{"id":7209,"date":"2011-04-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.causevox.com\/?p=379"},"modified":"2024-05-08T19:07:35","modified_gmt":"2024-05-08T19:07:35","slug":"bruce-bartons-100-fundraising-letter-response-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/blog\/bruce-bartons-100-fundraising-letter-response-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Barton&#8217;s 100% Fundraising Letter Response Rate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s talk about one of the first documented instances of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/digital-fundraising\/\">supporter-driven fundraising<\/a>. Bruce is the founder of BBDO, a global ad agency, and is often referred to as the one of the first to do supporter-driven fundraising.<\/p>\n<p>In 1925, there was a college in Kentucky called Berea that educated the local towns. The students were poor; they raised their own food, milked their own cows, and made their own crafts. When Bruce visited Berea College, the school was running a deficit. Berea College had two bad options. It could turn down students from education or start charging tuition.<\/p>\n<p>After seeing this, Bruce wrote a fundraising letter to ask for donations. He sent it to 24 of his friends in NY and asked for $1000 each to help kids in the South. He described the student and how they lived to humanize them to the reader and illustrated the urgent need for funding.<\/p>\n<p>The result? All 25 friends donated. In today&#8217;s money, they gave $300,000 to provide 250 students with education.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Berea College provides tuition-free education to low-income students. It was the first college in the south to be integrated too.<\/p>\n<p>It only takes one person to make a difference. Bruce made his by focusing his personal network on cause.\u00a0Read Bruce&#8217;s letter <a href=\"https:\/\/sofii.org\/case-study\/the-bruce-barton-letter-the-classic-long-copy-letter-from-1925-that-pulled-a-100-per-cent-response\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s talk about one of the first documented instances of supporter-driven fundraising. Bruce is the founder of BBDO, a global ad agency, and is often referred to as the one of the first to do supporter-driven fundraising. In 1925, there was a college in Kentucky called Berea that educated the local towns. The students were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"acf":[],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Team CauseVox","author_link":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/author\/teamcausevox\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.causevox.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}