Donation Drive Letter (Spec) - Advocacy United Network

Client: Advocacy United Network – AUN (Spec)

Audience: Individual donors,mostly women, often married, with household incomes of $80K or more. The kind of people who care deeply about issues like climate justice, human rights, and social equity— but don’t want their support to vanish into a black hole.

Challenge: On the surface, the challenge was to:

1. Raises funds from new donors

2. Raises awareness of AUN’s research, advocacy, and policy work

But AUN is a small nonprofit network whose work is largely consultative, not direct. They have very few tangible or clear success stories, especially not recently. The challenge was displaying how they indirectly create real change through advising on structural policy change.

Deliverables: Donation drive letter

Tone: Intelligent, Diplomatic, Urgent, Reliable, Evocative

Strategy:

This letter needed to:

• Make AUN’s work emotionally relatable

• Make the reader feel their gift would matter

• Make donating feel urgent

Since direct results were hard to show (AUN’s work is consultative), I focused on a big, tangible success story. It gives the reader something they could immediately care about. Then I focussed on the power structural change over short-term but more tangible gains to raise the stakes. 

To help readers feel personally involved, to give them a benefit to themselves, I used copy that reinforced ownership such as “your generosity helps…” or  “your gift empowers…”

The call to action had to bring urgency. “Donate now to keep vital advocacy alive.” suggests something is at stake while nudging the letter off the fridge and into the donation pile.

Note: This letter was written pro-bono for AUN using only publicly available information and no extra input. The language sticks to verified facts without making things up or exaggerating.
To improve the letter, personal stories from AUN changemakers and other success stories would have made a greater impact. With access to such stories, I would have woven this into the narrative rather than focussing solely on statistics, making the impact more tangible and the story more personal.