If you work for some sort of not for profit organization, you know how difficult it is to ask people for money. In general, people are usually generous. However, you need to make sure that you are pushing the right buttons and pulling the right strings in order to get them to be generous. This can take years of practice and studying of psychology. However, we have included some tips of how to get people excited about fundraising and contributing to your project. The best way to do this is to get peoples’ contact information and send them a newsletter. In this post, we will discuss some things that you should put in your newsletter to encourage them to offer their support to you in a financial way. Keep reading to get the advice!

The newsletter

Thank them!

One of the best ways that you can encourage generosity is through positive reinforcement. This is a common technique used in both child rearing and animal training. Positive reinforcement lets the person know that they are doing something right. In addition, the emotional reward is an encouragement for them to keep repeating that action.

Anyway, you need to thank your current and potential supporters often and strongly in your newsletter. Let them know how much you appreciate them and how your project or organization would be nothing without their support. If you do this, then you will make them feel important and needed. In this way, they will want to continue their support because they know that their efforts actually make a difference.

Be specific

If you are asking for money, you need to establish trust and accountability with your donors. People rarely give if they do not know exactly where their money is going. And who is to blame them? In this day and age, there are a lot of people who are scamming others into giving them money.

Anyway, be painfully specific with how the money will be spent. For example, if you are doing a building project and clearing a lot, then tell them your prospective tree removal services. In an e-newsletter, you can even include links like the ones below:

–http://www.maconwarnertree.com/tree-service-macon/

–http://www.maconwarnertree.com/tree-service-warner-robins/

–http://www.maconwarnertree.com/tree-trimming-macon/

In this way, you will establish the trust of people who are preparing to give you their hard earned money. If you really want to be on the up and up, then get into the nitty gritty with numbers and figures so they know what is happening.

In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to hear that somebody cares about the environment. Heck, we do too – we feel that it’s a very important thing to take good care of what gives us all of our resources.

When it comes to newsletters, it might be difficult for somebody to see how they can make an impact on the environment with something that seems so detached from being ecologically conscious. However, making a difference is much easier than you might expect it to be.

So much paper

Every day in the office, we use tons and tons of paper. Even though a lot of things are going electronic in these modern times, we still rely on paper for communication every day. Whether it is letters or even files, chances are we will be heading down to the printer room to grab our papers that we just printed.

Save it

With newsletters, however, we don’t have to use paper. With the advent of high speed internet, we can send off a digital newsletter with images and even videos attached to thousands of people on the web. Most of the time, we can do this through email. You can use a database or an email aggregate website to send out an internet blast that will reach everyone.

No longer are the days where we have to waste hundreds and even thousands of pieces of paper on a newsletter that someone might read once and then dispose of in the garbage. Let’s go digital and be good to the environment.

Making changes in a large organization can sometimes be difficult. There are so many people involved, and it can be hard to communicate ideas to all of them. When you are trying to effect a change, everybody needs to know. I’ve been working on the board of a baseball complex for years and understand all of the pains of making changes. While communication can sometimes be difficult, there are solutions available to suit your needs. One of those solutions is a newsletter. This is an effective way to make sure that everybody is in the loop. Below, I’ve included a story on how I used a newsletter to give updates on a complex restructuring project.

Building project

Updates

About five years ago, the baseball complex that I helped run was a burgeoning business. After the economic recession, people could afford to sign their kids up for baseball again, and the league counts were higher than ever. This resulted in some great attendances for games. Every Saturday, our complex would be full to the brim with people watching the games. We made a few small changes in the complex to accommodate everyone. We also had a concession stand put into the complex to sell goods to the complex attendees. This proved to be a very profitable venture. Our sales went through the roof and we ended up with a lot of money on our hands.

Having this economically advantageous position was good for us because we were able to look forward a little bit. We realized that with the growing numbers, our capacity would soon be full. We wanted our business to keep growing, so we decided that an expansion project was the best move. With the money that we had made from the last season, we were able to make a down payment on a contracting service. We also needed to clear some land. We used a search engine to find a tree cutting service. We got several results but ended up clicking the link http://www.lansingtree.com/tree-removal-lansing/. Subsequently, we contacted a tree service Okemos. In this way, we were able to get the job done quickly.

While we were making progress, we realized that it would be a good thing to keep our attendees updated. We weighed out several options, but we figured out that a newsletter would be the best option. This proved to be very effective in helping regulate the traffic during the building process.

You can ask most anyone. When it comes to writing, many people feel that their skill is inadequate. This is why when it comes to writing a company newsletter, many people will shy away from the task. I, however, feel pretty confident about my ability to write, and so when the opportunity came around, I jumped at it.

Let me just start by saying I never thought that I would be a newsletter writer. I got a degree in English in college and thought that I would go on to be a professor or some sort of book writer. However, when I graduated, I quickly realized that I needed to get a job to support myself because I had not income while I was writing books. I got an entry level job at a logistics company and have been doing supply management ever since. Life is weird like that sometimes.

Anyway, if you have fears about writing a company newsletter, you have come to the right place. I’m going to give you some tips that I’ve gotten from personal experience writing. Keep reading to get some more information.

The Newsletter

Relax

The biggest mistake that people write when making company newsletters is that they feel that they have to be official. This makes it hard for people to relate to it. What you should do instead is take a more relaxed approach to the newsletter. Start with a joke or a funny story (think about The Onion). This will allow people to ease into the letter and be more open to that information.

Being in a position of power can be difficult at times. In addition to calling the shots and being in charge, you are also responsible for communicating changes and decisions to the members of your entity. This can be a challenging task.

