Reflections on 10 Years

• “That brings me, finally, to a very simple but useful technique. I’ll leave it up to you to work out the details, but here’s the concept. Never write: ‘Mrs. Jones, I’m asking you to give a gift of $50 today.’ Never. Instead, write: ‘Mrs. Jones, I’m asking you to give a gift of $50 today, because …’ And nail the ‘because.’ Without a good ‘because,’ none of this stuff will work very well.”

From Tom Hurley, then president of the not-for-profit division of DMW (In the Trenches column, “The RFP Process”):