Mal Warwick - How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals

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Copyright 2013 by Mal Warwick. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warwick, Mal.

How to write successful fundraising appeals/Mal Warwick, Eric Overman. Third edition.

pages cm. (The Jossey-Bass nonprofit guidebook series)

Revised edition of the authors How to write successful fundraising letters, 2nd ed.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-54366-5 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-57321-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-57325-9 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-61808-0 (ebk.)

1. Direct-mail fund raising. 2. Nonprofit organizationsFinance. I. Overman, Eric. II. Title.

HV41.2.W378 2013

658.15'224dc23

2012048511

The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series

The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series provides new to experienced nonprofit professionals and volunteers with the essential tools and practical knowledge they need to make a difference in the world. From hands-on workbooks to step-by-step guides on developing a critical skill or learning how to perform an important task or process, our accomplished expert authors provide readers with the information required to be effective in achieving goals, mission, and impact.

Other Titles in the Jossey-Bass Guidebook Series

Preface to the Third Edition

Nearly twenty years ago I set out to develop the first edition of How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters . Measured against a geological timescale, two decades isnt a long timebut in fundraising terms the world has changed as surely and as dramatically as if the continents had drifted farther apart. Fundraisers todaythose who were content to solicit funds by mail twenty years agoface a multichannel environment, more complex, often baffling, and continuously changing.

The first edition of this book was exclusively about fundraising by direct mail. It represented my best effort to explain how and why the technique worksand how to make the most of it. Using abundant examples of successful and unsuccessful fundraising letters, I explained, step by step, what works and what doesnt in direct mail fundraising. I described all the different kinds of direct mail fundraising lettersif youre a beginner, dont be surprised that there are a lot of them!and I explained why the differences matter and how to make them clear in your own writing.

For most nonprofits today, direct mail is still the workhorse in the development office, generating the largest number of new donors and raising by far the largest amount of net revenue for operations. But the number of ways that nonprofit organizations are raising money from the public has proliferated with the advent of e-mail, the World Wide Web, mobile computing, and social media, resulting in the multichannel environment that fundraisers confront today. Thats why, from beginning to end, this book is dramatically different from its earlier editions. The changes include:

• A new title, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals (not just Letters ), to reflect the changed reality that todays fundraisers confront
• Three new chapters (Recruiting New Supporters: Beginning the Cultivation Process Online, Rounding Out Your Appeal with Online Media and More, and The New Keys to Success in Fundraising Today) and a fourth chapter thoroughly updated and expanded (Writing Online Appeals)
• New sample fundraising appeals substituted for nearly all the examples found in the second edition
• Revised text throughout , with every single sentence weighed for its relevance to current conditions
• Additions to the resources at the end of the book
• A website dedicated to this book ( www.josseybass.com/go/fundraisingappeals ), featuring numerous additional sample appeals (all in full color, of course).

If you want to cut to the chase and get a handle on the changes that time has wrought in the fundraising environment, I suggest you turn to the concluding chapter, The New Keys to Success in Fundraising Today.