In many instances, people in places of authority will send out a newsletter with updates on changes that have recently happened within the entity. This is a great approach that others should adopt. However, writing newsletter updates can present challenges of its own. In this post, we will explore some of those challenges and address how to overcome them. Keep reading to find out more information!

Updates

How often?

One question that is frequently asked is how often one should be writing these updates. There are several guidelines for writing these updates. For example, if there is some big change that happens within the entity, then a newsletter is obligatory. This will allow all members to be up to date with the big goings on of the group. If there is nothing large that happens, then releasing a newsletter on some sort of cycle is helpful. This cycle can be anywhere from monthly to once every six months. It’s up to you.

How long?

While it may seem to you that everybody wants a ten page update on how things are going, this is probably not the case. Many people (myself included) want to be able to read the newsletter and be done with it. Two to three pages is sufficient for most.

I run an organized soccer cooperative that has experienced a great amount of success within the past decade. We started small. In the beginning, we only had 3 men’s teams. Now, we have boy’s and girl’s leagues up to age 18 as well as men’s and women’s leagues. This has resulted in a large increase in things to do and people to contact. Oftentimes, I had a hard time trying to get a hold of everyone or keeping them in the know of what’s happening in the cooperative.

This was a huge problem for me until about four years ago when I switched to sending out newsletters. This format of communication was absolutely perfect for me because I would get the emails of everyone from the registration forms. From there, I would put the emails into a spreadsheet and create my own database. This is super helpful because now everyone can get updates all at once. This makes my life immeasurably easier.

Application

Field project

This newsletter came in handy when our league got too big for the fields we originally were using. As I said before, we went from a small league to a cooperative running 8 leagues each with 8 teams. When we got to a certain size, we made the decision that it was time to find better fields. We quickly realized that there were no fields to be found in the surrounding areas. We also realized that there was a nice parcel of land that was very cheap that we could use to make our own soccer complex. We knew this would be a big undertaking but decided that it was a necessary move to keep the cooperative going.

The purchasing of the parcel of land and the project to make them into soccer fields is where the newsletters came in handy. We used the newsletter to call a meeting of all participants in the cooperative. As a result, we were able to hold a large meeting and get a fundraiser going. We knew we needed to raise money to hire a tree service in Springfield. This was not hard, because we did our research online. The search engine gave us a few options (www.springfieldtrees.com/tree-removal-springfield/ and www.springfieldtrees.com/tree-trimming-springfield/ to be specific). We went with these and got a low cost quote that we could report to the cooperative. With the newsletter, we were able to tell our members how much money we needed to raise. Thankfully, our fundraising efforts were successful, and now we have plenty of space for the sport we love.

It’s hard to keep up with the ever changing technology in our society. It seems like just when we get the hang of communicating in one manner, a new method of communication emerges, putting us soundly back at square one. This can be especially difficult if you are in a position where you need to be sending messages or giving people updates as much as possible. For example, people who are in positions of authority (such as supervisors and managers) need to effectively communicate updates of code and regulations to make sure that employees are performing their job well.

Throughout the years, there have been several approaches to mass communication. The one that is discussed most in this blog is the newsletter. This form of communication allows you to select your content and make it heard to a large group of people.

We are now in the year twenty sixteen, and now there are more ways than just a newsletter to communicate updates. For example, some companies have set up an email infrastructure where a manager can send out emails that everyone on a certain team or in a certain department can get. This is great because you can reach out to a very specific group of people with ease.

Still others have resorted to using social media. There are private groups that can be made on social media platforms like Facebook. This allows people to privately share updates or communicate news to their fellow coworkers. As a result, we now have many different ways to talk to one another within a group of organized people.

When I first got into the world of newsletters, I was overwhelmed. I was completely inundated with options. For example, I had to figure out how I wanted to disseminate the information. Since we are in an age of technology, there are multiple ways to send out a newsletter. For example, some people choose to send it in an email blast to their whole email database. This is a good option, but it does seem to be a little bit impersonal. Others prefer to actually print out the newsletter and mail it to people. This can be great because it has a personal touch to it. However, it does waste a lot of paper and is not great for the environment. Still others like the web post approach. Essentially, they will type up a newsletter and post it to the organization/entity’s website. This is another great method but has a limited reach as many people will not venture onto that organization’s website for no reason.

Decision

Execution

I decided to to go the email route for the newsletters. This was great for me because I already had a large email database. I used a mail client to get all of the addresses organized so I could send the newsletter. Now came the tricky part: I had to figure out how to organize all of the information. This was not as hard as I had originally anticipated due to the wealth of free templates that exist on the internet. In no time, I found a great template that suited my needs and was able to send out a solid newsletter.

If you are running some sort of organization, communication is key. If there is some sort of breakdown in communication, then the organization will not run as smoothly as possible.

I’ve experienced this in my own life with running PTA meetings for school that my kids attend. It is a fairly large school district with many students in attendance. The PTA committee is well staffed, but when announcements had to be made, we found that we were experiencing trouble in relaying messages from the board to the lower ranks of staff.

We tried many different approaches. For example, we tried to make some sort of phone tree to relate the new happenings for the PTA. This was difficult because we would end up with a real life version of the game telephone. By the end of the phone tree, some information would be slightly distorted to the point where it was incorrect. This misinformation caused some operations that we ran to be inefficient. For example, our spring bake sale ended up having way too many pies and not enough cookies or brownies. This made it difficult for us to put on our end of the year parties for each of the classrooms.

The second thing that we tried was running a website. Unfortunately, we all lacked the technological expertise to make things smooth and clear. We also had some trouble acquiring an easy domain for members to locate.

Enter the newsletter. With a fast, easy, and free template, we were able to make sure that everyone had all of the information we wanted to share. As a result, the fall bake sale was a total success.