A typical production schedule for a fundraising appeal letter looks something like this:

• 2-3 weeks for the creative work (interview, writing, design, proofing and approval process)
• 2 weeks for production (print, fold, insert, address and mail)
• Up to 2 weeks for mail delivery

And don’t forget there are holidays in there, too. If you want people to receive your letter at the beginning of December, and you haven’t started, you’re running late.

Don’t despair. And don’t just throw something together, pop it in the mail and hope for the best. If it’s important to you to raise as much money as possible, you need to not only get your fundraising appeal done—you need to get it done right.

The recession has placed many professionals in a Catch 22 situation. Because times are hard, the services your organization provides may be higher demand. Therefore, you need to raise more money so you can provide more services. Your donors may have been affected by the economy, so you need to do more just to reach the same level as last year. But because times are hard, staffing wasn’t increased this year, and you may have been stung by staffing cuts.

This is not the year to cut corners. You need your year-end appeal to be as effective as it can possibly be.

The solution  is to find a way to regain the labor force and the expertise you need.

• First, look inside your organization for people to help you with your appeal letter. Perhaps you have a board member or volunteer who is a professional designer and could lay out your appeal letter faster and more skillfully than you could.
• If you can’t find skilled help for your appeal letter, perhaps you can find people who could help with other projects. That would free up chunks of time for you to complete your year-end appeal.
• If those strategies don’t work, hire outside experts on a per-project basis. The cost can be surprisingly affordable, and the increased donations you receive should more than cover the initial investment.  Many small organizations find it’s cost effective to outsource their appeal letters.

If you need help meeting the deadline for your year-end appeal, contact us today at 1-888-244-4013 to see how we can provide expert help at an affordable cost.

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Many, many times during my writing career, I have shown a draft to a client who informs me I have committed an error. The client is adamant that the text is incorrect because he remembers a certain rule from fourth grade.

While I am always grateful to any proofer who picks up an error before the piece is published, many times the text in question is actually correct!

The problem is that English is a very complicated language. There are lots of rules. The rules apply in some cases, but not others. There are often exceptions to the rule.

And sometimes it’s okay to break a rule.

You couldn’t learn all of that in fourth grade. But somehow those nuanced lessons from later grades weren’t remembered as clearly as the ones we learned when we were nine.

One more thing.

Sometimes the person learned a “rule” that was wrong.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples:

You must always use complete sentences. That’s an excellent rule. Using complete sentences with a subject and predicate helps convey complete thoughts.

However, sentence fragments can be useful in informal writing to change up the rhythm of the copy. (Yes, I view blog entries as informal writing. Newsletter articles and fundraising appeal letters are examples of informal writing, too.)
I used a sentence fragment in this entry: “One more thing.” I think it works here to signal to the reader that something different is coming.

For more reading on this topic, go to:
http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/effectivefrag.htm

You must never end a sentence with a preposition. I’ve been “corrected” on this countless times, and you’ve probably heard it, too.

The weird thing is that this was never a rule for the English language.
Latin, however, has such a rule, and some people, feeling Latin was superior to English, tried to apply Latin rules to English. This was taught as a rule by curmudgeons for more than a century, and I think it may finally be fading out.

It was reported that Sir Winston Churchill, the great British political leader, scoffed at the so-called rule, saying, “That is the sort of thing up with which I will not put!” No matter who said it, that quote helps us remember that trying to apply this to English will only mangle our prose.

For more reading on this topic, go to:
http://grammartips.homestead.com/prepositions1.html

Connie Oswald Stofko

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