Nonprofit Cover Letter Sample Writing Guide (15+ Tips)

Nonprofit Cover Letter Sample Writing Guide (15+ Tips) Working for something you believe in deeply and making a difference in the world make your heart beat faster.But before you start to give back to the community, you need to get your foot in the door.You and I both know that Oh, nonprofit work is like volunteering. No real competition, all smiles, is just a brutal myth.In fact, the nonprofit sector is ruthlessand so is the nonprofit job-search.Take heart. Youre about to learn how to write a nonprofit cover letter thatll give you an instant edge over other applicants.This guide will show you a great nonprofit cover letter example plus the best tips on how to write a cover letter for nonprofit jobs step-by-step.Want to write your cover letter fast?Use our cover letter builder. Choose from20+ professional cover letter templatesthat match your resume. See actionable examples and get expert tips along the way.Sample Cover Letter for a ResumeSee more cover letter templates and create your cover letter here.One of our users, Nikos, had this to say:[I used] a nice template I found on Zety. My resume is now one page long, not three. With the same stuff.Create your resume nowConsidering similar positions too? See other cover letter examples for jobs in your industry:Consulting Cover LetterProject Manager Cover LetterPublic Relations Cover LetterVolunteer Cover LetterCase Manager Cover LetterWant to explore your options further? See our full selection of cover letter examples for every career:Best Cover Letter Examples for All ProfessionsLets get started then!Nonprofit Cover Letter SampleAmelia BoughtonAdvocacy and Engagement Specialist82 North Cooper StreetBrooklyn, NY 11219a.boughton@me.com+1-202-555-0158linkedin.com/in/ameliamarthaboughtonSeptember 15, 2019Tiffanie DarkeManaging Director, Office of Public Policy and AdvocacyUNICEF3 United Nations PlazaNew York, NY 10017Dear Tiffanie:Nick Kaye suggested I apply for the position of Manager, Advocacy and Engagement with UNICEF New York because he knows my proven record of successfully managing and executing all stages of digital communication strategies and timelines for largest national non-profit organizations. I have attached my resume with detailed work experience for your review. I am sure my expertise will translate into groundbreaking results for UNICEF New York.Nick informed me that the crucial upcoming challenges for UNICEFs Advocacy and Engagement team are the development of advocacy-related video content and legislative one-pagers, as well as incorporating UUSAs advocacy priorities into TV, print, and web campaigns. For the past 8 years, I was working as an external consultant for multi-national nonprofits and NGOs. Recent achievements include:Increased funding for the XYZ Organization by 90% year-on-year through multi-channel awareness-raising campaigns.Secured 17 non-paid-for publications in 4 major national print outlets in the last 6 months of 2018.Oversaw all digital projects for Feed The Children, boosting efficiency by 30%.When I re ad your mission statement of working toward the day when no children die from preventable causes and every child has a safe and healthy childhood, I felt reinvigoratedits the single goal Ive always aimed to dedicate my professional life to. Joining your Advocacy and Engagement team would allow me to grow in the direction I desire most while working hard on delivering all your upcoming objectives.Can we schedule a call or a meeting to discuss my solutions for improving the effectiveness of UNICEFs marketing and PR campaigns in the upcoming year?Yours sincerely,Amelia Boughtona.boughton@me.com+1-202-555-0158That was one jaw-dropping nonprofit cover letter, right?The good news? Youre about to learn how to create an equally great one yourself.Dont have much experience yet? See our guide to writing entry-level cover letters here: Entry-Level Cover Letter With No Experience ExamplesSee that you could actually still use a little work on your resume? This guide will definitely help:How to W rite a Nonprofit ResumeNow, lets walk through writing a cover letter for nonprofit jobs step by step.Nonprofit Cover Letter TemplateHeres how to write a cover letter for nonprofit jobs:1. Stick to the standard business letter formatMargins: one-inch.Spacing: 1.15.Font: one of the classics (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc.); 11 to 12 pt-sized.See more: Cover Letter Format and Layout Rules2. Create a good-looking nonprofit cover letter headingMake the header of your nonprofit cover letter match your resume header.Include: your full name, job title, contact details, physical address.Put the city and date below.Finally, add the addressees details: the hiring managers full name and the company address.Dont know who the hiring manager is? Try to find out! See who runs the company department on LinkedIn, check with the company website or just call the front desk and ask.Learn more: Address on a Cover Letter3. Start with a personal greeting and a captivating opening paragraphDear [hiring manag ers name] is the best greeting out there.In the first paragraph, introduce yourself and state the position to which youre applying.Open with a hook: mention your relevant achievements or highlight your skill set.Learn more: The Best Cover Letter Opening Lines and Paragraphs4. Show that youre *the* candidate theyve been looking forGo through the job ad. Identify their key requirements. In your nonprofit cover letter, provide evidence of your past achievements that show youll be able to do the job well.Add metrics and numbers to validate your achievements.Mention some extra accomplishments you know they cant afford to miss!5. Explain your motivation to joinMake them realize you want to work with them more than with any other nonprofit.Refer to their mission and valuesclearly state why theyre important to your professional self too.If youre passionate and excited about this job, dont tone it down. Tell them what impresses you most about their activities.Do all this while not making you r cover letter too long. What does too long mean? Find out: How Long Should My Cover Letter Be6. Close with a call to action and a clear offerAsk for an in-person meeting or a call.Reiterate what youre bringing to the table. Say what specific goals youll help them reach.See more: How to End a Cover Letter Right7. Put your professional sign-off at the bottomSign with your full name and a digital copy of your signature.Include a footer with your phone number and email.Once youre done with your job application, dont just sit and wait.A couple of weeks passed and you still havent heard from them? Follow up! A well-placed call or email can make all the difference.Find out more: How to Follow Up on a Resume and Cover LetterOne final thing:A professional nonprofit cover letter can seriously boost your chances for landing that job. But its still your resume that matters most.When making a resume in our builder, drag drop bullet points, skills, and auto-fill the boring stuff. Spell check? C heck. Start building your resume here.Create my resume nowWhen youre done, Zetys resume builder will score your resume and tell you exactly how to make it better.Want to learn more about writing a cover letter for nonprofit positions? Struggling with ideas for your cover letter? Let me know in the comments. Ill do my best to help!

