Storytelling for Grantseekers: A Guide to Creative Nonprofit Fundraising

chapter THREE

The Short Story

Writing Letters of Inquiry

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter.” These words of the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (often misattributed to Mark Twain), can be rephrased and applied to the grantseeking field: I didn’t have time to write a letter of inquiry, so I wrote a proposal instead. If proposals are like novels, then letters are like short stories. Whereas novels can be long, meandering, and filled with subplots, short stories must be tightly compact, using an economy of words. Admittedly, it’s challenging to keep your narrative brief. Every word counts. This chapter will demonstrate how to write a concise, ...