Oliver, I have been grossly insulted. Just as I passed that group over there I overheard someone say he would give me fifty dollars to resign from the club.”

“Hold out for a hundred,” counselled Hereford, “you’ll get it.” Read the rest of this entry »

The secret to publishing compelling donor newsletters is to only publish stories that are newsworthy to your donors. But how do you decide if a story is newsworthy? Take this simple test. Read the rest of this entry »

I was pontificating with my wife, Ruth, the other day, explaining that fundraisers have no control over one of the Big Cs of fundraising. “Ideal donors,” I announced, “have the Capacity to give, have a strong Connection with the charity, and are Committed to support the charity over the long term.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you look for wealthy donors in all the usual places you’ll receive the usual result.

Disappointment. Read the rest of this entry »

Most first-generation millionaires are tightwads. They aren’t rich because of how much they spend but because of how much they save.

If you need to find millionaires who will donate a large sum of money to your non-profit organization, look for tightwads, not millionaires. Read the rest of this entry »

Before they hired me as their director of development, and before they ran out of money and laid me off, a non-profit organization whose name is unmentionable ran an unmentionable direct mail program. Read the rest of this entry »

Next time you are arrested, pay attention to what information the police officer asks you to divulge immediately. It’s not a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Casanova never penned a one-page love letter. So neither should you.

I write fundraising letters for some of the most well-known non-profits in North America, and not one of them has ever hired me to write a one-page fundraising letter. They know from testing that donors read two-page letters. And four-page letters. Even eight-page letters. Donors read what interests them, and not a word more. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the greatest mistakes I see non-profit organizations making is watching their dollars and not their donors. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to increase the number of people who read your email fundraising letters and email newsletters, put today’s headlines in your email subject lines. Read the rest of this entry »

The bereaved mother who became a figurehead for the US anti-war movement abandoned her fight in May 2007 after growing disenchanted with the campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

A while back I realized that measuring the effectiveness of direct mail fundraising campaigns is a lot easier than I’d thought. Read the rest of this entry »

A picture is never worth a thousand words. After all, why do newspapers and websites contain more words than images? Because pictures are insufficient on their own. Would you date someone whose nice photo you saw online, if that’s all you had to go on? Of course not. Pictures are not worth a thousand words. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to measure your success in direct mail donor acquisition is to examine your cost to raise a donor rather than your cost to raise a dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Some non-profit organizations should not use direct mail as a way to attract new donors. Is your organization one of them? Take this simple test and find out. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing is more important in direct mail fundraising than who you mail to. A terrific letter mailed to the wrong list of people will flop. I have a client who mailed a donor acquisition package to people who had not supported his organization but had supported another. The response to his appeal was zero. Read the rest of this entry »

What kind of response rates do your direct mail fundraising letters generate? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the easiest ways to boost net revenue in direct mail fundraising is to stop sending every appeal to every donor. Read the rest of this entry »

Next time you write a letter to a donor but can’t think of the best way to express yourself, let someone else do it for you.

Someone like Mother Theresa. Mark Twain. Rosa Parks. Ernest Hemmingway. Read the rest of this entry »

Be warned. If you’re starting a non-profit and don’t have $100,000 in the bank, don’t use direct mail. You literally cannot afford to use direct mail to raise funds right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to learn a vital lesson in donor retention? Here’s a tactic from Sunday School to avoid. Read the rest of this entry »

How long do most of your donors contribute to your organization before they walk away? One year? Five? Ten? You should know. Read the rest of this entry »

Every healthy direct mail fundraising program balances asking with informing. Appeal letters do the asking. And donor newsletters do the informing. Read the rest of this entry »

One of your greatest obstacles in operating a successful annual fund is thinking of it as an annual fund. Read the rest of this entry »

What would you do if I mailed you a package of black and white photos? Would you throw the package in the trash unopened? Read the rest of this entry »

New donors are closer than you think. Often they are friends of your donors, or family members. Read the rest of this entry »

Direct mail fundraisers learned long ago that stamps boost response rates. Maybe the same will work for your sales letters. Why not test and find out? Read the rest of this entry »

What does an ideal new direct mail donor look like? How can you spot one in a crowd? Or in a list of potential donors? Look for the 3 Cs. Read the rest of this entry »

The last thing you should ask for in a fundraising letter is a donation. You have no business asking for money until you have first persuaded your donor that you deserve her attention, value her time, appreciate her as a person, and want to partner with her in turning the world upside-down. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to know one of the most vital truths in direct mail fundraising? Friends stay in touch. Read the rest of this entry »

