This is a question that gets asked rather a lot by people new to fundraising.
The perceived wisdom is:
Don't do it. Tailor all the applications seperately.
The real world situation is:
You will probably find that when you start off you are tailoring each one till you get to five or six then you will find that number seven or eight are actually the same as number one or three i.e. for 100 applications you will probably have less than ten variations. This means the process speeds up as you go through them. In fact you can group them together into ones that are very similar.
Having said this, I never send them out en masse. I do a few a day and post them out as they are done. I also personalise them slightly with PS's of highly relevant or connected issues, and I always top and tail with a fountain pen.
I just think that the idea that you would ever do 100 completely different applications because there were 100 trusts to apply to for the same project is a bit misleading. I don't think anybody would write fresh applications to each of them.
In my experience as a fundraiser appeals to smaller trusts brought in about 10% of my fundraising target so it was worthwhile, buit not worth spending any more than 10% of my time on.
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