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"Don't put that in there!" 

This is how Julie replied to my beloved first idea for a subject line for this newsletter.

She deemed my idea "gross" and "not good."

She was right, of course. (As she usually is! )

Still, I can't resist telling you my bad idea anyway...

Skip over the ...

Our son Baye was once a beneficiary – at age 7, when he lived in an orphanage run by an American nonprofit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He has many stories to tell.

But turning beneficiary stories into moving fundraising stories of need for an appeal letter is more challenging than...

In your donor appeals, your endings are so important! 

A misplaced story ending means your appeal might not end well.

Here's an except from page one of a pretty typical appeal letter story.

It’s a terribly sad story of a boy named Ian who has nightmares of a parent killing him....

       As a donor, I sometimes daydream about the charities I support and wonder what it would be like to be there to see my gifts at work ...

       … to see a child as she wakes up from a sight-saving surgery on the Flying Eye Hospital …

...

My son Mickey was reading a heartbreaking book for his high school English class. The Other Side of the Sky is a memoir of a girl who grew up in war-torn Afghanistan... and her perilous journey to the United States.

Mickey looked up from the book asked, "Why do they make us read depressing...