HELP! I need to send out donation letters for our school carnival in February. The kids need to raise money for camp. I want to know if any one has a standard letter they have sent out to companies that seems to work good? When you do walk into these businesses who do you talk with and what exactly do you say? Any information you could provide me with would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you -
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I started planning our auction 3 months in advance. That wasn't enough time to get national letters out--didn't even realize I could do that until a month into it (thank you PTO Today for great ideas!) but that was enough time to solicit locally and I got about 60 items, which was perfect for our little school.
Before sending out faxes, we called ahead and asked if they would be interested in donating. If they were, we faxed or mailed a letter. We got a good response from that. But the best response was to hit businesses personally.Sometimes I walked out with a donation in hand, and sometimes they mailed it to the school. Cold mailings netted about a 8% response.
The thing about starting out so late, it didn't seem to hurt how many donations we got, but I did have to be super organized and on top of everything. We literally still had donations coming in the day of the auction, even though we had a deadline of two weeks prior to the auction.
FYI - be careful with faxes - it is illegal to send out unsolicited faxes. My husband is an attorney and litigates these types of cases. If you have permission from the company, it may be okay. Also, it may be different regarding donations, but I would check before doing anything via fax.
This will be our 2nd year doing the regular silent auction (they've always had a few baskets and did the ticket in the container thing). Last year our silent auction/carnival was mid-April and I started soliciting donations in Oct. I did mailed out about 500 letters and emailed a ton. This year, our silent auction/carnival is the end of March and I started in July. This year I've emailed over 500, faxed about 200 and mailed out about 300 and I have a big honkin' stack to send out today.
Good luck to you,
Holly This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
When we had our first tricky tray in October of 2004, we started sending out our corporate letters in February 2004. We started soliciting local businesses in May...but the summer was hard, being out of school. Once September hit we were pretty much wrapping things up, literally, and I'd say we were done 2 weeks before our auction. We have our next tricky tray slated for March/April 2007 and will most likely start planning it in March/April 2006. One full year is about what it takes us.
