COMM 310: Advanced Writing, Public Relations
Direct Mail Letter

Your group is trying to raise money to benefit your twice-a-month newsletter, called PR Progress. The newsletter is a regionally-based, non-profit, no-advertising publication designed to help inform PR students and professionals on new research in the field, innovations, staff changes in North Dakota and western Minnesota, profiles of professionals, training programs, new media-related products, problems in the industry, and basically anything of interest to PR people in the area.

You've been publishing for five years, sponsored by your group, Public Relations Or Death (PROD).But you have some problems. See, the cost of production and mailing 15,000 copies of this publication is no longer being covered by the $25-a-year subscription fee. So your group's director has decided to try to raise more money by holding a raffle. (State license number 321.)

Here's how it works: relying on your mailing list of 25,000 communications-inclined people in the tri-state area, you include a direct mail letter and an "exclusive entry form." Each form holds a different entry number. To be eligible, the recipient has to mail back the entry form. With, you hope, a donation! You can't by law force people to donate to be eligible, but you can guilt trip them into doing it! Or something.
Your director says you have to say somewhere in your letter than the suggested donation is $20, and also what the prizes are to be raffled. The prizes are pretty darned good: $2,000 grand prize; Two second-place prizes of $200; Five third place prizes of a gold-plated pizza cutter.
So they have a number of chances to win! Whee!

Don't forget to tell people that they gotta get their stuff back by Jan. 15. Boy, this is going to be quite the exciting promotion, but only if you present it that way in your very important direct mail letter. Use underlining, boldface, headlines, subheads, etc., as you think necessary.