Ichuan

I have always had a hard time coming up with request for donation letters. It is hard to ask someone for money, especially as a stranger. When I received requests for donations from other charities, they always used to seem so insincere when I got them. There were a lot of non profit organizations that did not really put in a lot of thought to their letters. They would thank you briefly for the work that you have done by giving money, and then ask you for more. Being a frequent donor to charities myself, I definitely think about my own reactions to requests for donation before writing one myself. I think it has really helped me to come up with a more intelligent way of doing it.

The most important thing when you’re making a request for donation is to make people feel like they are really getting to be a part of something for their money. People are pretty lonely in our society. With all the problems that we have in the modern world, no one feels like they are a part of anything bigger anymore. A request for donation should help someone change this. If they have given before, you can tell them what their donation has helped with. Have you opened any new programs in the past year? What have they done? Perhaps you can even talk about particular families, campaigns, or other people or issues that have been affected directly by the money your donor has contributed. This is giving them something. This is giving your donor the opportunity to feel like they are participating in meaningful social change.

Once you get to the actual request for donation part of the letter, you should keep the same idea. Don’t just ask for money. Instead, requests for donations should ask for money for a particular project. For example, I used to work in an environmental watershed nonprofit organization. We were dedicating to protecting the watershed in Berkeley California, and were working on reclaiming land from developers and giving them back to nature.

In all of our request for donation letters in 1987, we talked about one particular plot of land. We explained in detail what we had done to turn it from a virtual dump to a wild land. We included pictures. Only then did we make a request for donations to continue the project and take it even further with another park. We made more money that year than we had in any previous years because we were specific about what we had done and what we wanted. People wanted to hear that.