Connecting Schools With Great Fundraising Ideas.

One of the most important tools available to any fundraising leader is the fundraising letter. With a finely-crafted missive, the leader will be able to clarify the mission, excite the audience, and deliver on the stated need.

However, getting the letter to the point where it is “finely-crafted” is the hard part. I believe there are five key components that should be implemented to give your letter a much better chance of hitting its mark.

Before you begin writing, I recommend that you jot down a quick outline. This will help you plot your individual points, provide your supporting evidence, and generally keep you on track.

The outline should be broken down into five sections. These are: attention, interest, desire, conviction, and close. By following these five “guideposts” you are taking your reader on a directed journey, exactly where you want him to go. And fortunately, since this progression makes rhetorical sense, the reader will actually be happy to go along for this ride, as opposed to a letter that is all over the place and never really gets to the point.

Let’s break down each of the sections.

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There is a local radio station where I live that made a stand this year against the premature playing of Christmas music.

For the past few years, stations up here, and I assume elsewhere, have been starting their holiday playlists earlier and earlier. No kidding, we were hearing Jingle Bells before the Monster Mash.

Finally, one station had had enough. They claimed that most people wanted to celebrate “one holiday at a time”. And I heartily agree with them.

So, now that Thanksgiving is behind us, I can happily focus my attention on Christmas.

It was right around this time each year when I was working at the private elementary school that I would write the annual letter to parents asking them to contribute to the teacher Christmas bonus fund.

I always looked forward to crafting this particular letter, because it was for a very personal cause. Everyone at the school knew that we couldn’t afford to pay the teachers what they were actually worth. (I’m sure many readers will commiserate.) And, our budget for payroll was already maxed out, so the only way we could give our staff a little extra in their December paycheck was to ask for help from the parents.

When thinking about writing this letter, there were a number of specific items that I made sure I worked into the letter. Here are ten of them: continue reading

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Just recently, an old friend of mine forwarded me an email he received from the leader of a non-profit organization he had just joined with his son. My friend knows that I write about non-profits for a living, so he thought this message might be of interest.
It was a request for volunteers.

Here is the text of the email:

Parents,

How many of you would like to volunteer in some capacity. I am searching for some committee members. All you need is some good ideas for meetings. If you are able to help at the meetings just let me know. Remember this is you and your son’s [experience]. Every adult volunteer has something valuable to offer. I am confident you will find the experience to be rewarding and fulfilling.

Thank you,

How would I fix this call for help? continue reading

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Sometime during the course of your school fundraising experience, it is likely that you will send out a solicitation letter to parents. Maybe you already have. From my own experience, I don’t think this kind of a letter is anybody’s first choice of a fundraising strategy.

You probably arrived or will arrive at this point when you realize that you just can’t, in good conscience, ask parents to partake in another product sale or purchase tickets to another fundraising event, but your budget is still short and so you have no choice.

Why not just put it all out there in a well-written letter and ask parents to pony up to cover the shortfall? I mean, the logic is sound- all parents have to do is write a check- no twisting arms of co-workers or relatives, no volunteering on a Saturday morning for bake sale duty, no decorating the church gym for an auction. Just a few strokes of the pen and the problem is solved. Right?

The real challenge in this strategy is crafting the right kind of letter. This is a very tall order, and if not handled properly, you won’t be receiving very many checks.

Just recently, I came across a blog post that offered a sample of such a letter. The folks who run this blog have offered the letter up for any school to copy and customize as needed. I think that there are some very good parts in this letter; however, I do believe that it significantly misses the mark in convincing parents to take the action step of sending a check. continue reading

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