Your greatest challenge as an email fundraiser is your list. If your organization is typical, only 10% of the people in your donor file have given you their email address. And that list isn’t growing any larger all on its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Sending an email with no links to follow is like mailing a direct mail appeal without enclosing a reply device or return envelope. Costly. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I checked, which is to say, yesterday, the average open rate for an email donor newsletter was 37%. That means 63 percent of donors are not opening the email newsletters they’ve asked to receive. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the greatest challenges in email fundraising is poor open rates. The majority of donors who subscribe to email donor newsletters receive them but never open them. Read the rest of this entry »

Email is cheaper than direct mail but that’s not why you should embrace it.

Your non-profit organization should be communicating with donors and members by email for four strategic reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Do your donation request letters lack a protagonist? The most compelling appeal letters feature a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, that captures the donor’s attention and makes the appeal human, moving and profitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Successful fundraising letters are exciting to read. They take you to crack houses, battlefields, logging protests, prisons, floods and other places you will never set foot yourself. Effective donation request letters show you the organizations you support engaged on the front lines in the battle to right wrongs, correct injustices and make the world a better place. They put you in the thick of the action. And they usually do this by making a scene. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 1985, which I now realize is more than 20 years ago, a homeless man stood at the corner of College and Yonge streets, in downtown Toronto, begging for money. This was his cry: Read the rest of this entry »

Fundraising letters are about people. People talk. So your fundraising letters should include the voices of people. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Argentine army surrendered in June of 1982, ending the Falklands War, some Royal Marines discovered that the quickest way to get the attention of stubborn Argentine prisoners, since we did not speak their language, and they did not speak ours, was to hit them on the elbow with the handle of a pickaxe. Prisoners treated in this fashion followed our orders. Read the rest of this entry »

How would your next fundraising letter perform if Agatha Christie wrote it? Read the rest of this entry »

Your fundraising letters will be more dramatic if you write them like a novel. Read the rest of this entry »

The most important letter in direct mail fundraising never asks for a donation. Thank-you letters increase donor loyalty, strengthen relationships and increase your chances of receiving more gifts in the future, including major gifts and legacy gifts. Read the rest of this entry »

The most important letter in direct mail fundraising never asks for a gift. Ever. Read the rest of this entry »

I once had a friend who used to bid me farewell by exclaiming, “Up ’yer kilt!” Where Jock is today and how many pals he still has I cannot tell. But his original and startling phrase reminds me of a vital truth in direct mail fundraising: How you thank your donors and how your donors hear you thank them can be two different things. Read the rest of this entry »

Thank-you letters are one of the most important letters that your non-profit mails to donors. They remind donors that they made the right decision in supporting your organization. They show that you are grateful for the donors gift. Read the rest of this entry »

One temptation in writing fundraising thank-you letters is to make your organization the star of the letter. You feel pressure to tell your donors how terrific you are, how cost-effective you are or how broke you are. Read the rest of this entry »

The most important thing about your donation thank- you letters is not what you say or how you say it but how quickly you say it. Read the rest of this entry »

What would happen if the author of The Da Vinci Code wrote your next direct mail fundraising appeal letter?  Read the rest of this entry »

I have a brother-in-law who farms and drives a 16-wheeler for a living. When I told him that I start each business day with a blank computer screen that I must fill with at least 1,000 words by noon, he almost fainted. Read the rest of this entry »

Direct mail fundraising is a numbers game. A game that changes all the time. Who could have predicted the advent of online giving? Or the popularity of sweepstakes? Or the rise of a generation of young donors whose primary method of communication is text messaging? Read the rest of this entry »

Your direct mail fundraising results never lie. But they mislead you if you let them. I worked as Director of Development for a national charity that held a lavish fundraising banquet each year. The staff, from the executive director down to the receptionist, including the development staff, thought this banquet was the organization’s most successful fundraiser. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t ask me how I know, but in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings you’ll sometimes hear a member mention “The Elephant in the Living Room.” Read the rest of this entry »

Q. What is a premium?
A. In direct mail fundraising letters, a premium is an item offered to a donor, usually at no charge, to encourage the donor to make a donation. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a client whose direct mail fundraising program is in trouble. I think you can profit from his predicament. I know he is going to. Read the rest of this entry »

Your donors read your donor newsletter to discover news about themselves. You are of secondary interest.  Read the rest of this entry »