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Electronically sign thank you letter for donation to church

so sitting down to write a fundraising letter or an appeal as a task that many of us take on each year and in fact maybe your organization since multiple letters or appeals each year so this is something you're doing a couple of times every year well in this video I'm going to give you some easy-to-follow steps to help you write your best fundraising letter these are some of the same tips I use to write fundraising letters that have helped organizations raise as much as $75,000 hey there my name is Vanessa chase auction and welcome back to my channel I'm really excited to have you here today so I love writing it's one of the reasons why I got into fundraising and continue to stay in fundraising I think it's really interesting and fascinating to be able to persuade people with words and to be able to convince them to donate I think it's a really interesting piece of the work that we do but I know that not everyone feels that way about writing sometimes it's difficult sometimes we run into writer's block we have problems thinking of what to say it feels difficult and so on and of course there's the results of the writing sometimes it can feel really deterring to feel like you're not really getting the results that you want from your writing and as a result we can feel like maybe we don't want to keep doing this so today I'm going to give you some easy to follow tips that will help you improve your writing and your next fundraising appeal letter let's get to my first tip for you is to know who you're writing to I think this is such an important piece in writing a fundraising letter is knowing who the audience is so I'll give you a really clear example of this so writing to an individual donor is going to have a very different tone in style than writing to a foundation and a letter of inquiry versus writing to a corporate funder those are all very different audiences and you're probably gonna write to them in some pretty distinct ways and so one of the first things I do when I sit down to write fundraising letters or emails is really spend some time thinking about who is it that I'm write into why do they care about this cause how can I remind them what's important to them and to really connect with them through my writing my second tip for you is to make it easy to read I can't even tell you how many fundraising letters and emails I've read over the years that are just huge blocks of text that are not easy to scan and it's really easy to get lost in them as well so my general guideline for writing is to make sure that my paragraphs are not super-long they're easy to scan and in fact sometimes my paragraphs and they just only be one sentence that stands out that really helps me to get the point across if someone is scanning through my letter quickly the next tip I have for you is to give people a reason to keep reading very early on and by that I mean get to the point this is something that I think is so important in any kind of fundraising letter we want to make sure people know why we're writing to them what's in it for them and why they should continue to read sometimes I find that in fundraising letters and emails we kind of meander our way to the point to the call-to-action way at the end and one of the things I want to say to you is that it's good to just get to the point quickly build the case and then get the point again at the end of the letter that's another way to go about that and I find that both for emails and letters this is a really great strategy my next tip for you is to write conversationally and this is one of the things that I think makes a huge difference nobody wants to read a letter that sounds like a form letter someone found on the internet and believe me there are plenty of templates out there for writing fundraising letters online none of which you should use so what I want you to encourage encourage you to do instead is to find your own style of writing and be able to write conversationally to connect with people through that letter now if you're someone who's really struggled with writing in the past and you think I'm not a good writer this is not something I'm good at you know there's lots of stories we can spin about that one of the tips I want to give you is to actually use your smartphone to do a voice memo recording of your fundraising appeal and use that as your first draft I find for a lot of people this is a way where they can really capture their cotton their natural conversational tone and style and their writing versus trying to type it in one go on the computer where it can feel kind of more stifled and hard to capture that so do a voice memo recording transcribe that and work from that as a first draft that can really help you capture that tone much more easily my next tip is to have a clear and compelling call to action this is so so important in fundraising letters we can write all the great things we can think of tell really good stories but if there is not a clear call-to-action and clear path to answering that call to action we're probably going to lose people's interest pretty quickly so we need to make sure we're clear compelling and hopefully deadline-driven and what we're asking people to do and telling them where they or what the next step is to answer that call to action so for instance filling out the reply device that you've included going to a website sending you an email whatever that might be you know being very clear about what it is the next step is so that people don't get confused and hopefully follow through I'm taking back my next step is to create a sense of urgency through your writing this is so essential for fundraising and Jeff Burks talks a lot about this and some of his fundraising copywriting books but I think it's something that really makes fundraising work is when we have a sense of urgency now I'm not saying it needs to be like your house is on fire kind of urgency there's lots of types of urgency that we can create in our fundraising writing and one of the ways that we can do this you know certainly is being deadlines driven so if you're writing a year-end appeal letter you know December 31st is a very natural sense of urgency and a clear deadline for people but there's other ways to create that sense of urgency so you know being able to talk about the necessity of something to need for something getting done sooner rather than later and actually giving people good reasons why that needs to happen my final tip for you is to show donors how they're a part of the change I think this is such an important part of fundraising writing is being able to really clearly communicate to donors of what they're a part of they want to know how they're going to make a difference how they're going to facilitate some amount of change I think one of the things that I see quite often in fundraising letters and emails is something like you know donate today to support this cause or donate today to help us make this change in the community things that are a little unclear and you know by clarifying that I'm really teasing out what is the change how is it that you're supporting us what is it that we're facilitating through our donation we're able to connect with people in a different way and hopefully help them show what it is their money can help do at our organization so those are my writing tips for you I hope they're helpful for you as you plan your next fundraising letter as I said this doesn't have to be a super difficult task and I hope that some of these tips are some things that you can implement in your next letter and I would love to hear from you in the comments below about which one of these tips you're most excited to try out so let me know thank you so much for tuning into this video I hope you've enjoyed it if you have please be sure to give it a thumbs up here on YouTube and subscribe to my channel for more weekly fundraising Communications tips