Reality check Youre not going to make money from your blog

Reality check Youre not going to make money from your blog Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. Its so unlikely that its a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. Its not. Blogging is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself. But here are eight reasons you should stop thinking about money from blogging: 1. Big bloggers come from big media. Usually Im the first person to rip on print media as outdated and a dead-end career. But heres something that maybe you dont realize: Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print. For example: Erik Schoenfeld (TechCrunch), Owen Thomas (Valleywag), and I all wrote for Business 2.0 magazine at the same time. Ten years ago. Which means we had a ton of national media experience before we started blogging. Anya Kamenetz (Yahoo Finance) wrote for the Village Voice and had a very serious book publishedbefore she started blogging. 2. Sure, there are exceptions. But youre probably not one of them. Lets look at some people who have big blogs who didnt come from big media. Heather Armstrong at Dooce. Shes a good one. Heres what she has that you dont: Shes a talented writer and a talented designer. Shes married to a developer who does all her tech stuff for free. And she has an amazing story to tell. She has the ability to translate her genius across many mediaphotography, memoir, twitter, and so on. She is a marvel. And you are not. None of us is. Thats why she is making so much money from her blog. 3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard. Most people had to do their day job and experiment with their blog and figure out what works and then do two, pretty much full-time jobs, and then quit their day job when their blog earned enough money. JD Roth did this at Get Rich Slowly. I did this with my blog (and nearly fell apart). Most people who do this do not have kids. Because if you have kids and a job you already have two full-time jobs, so you cannot add another. Blogging to support yourself is a complete full-time job. Read Gina Trapanis post about how she is taking a break from blogging because its so life-consuming. 4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging. Yes, there are some topics that do not require controversy: Productivity tools, for example. I think its safe to say, though, that that market is pretty saturated. You will have to find a good niche for yourself in order to stand out from the crowd. So you will have to be different, and the bloggers who are different have surprising things to say. And if you have surprising opinions, youll have people who tell you youre an idiot. And if you are making good money from your blog, youll have hundreds of people telling you how youre an idiot. Do you want that? Really? Will you be able to write another controversial opinion the next day or will you be too nervous? 5. You can make more money flipping burgers. If you want to get your opinions out into the world, or you want to write a diary about your life, whateverdo that. But why do you have to make money at it? Most of you would probably like to write a bit, to get new opportunities, and then leverage the blog to do something fun. Most of you do not want to write blog posts optimized for advertisers. Really. 6. Please shut up about your book deal. Books are not cash cows. They are time sinks. And they are marketing tools for something else. Like a consulting business or a speaking career or a blog. And people who are great speakers are seldom great writers, and vice versa. So dont tell me you are doing a blog to get a book deal: Dead end. And dont tell me its not a dead end because youll turn that into a speaking career. Show me someone that has worked for. Dont tell me about Seth Godin. He had huge books before he started blogging. Not the other way around. 7. Blog for better reasons than money. There are a lot of reasons to blog, but for the most part, money is not one of them. In the book, Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, Stephane Grenier asked forty bloggers what their definition of blogging success is. He talked with people like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Ramit Sethi, and me. We all make a living online, and we all have big blogs, but almost no one in the book said money was the definition of success. Bloggers defined success as things that mattered in their life: influence, connections, friendships, the ability to lead a conversation that matters to people. Some talked about a blog leading to other business opportunities. 8. Banner advertising is the mafia. I have not had banner advertising on my site because I am so adamant that people should not blog to earn moneyI dont want to encourage anyone. I did take one ad. For Career Bags. Im going to tell you something: The amount they paid for that ad was insignificant to me. But they let me do a lot of shopping on the site for free. Which was a huge treat. Shopping was fun. And I think about how much I love my blog every time I put my laptop into my Casauri bag. I would never say that about a banner ad. But I am about to capitulate and sign a contract with Federated Media, the by-far-biggest company for online ad sales. Federated is sort of doing me a favor. I mean, I have about 400,000 page views a month, which I think is less traffic than any of their other clients. Im grateful to be part of Federated because I do, in fact, need to make money from my blog. But what I have done to get herework two jobs at once while raising kids, sell equity in my blog and then almost go out of business, and spend about four hours on each postyou probably wouldnt want to go through all that just to make money on banner ads. You probably have a way more efficient mechanism for earning money and you can blog on the side. This seems like a good time to tell you the advice my writing teacher gave our who class in graduate school: Writing for a living is a very, very hard life. If you can do anything else for a living, you should. So the idea that blogging will help you get rich: Forget it. Your chances of that are so slim, while your chances of gaining the other benefits of blogging are very high. So blog, yes, and do it to reach real goals, just not financial goals.

