Writing For A Good Cause: The Complete Guide To Crafting Proposals And Other Persuasive Pieces For Nonprofits - Softcover

Barbato, Joseph

 
9780684857404: Writing For A Good Cause: The Complete Guide To Crafting Proposals And Other Persuasive Pieces For Nonprofits
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684857405 ISBN 13: 9780684857404
Verlag: Touchstone, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Filled with tips and survival skills from writers and fund-raising officers at nonprofits of all sizes, Writing for a Good Cause is the first book to explain how to use words well to win your cause the money it needs. Whether you work for a storefront social action agency or a leading university, the authors' knowledgeable, practical advice will help you:

Write the perfect proposal—from the initial research and interviews to the final product

Draft, revise, and polish a "beguiling, exciting, can't-put-it-down and surely can't-turn-it-down" request for funds

Create case statements and other big money materials—also write, design, and print newsletters, and use the World Wide Web effectively

Survive last-minute proposals and other crises—with the Down-and-Dirty Proposal Kit!

Writing for a Good Cause provides everything fund raisers, volunteers, staff writers, freelancers, and program directors need to know to win funds from individual, foundation, and corporate donors.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Barbato is president of Barbato Associates, which provides writing and design services to the fund-raising programs of nonprofits. He has worked with dozens of nonprofits, including New York University, The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and The United Nations Foundation.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: What Is Fund Raising, Anyway?

The ABCs of the Nonprofit World

Once, it was called begging. In 1641 a group of clergymen representing Harvard College went to England in search of funds. That was the beginning of fund raising in America.

Small wonder that fund raising still bears a stigma.

"Is there a seamy side to fund raising?" asked The New York Times Magazine in a 1997 interview with Vartan Gregorian, noted for his fund-raising successes as head of the New York Public Library and Brown University.

"Not for a good cause," said Gregorian.

The fact is, many people think it unseemly to ask other people for money -- no matter what the cause. Gregorian himself noted that he has found it hard having "to please a donor by suppressing your own views," as well he might.

Fund raising is about pleasing donors. A pleased donor gives money. A displeased one does not.

The donor is always right.

If all of this is so, why do people become fund raisers and fund-raising writers? It lies in the satisfaction of having helped bring money to a good cause.

Fund raising has given us literacy, open-heart surgery, Ronald McDonald House, churches to go to on Sunday, public-radio programming, and a restored Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It has saved lives, built monuments, cured diseases, fostered artistic careers, nurtured children, advanced scholarship, discovered planets, conserved natural areas, and encouraged social change.

The Council on Foundations once listed the foundation-funded projects that ultimately touched the lives of most Americans. They found that foundation money jump-started Emergency 911, public libraries, the Pap smear, Sesame Street, vaccines against yellow fever and polio, the invention of rocketry, the hospice movement, and the white lines on the shoulders of highways.

Because people have been begging on its behalf since 1641, Harvard is now one of the preeminent universities in the nation and the world. Did money make it so? Yep. If Harvard had much less money, would it make a difference? Yep.

Here is the rule of thumb: Money attracts excellence, and excellence attracts excellence. At universities, this means money attracts an excellent faculty, who in turn attract excellent students. With a 1998 endowment of about $13 billion, Harvard can afford excellence. Period.

And they are still begging! Harvard employs 271 men and women on its fund-raising staff for its current $2.1 billion fund-raising campaign. Why so many? After all, you might think that as some have said, "Any fool can raise money for Harvard, and many do." Yet even a cash cow has to be milked.

AMERICAN GIVING

Each year, Americans give about $150 billion to good causes, that is, charitable organizations. Where does the money go? Let's look at the three biggest gifts of 1998.

According to the 1998 Slate 60, which lists the year's largest donations, James and Virginia Stowers came in first with a gift of $327 million to create a medical-research facility in their hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. The Stowers, both cancer survivors, own a major family of no-load mutual funds, American Century Cos. They plan to bequeath most of their other assets to the institute.

In the same year, Martha Ingram, chairman of Ingram Industries, gave $300 million to Vanderbilt University, putting her right up there with founding father Cornelius Vanderbilt. The funds will go into athletics, health care, research, teaching, and other programs at the school, which is the alma mater of Mrs. Ingram's ex-husband and three of her kids.

Coming in third, David and Cheryl Duffield, who made their fortune in software, pledged $200 million toward finding a home for every stray or abandoned dog and cat in America. The Duffields want to end the euthanasia of homeless animals. They were inspired to make the gift by their affection for Maddie, a miniature schnauzer.

Fund raisers prompt gifts like these. They do so by communicating the good that an organization does, cultivating prospective donors who indicate an interest in the cause, and finally, asking the prospect for a donation.

There are all kinds of ways to do these things.

On a mass scale involving modest sums, Girl Scouts sell cookies door-to-door every year, and the Salvation Army places bell-ringing Santas at every shopping mall each holiday season. Similarly, direct mail is used to pitch everything from Easter seals to improved programming at the local PBS station. They may attract small gifts, but these are significant fund-raising programs: The famous March of Dimes, which literally invited Americans to send in dimes, underwrote the development of the Salk vaccine against polio. Girl Scout cookies bring in several hundred million dollars each year.

Alas, you cannot go door-to-door looking for million-dollar gifts. Few people can afford to make such major contributions. And once you know who can afford to give $1 million or more, you have to know whether they care about your cause, you have to establish contact with them, you have to cultivate them over time, and you have to convince them that making a gift to your good cause will satisfy their needs.

GOLDEN OLDIES

They didn't have PCs, scanners, and laser printers, but Americans have been writing fund-raising copy for generations.

The first fund-raising piece, "New England's First Fruits," was written at the request of the three clergymen who went to England in 1641 to raise money for Harvard. The threesome -- Hugh Peter of Salem, Thomas Weld of Roxbury, and William Hibbens of Boston -- needed "literature" describing the "selling points" of New England.

Talk about making the case for a college:

After God had carried us safe to New England, and had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civil government: one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.

In 1853 another classic fund-raising missive was written by Ann Pamela Cunningham after her mother made a trip down the Potomac River and found Mount Vernon -- the beloved Virginia estate of George Washington -- in ruins, with its roof collapsing, its portico propped up by unsightly supports, and its grounds overgrown.

Moved to act, she wrote a letter urging the "Ladies of the South" to raise enough money "to secure and retain the home and grave" of Washington "as a sacred spot for all coming time!" As published in the Charleston Mercury and other newspapers, the letter began:

A descendant of Virginia, and now a daughter of Carolina, moved by feelings of reverence for departed greatness and goodness, by patriotism and a sense of national, and above all, of Southern honor, ventures to appeal to you in behalf of the "home and grave" of Washington.

Ladies of the South, of a region of warm, generous, enthusiastic hearts, where there still lingers some unselfish love of country and country's honor, some chivalric feelings yet untouched by that "national spirit," so rapidly overshading the moral of our beloved land -- a moral blight, fatal to man's noblest attributes, and which love of money and speculation alone seems to survive -- to you we turn, you, who retain some reverence for the noble dead, some admiration and remembrance of exalted worth and service even where they are no more! Of you we ask: Will you, can you, look on passively and behold the home and grave of the matchless patriot, who is so completely identified with your land, sold as a possession to speculative machinists, without such a...

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Verlag
Touchstone
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684857405
ISBN 13 
9780684857404
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
337
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande