Asking Companies For Donations?
Here's What to Include in Your Letter
Too many of the letters I have seen asking companies for donations are based on the main premise of "We are trying to help people worse off than you and we want you to hand over your hard-earned money without giving anything in return."
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| Asking Companies For Donations? |
No wonder the success rate is low. This is why most letters get thrown in the bin. You have broken the first rule of seeking donations.
1. It is not why you want the donation, it is why they want to give it
You need to think about what the company will want from helping your organization as the basis for the content of your letter.
Plead and begging does not build confidence in your organization
Companies only give donations to those they trust. If your letter makes your organization sound desperate and not able to cope with the purpose, that you actually chose to do, why should the company feel confident about letting you have their money?
If your letter shows the current management is in trouble or unsure of what they are doing, it will be a hard challenge to convince this company that you will manage their donation wisely.
People with money like to see real numbers
Real business owners and managers can see through bad statistics and any cliche quotes because they see them all the time in business.
If you include any statistics in your letter to create demand or empathy for your cause, you will need to ensure that the numbers are based on real research and can be proven. Too many numbers or statistics will overwhelm most readers and be considered too hard to bother reading any more.
So only use a few statistics that strongly support your cause and discard any that are not based on any peer-reviewed studies.
This leads us to why most donation letters fail.
People donate to causes they feel strong affiliations with
Find out if the owner or manager has someone that experienced or knows someone that is affected by what you are trying to fix. This is one of the strongest reasons why people donate in the first place.
In general, we are blind to the sufferings of events outside our experiences and your letter will not suddenly alert companies to these events in their environment.
In other words, your donation letter is not strong enough to create awareness of the problem, educate the reader of the problem, and then convince them they should act now.
You need to build relationships over time with companies to increase donations if you want your letters to succeed.
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