Use Quotations in Your Fundraising Appeal Letters to Inspire and Motivate Your Donors.

By Alan Sharpe, CFRE
Next time you write a letter to a donor but can’t think of the best way to express yourself, let someone else do it for you.

Someone like Mother Theresa. Mark Twain. Rosa Parks. Ernest Hemmingway.

Quotations are one of the most effective ways to inspire and motivate donors. Think of all the topics you could possibly want to write about in a fundraising letter, such as apathy, challenge, faith, freedom, generosity, injustice, love, optimism, persistence, poverty and war. Chances are, someone, somewhere, at some moment in history, has said something quotable on your topic.

So when you are stuck for the best way to say something, reach for a book of quotations and turn to the table of contents. Look up the topic you are struggling with. Turn to that page and hunt for a quotation that conveys your thought in a memorable or wise or pithy or funny or epigrammatic way. Then take that quotation and incorporate it into your appeal letter.

For example, let’s say you’re requesting funds for a shelter for homeless people. You want to convey to your donors the plight of people who end up living on the streets. You pick up your book of quotations, look under the topic Injustice, and find that Pearl S. Buck, human rights activist and Nobel Prize winner, once remarked: “Hunger makes a thief of any man.” There’s a zinger that you can incorporate somewhere into your letter.

Or let’s say you’re writing to the same donor about the same homeless shelter, but instead you’re struggling to communicate how the streets are especially hard on homeless children. You don’t want to simply say, “The streets are especially hard on homeless children,” because you’re afraid that you’ll be stating the obvious, or sound like you’re preaching.

So you search under the topic of Children, and find this nugget from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hodding Carter: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.” There you have a memorable way to state your case. You could even turn this quotation into a theme that runs throughout your fundraising letter package, starting with the outer envelope teaser.

Quotations are an effective way to up the octane in your fundraising letters for a number of reasons:

1. They help you communicate truths about sensitive topics by letting someone else speak for you
2. They add colour to your writing, the same way sound bites do in a TV documentary
3. They help you express the funny side of a situation (by quoting Bill Cosby, for example) when doing so directly might sound crass or insensitive

When you quote people word for word, be sure to mention who you are quoting. Imitation, as Charles Caleb Colton said, is the sincerest form of flatter, but quoting people without citing your source isn’t imitation. It’s plagiarism.

You might be interested in…

The Fundraisers’ Book of Quotations. Inspire and motivate your donors with over 2,700 quips, proverbs, aphorisms, witticisms, zingers, epigrams, quotes, one-liners and words of wisdom from actors, writers, activists, philanthropists, artists, scientists, philosophers, poets, humorists, novelists, inventors, journalists, kings, queens, magnates, presidents, dissidents, preachers, paupers and others, famous and infamous, living and dead.

Handbook Number 2 Twelve Creative Ways to Ask for Gifts Using Fundraising Letters. Learn how to say what is on your mind in a fresh way.