While foundation grants are an important source of income for nonprofit organizations, donations from individuals are also vital. Nonprofit development professionals who find tapping the latter source of funding to be a challenge will do well to spend a couple of hours with two books in The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guideseries.

Tom Ahern's The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising More Money With Newsletters Than You Ever Thought Possibleand Madeline Stanionis' The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (if Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with Emailshow readers how to craft fundraising appeals that lead to real donations. And in different ways, both authors provide advice designed to make your message stand out in an information-saturated world. As Ahern says, "Every day, thousands of messages come at you from every direction... sent by organizations trying to penetrate your brain and influence your behavior, particularly your spending behavior (which, of course, includes charitable giving)."

Ahern's main point is that successful nonprofit newsletters can earn more money than direct-mail solicitations. To help you create such a newsletter, he provides eleven newsletter writing recommendations (four personalities to appeal to and seven flaws to avoid), and suggests including and/or incorporating "real news," catchy headlines, dramatic tension, and emotional stories about your organization into each issue. Such an approach is more likely to motivate readers to donate because it will help them understand how their donation fits within the larger picture of your organization. It's also essential, says Ahern, that the newsletter focus on the donors and their activities. "A donor newsletter is not about what your agency has achieved," he reminds us. "It is about what your donors have achieved through your agency."

In contrast, Madeline Stanionis believes in the power of direct-mail solicitations, and her focus is on adapting and applying proven direct-mail model methods to the e-mail sphere.

For example, she tells us that people are easily fooled into believing that e-mail solicitations are synonymous with bulk solicitations. Not true. E-mail solicitations, says Stanionis, are essentially direct-mail solicitations, and a successful direct-mail solicitation requires knowledge and planning. A critical difference between the two is in the quality of the mailing list. It's easy enough to purchase a list of "snail" mail addresses, but very difficult to acquire a similar list of e-mail. E-mail is also very cheap compared to standard snail mail, but it can take a while to build an e-mail list worth mailing to. Fortunately, Stanionis provides methods for building such a list, and provides pointers on technical issues, such as things you can do to improve the chances your e-mails reach their targets instead of getting caught in spam or junk-mail filters.

She also tells the reader that, in terms of fundraising effectiveness, an e-mail campaign involving multiple solicitations is much superior to a one-time solicitation. Effective annual and ad hoc event-driven campaigns require planning and proper timing to maximize their success, however. While Stanionis shows how organizations have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through e-mail campaigns, she also takes pains to point out that achieving such a result is more complicated than just clicking on "send."

Both Ahern and Stanionis make their living doing the work they write about, and both of the books are quite brief — even if the titles are not. Either could be read in one sitting, and fundraisers who do so will come away with a lot of practical lessons and step-by-step information that will come in handy when they get back to the office.