Case for Support

A case for support is the argument for why someone outside your organization should part with money. It is written once, kept current, and then quarried for every appeal letter, grant proposal, and major gift conversation you will have. Organizations without one end up reinventing their own argument every time they need it, slightly differently, which is why their materials never quite match.

The questions, in order

A sceptical outsider asks these six, roughly in this sequence, whether or not they say them out loud. Answer them in this order and the argument builds; answer them out of order and the reader is being asked to care before they know what about.

1. 1What problem exists, for whom, and how do you know? Evidence, not adjectives.
2. 2What do you do about it, specifically, and why that approach?
3. 3What does it cost, and what does a given amount actually buy?
4. 4What has it achieved so far? Numbers where you have them, a real story where you do not.
5. 5Why you rather than someone else working on the same thing?
6. 6What happens if this is not funded? The consequence, stated plainly.

Write it long first, eight to ten pages, with every fact and number in it. That long version is your source of truth. Nobody outside will ever read it end to end, and that is fine.

The long case is the quarry. What you use in practice are the shorter things cut from it, all saying the same thing at different lengths.

Four versions do almost all the work, and each one is a cut of the same argument rather than a fresh attempt at it.

Keeping it honest

A case decays. Numbers age, stories get told without permission, and the specific claims that made it persuasive quietly become claims you can no longer stand behind. Four habits keep it usable.

• Every number in it should be traceable to something real, and dated. Impact figures from four years ago read as though nothing has happened since.
• Use one real story properly rather than three thin ones, and get permission to tell it.
• Say what a specific amount buys. "$250 pays for a week of tutoring for one student" outperforms "your support makes a difference" by a wide margin.
• Review it once a year. A case nobody has touched since the last campaign is quietly wrong by now.

Do those four and the case stays a document you can hand to a funder on an hour's notice. Skip them and it becomes something you rewrite in a panic every time somebody asks for it, which is where most organizations are.

Riverside had no case for support. Here is the core of the long version, reduced to the six questions, with the evidence attached.

Every one of those says the same thing, uses the same numbers, and came from the same document. That consistency is the whole reason to write the long version nobody reads.