How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals

Includes Sample Letters, Real World Examples, Style Tips, New Chapters on E-mail, Websites, Social Media, and More...

Now in a completely revised third edition, this classic book shows how to create winning appeals that will realize the full potential of direct mail and online fundraising. Written by fundraising guru Mal Warwick, with assistance from Eric Overman, this comprehensive resource gives nonprofit fundraising staff the information needed to write compelling fundraising appeals for any medium. If you follow Warwick's guidelines, your direct mail and online fundraising campaigns will produce better results, year after year.

Written in an easy-to-read style, the book is filled with practical techniques, proven approaches, and illustrative examples of both successful and unsuccessful appeals based on the authors' wealth of experience fundraising for hundreds of nonprofits. Step-by-step and appeal by appeal, the book shows how to navigate the fundraising appeal process with ease. To meet the demands of today's socially connected donors, this new edition explains how to mesh today's online technologies with direct mail to produce optimal fundraising results. You'll learn how to use e-mail, websites, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile technology to recruit more donors and raise more money. The book includes current research on timely topics such as online vs. offline behavior, online giving statistics, demographics, and best practices in integrated fundraising.

If you're a nonprofit professional eager to master the latest methods in fundraising, or simply need to write direct mail appeals for your organization, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals will help you hone your skills and create appeals that will hit the mark every time.

At its heart this classic book is about how the process of fundraising is a process of one-to-one relationship building.  The book helps nonprofit staff responsible for writing fundraising appeals, write them well and drastically increase the odds that every appeal, regardless of type, intended audience or medium, produces the desired result.    In addition to Mal's accessible, conversational style, one of the book's primary strengths is its numerous examples, techniques and approaches based on his three decades of experience.  These tools guide readers step-by-step, appeal by appeal, through a process that for many can be painstaking. Every chapter will be updated to reflect current knowledge about direct response communication and many of the examples will be replaced with new ones.    The new chapter on social media will help readers understand where the technology "fits" into the organization's overall fundraising strategy and how to evaluate and use the available tools (e.g. Twitter, FB, mobile) effectively.  Through the use of current data, and new examples, the chapter will also clarify the differences between writing traditional direct response appeals and writing for social media and how, in either case, to write effectively.   The chapter on Writing Online Appeals will be updated in line with current research (e.g. online vs offline behavior, online giving stats, demographics, best practices for integration with traditional approaches) and will feature new examples of successful and unsuccessful online appeals.  Emergent fundraising technologies (Blackbaud, NW For Good, Razoo, etc.) will also be covered. A new, stand-alone, online Writer's Toolkit features full-color samples of the types of fundraising packages discussed in Chapters 10-19 in addition to full color versions of some of the b&w examples in the book, the online examples in Chapter 20, and additional samples of eNewsletters and online appeals.