How great storytelling can break the fundraising rules

Just got an interesting piece of direct mail fundraising, and I want to show you some things about it. Important fact about it:

• It’s from Covenant House. This is the organization that some years ago had the legendary direct mail pack that included a small paperback book filled with powerful stories of homeless kids.
• It is donor acquisition; I have not donated to them before.
• It may be a control: I think I remember receiving it before.

It’s an interesting pack, with a lot going on in it. I’m just going to focus here on the use of storytelling in the letter.

It is a four-page letter. It opens with a story:

It was just after dark, and I had gathered with our kids, our donors, our staff, and my family at the shelter. We formed a circle to mark the night together in prayer and thanksgiving for one another and the gift of God’s love in the world.

And the story goes a full three pages. All in italics. The story ends on the first line of page four.

That’s when it finally starts addressing the reader and stops being in italics. The only address to the reader before that is half-way down the first page, in the fifth paragraph:

I pray this story, an embodiment of the spirit of what Covenant House can do, moves you to be a part of blessing our youth this winter.

An indirect ask.

The last three paragraphs are a more typical ask:

Please … will you help us provide shelter and love to the droves of homeless kids who will come to our Covenant House crisis shelters this Christmas? Your Christmas gift today — whatever you can afford — will give kids like Jeremiah food, counseling, medicine, and a safe place to sleep away from the dangerous streets. But most of all, you will be giving them the love and dignity every child deserves. Please help if you can! We simply can’t care for the thousands of kids who will come to us this Christmas without the help of good people like you…

The P.S. is almost a complete appeal on its own:

P.S. Tonight, more than 2,400 hungry, scared, and all-alone kids will sleep in our shelters. We are seeing more kids in crisis than ever and could really use your help today. There’s no other way to say it — the need is urgent. Please help our kids this Christmas. Your gift will be put to immediate use to provide much-needed safe beds, healthy food, educational assistance, counseling, job training, and more for our kids. Thank you again for doing what you can and for believing with us that every young person deserves a safe place to sleep, especially at Christmas.

This letter does a number of things I generally don’t recommend in fundraising:

• It opens with the story. (Though I’d say this story earns that approach.)
• It’s a quasi-complete story — about a kid who comes in for help who ends up donating all he has to help other kids. We don’t learn if he broke free from homelessness or not. But he is clearly better off at the end of the story than at the start.
• It goes nearly three full pages without addressing the reader. If you did the I/you pronoun count, it wouldn’t look good! (When it does talk to the donor at the end in in the P.S., it does a good job of it.)

But if it’s a control as I suspect it is, that means it is working.

This tells us two things:

1. Stories are very powerful in fundraising. So powerful that in some cases they can overcome the “rules” we try to follow.
2. Even with an amazing story, you still have to do a bunch of other things right to succeed!

If you’d like to read the full letter, you can download a scan here.

More on Storytelling for Fundraisers.