(PS… should anyone be so inclined, we’re still accepting donations. They can go to my office at 1500 Spring Garden St., 12th floor, Phila., Pa 19130.)

I’m right on the same page with you relative to Margaret’s letter. You hit the nail on the head!

Through all my years in nonprofit advancement, I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the really “sharp heads” in direct-response fundraising — people like Alan Sack and lee Robbins, for example. From all of them, I’ve always tried to learn something that was demonstrably true and durable. Experience proved that most all of it was.

Even the experts have been known to counsel that an appeal letter should never be “long” (more than two pages) or “full of too much detail” (people aren’t going to read it all). While respectful of the experts and their written (and sometimes unwritten) rules, my own instinct always was to just tell the story and make it as real, emotional (within reasonable limits), personalized and credible as possible.

Margaret’s letter does all of that and more! Clearly, she was writing to a small and more familiar audience, but, as you (Roger) stated, it’s purely from the heart and about a real person and real needs.

In my own view, the principal lessons for all of us in this are: (1) to avoid putting on a detached, formal persona when sitting down to write an award-winning appeal letter, and to write it as though we were appealing to our own close friends; (2) to ask, and to ask “boldly and with outrageous hope” (I love that part!); and, (3) to strive to build nonprofit constituent relationships out of the same stuff as highly personalized relationships, so that they might produce similar results.

You are right; this was a terrific letter by Margaret Battistelli. To use Tom Belford’s familiar expression, she deserves a raise! Three cheers!