How to create a charity fundraising pack

Charity fundraising packs are a vital way to connect with fundraisers, donors and other core audiences that can benefit your organisation. The fundraising pack is typically sent as a physical product or shared via a PDF with potential partners. Your fundraising pack is a vital component of your complete fundraising strategy – and should receive the most interest and investment.

In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the steps to create a fundraising pack, examine the essentials (and the nice to haves) and explain why working with a professional charity copywriter is going to deliver the greatest return for your investment (while also saving you some time!).

Why create a professional fundraising pack?

Charities need a clear, compelling and relatable fundraising pack to connect with fundraisers. Even more importantly, the fundraising pack provides legal information to ensure events – and fundraisers – are safe and legally protected. The pack also provides details on how donations can be successfully transferred once the event has been completed. 

Many charities will create their own fundraising packs. That’s fine, but in our experience, the more professional your fundraising pack the more profit you’re likely to make. That’s because fundraising packs contain everything required to raise money while keeping fundraising fun.

You also have to consider that charities are in competition for vital resources and the ones that make the best case will be the biggest beneficiaries. When fundraisers are interested in raising money for a cause (like diabetes, cancer or mental health, for example), they’ll often search online and access resources  like fundraising packs. If yours if professional and clear, you’ll have an advantage – and that means more opportunities to raise funds you need.

What’s included in a charity fundraising pack?

Your charity fundraising pack is a core way of communicating directly with your core audience. Fundraising packs can contain pretty much all information that you need to organise, manage and complete a fundraising event. Buy beyond that, they provide a way to 

Some common things you’ll find in a charity fundraising pack include:

• Welcome letter
• Case studies
• Fundraising ideas
• Legal information
• How to raise money and transfer money
• Setting up an online giving page
• Legacy and will section

You might also find other things, including specific inserts that provide information on certain aspects of fundraising, like school events, community fundraising ideas or challenges. There may be other elements you need to include in a plan. A fundraising pack for a marathon might contain a running guide. A century cycle challenge may want a mileage chart.

The best and most successful fundraising guides are shaped around you, your organisation and your audience – so they’re what we’re going to consider first when designing your charity fundraising pack.

Designing your charity fundraising pack

OK, so now’s the time to begin creating your charity fundraising pack. We begin by identifying some of the

• Who are we writing for?
• What information do they want?
• What do we want them to think, feel and do?
• What’s a logical structure for a guide?
• What case studies should we include?

Working through this list on your own or with a charity copywriter (or charity copywriting agency like 42group) can help bring some clarity to your fundraising pack.

From this exercise, you should have the rough outline of a structure. There are no rules when it comes to fundraising packs. They can be as short or long as you like, but they should deliver for your audience.

Here’s an example of a simple fundraising pack outline and pages.

1. Cover
2. Intro letter from CEO
3. Fundrising ideas
4. Case studies
5. Creating an online fundraising page
6. How to transfer your donations to us
7. Fundraising tips to maximise donations
8. Back cover with contact information

This provides a simple and logical structure to create a fundraising pack.Will it work for you? Work through the process above and you’ll be able to develop a page structure and content that helps drive donations to your charity.

Charity fundraising tone of voice and style

This is a really challenging one. Charities don’t conform to the style rules that corporate companies do, which gives you the freedom to do something different. 

Think of it this way. Charities raise donations by appealing to people like you and me. They do this through building human connections, something that we, as copywriters, believe is the core of what we do. 

Connections are built when people, brands, businesses and (perhaps more than the rest) charities speak with clarity and authenticity. Basically, they’re true to themselves and their causes. 

We don’t know about your charity (yet) and can’t provide advice and guidance that will add value. What we do recommend is spending time developing your tone of voice, establishing a style that’s unique to you. Do that and you’ll be well on your way to establishing a tone of voice and style that delivers huge benefits for your charity.

Building a charity fundraising pack

Fundraising packs (sadly) don’t just appear fully formed and ready to send. Instead, they’re the product of hard work and collaborations among copywriters, designers, fundraisers and charity leaders. 

You can choose to outsource the creation of your charity fundraising pack to an agency like 42group, or manage it internally.  That’s your choice. Some of the benefits of working with an agency include:

• Established processes and ways of working
• Strong history of delivery
• Fixed fee
• Agreed timescales
• Relationships with other providers (designers, printers, distributors)

Outsourcing the creation of your fundraising pack to an agency is a simple solution – but it can cost more than your in house team. The reality is that most charities don’t have the time, skills or resources to deliver the kind of end-product that an agency partner can.

Work with a charity copywriting agency

You’re probably wondering whether you should work with a charity copywriting agency or not. In our view (not impartial, obviously, but based on over a decade of experience), working with a specialist charity copywriting agency like 42group is the fastest and most cost-effective way to get the result you want: a charity fundraising pack that generates the maximum donations with the minimum of stress. 

We can walk you through the process here (and a whole lot of other resources and information that can add massive value but that we’re not prepared to share for free!). The result will be a fundraising pack that you’ll be proud of and plays a key role in securing the future of your organisation.