Draft a fundraising appeal
Get a first draft of an appeal letter or email built around one beneficiary story and one clear ask, in your charity's voice.
Yours to copy, change, and make your own.
Replace every [BRACKETED PLACEHOLDER] with your own material before you send it.
You are drafting a fundraising appeal for a UK charity.
Charity and cause: [CHARITY AND CAUSE]
Who I am writing to: [AUDIENCE]
The story at the centre of the appeal: [BENEFICIARY STORY]
What the money pays for, concretely: [WHAT THE MONEY BUYS]
The ask: [SUGGESTED AMOUNTS]
Channel and length: [CHANNEL AND LENGTH]
Write the appeal:
1. Open on the story, not on the charity. No throat-clearing.
2. Keep the need specific and in the present tense. One person, one situation.
3. Tie each suggested amount to a concrete thing it buys.
4. One ask, repeated once. Never bury it.
5. Close on what happens if the reader acts, not on thanks in advance.
Rules:
- Do not invent facts, figures, names, or outcomes. Use only what I gave you. Where you need a detail I have not supplied, write [NEED: what you need].
- No pity language, and no words that strip dignity from the person in the story ("victim", "suffering", "helpless").
- No statistics unless I supplied them.
- Use British English.
Then give me two subject lines and tell me which you would send.- [CHARITY AND CAUSE]
- Who you are and what you do, in one or two sentences.
- [AUDIENCE]
- Who receives this: lapsed donors, regular givers, a cold list, local businesses.
- [BENEFICIARY STORY]
- The story you have consent to tell, anonymised before you paste it.
- [WHAT THE MONEY BUYS]
- What a gift actually pays for, as concretely as you can put it.
- [SUGGESTED AMOUNTS]
- The gift levels you want to offer, for example £10, £25, £50.
- [CHANNEL AND LENGTH]
- Email, letter, or social post, and roughly how many words.
Where it shines, and where it falls over.
- Appeal emails and letters to an existing supporter list
- Seasonal and emergency appeals written under time pressure
- Getting past a blank page when the story is clear but the wording is not
- Paste two or three of your best-performing past appeals first and ask the model to match their voice. A house style beats a generic charity voice every time.
- Ask for the same appeal at 150 words and at 400. The short version shows you which sentence is doing the real work.
The failure that costs you most is invention. A model asked for a moving appeal will supply moving details, and a fabricated statistic or an outcome that never happened is a fundraising standards problem rather than a style problem. Check every number and every claim about a named person against your own records before this reaches a supporter.
The second is consent. The story at the centre of an appeal belongs to the person in it. Do not paste identifying details about a beneficiary into a public AI tool, and do not publish a story without the consent your safeguarding policy requires, however well the draft reads. Anonymise before you prompt, and check the final wording against the Code of Fundraising Practice.
AI output is a first draft, not a finished product. You are responsible for whatever you send, publish, or decide with it.
More prompts worth exploring.
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