[Boydean]

One of the best pieces of advise we were given about this is to put down how much you are asking of them. It might seem cheap at first, but once explained to us it really made since. Most of the time the people who make decisions of who to give money to don't want to come up with a number(nor do they have the time to), its there plain and simple.

An example that we use is "We are asking of (so&so) to make a contribution of $000 or more. Please make checks payable to (so&so)."

Just two lines that they can eat on. We also found that putting who to write the check to in bold helps to cut down questions quite a bit.

And then from there go into what the funds will help with. Once we added this to our letter we found a great deal of positive response back.