Mindfulness makes you more productive

Mindfulness makes you more productive Im in the midst of dumping my happiness obsession for something else, but I wonder what is the key to a good life if Im giving up on happiness? I thought maybe it was interestingness, but I am a little worried because I confess that Id rather fall asleep in the farmers arms than solve the meaning of life. Or maybe I am doing them both at the same time? I dont know. I just know that ideas overwhelm me sometimes, and until I go to a doctor to get medication to calm my head down, Im not convinced I need more interestingness in my life than my already-spinning head. Then I thought maybe I needed expertise: striving to be an expert would be my obsession. Which it might be. But I dont think it replaces happiness. It sort of sits next to it. Like, obsessing about being an expert comes naturally to me, but Im not sure why. So Im still looking for what can replace happiness as my what-am-I-doing-here thing. And Im thinking that maybe its mindfulness. It kills me to even write the word, because for the last decade, while I was busy turning Ashtanga yoga into a competitive sport, my teachers kept talking about mindfulness. I kept thinking to myself, I wish theyd shut up and just rank us so I know if Im best. But Im convinced that mindfulness is what gives us the self-discipline to do all the stuff the happiness researchers say will make us happy. And it makes sense, because my yoga teacher always told me mindful would make me happy, if Id just try it. So I get about ten zillion books in the mail because publishers ignore the fact that most book reviews on this blog simply say why I didnt like the book. But. Whatever. So I get this book in the mail The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World and for some reason I find myself reading it during violin practice. This is very bad because we are in a Suzuki program, which means Im the teacher. I said to myself, this is crazy, Im reading a book about slowing down my life as a way to multitask while I am teaching my child to love music. I forced myself to put the book down. But I liked the book. And I asked the author, Christine Louise Hohlbaum, to write a guest post on my blog. Which is something I never do. Because I end up hating all guest posts and spending way too much time editing them. The first thing I did when I saw her guest post is I said no. I said this cannot be a guest post. But I think it was okay because thats her first piece of advice: 1. Learn to say no with panache. So instead of spending way too much time going back and forth editing, I am just going to plumage through the guest post for stuff I like. I like no. She says, One of the biggest time sucks in our lives is saying ?yes to something we should have declined. Taking on that extra project at work, organizing the blood drive (again), or accepting yet another party invitation can eat up your time you could have spent doing something you truly love. We have been conditioned to believe ?no is an evil word, when, in fact, it is a complete sentence. This is how I know she wont mind that I dumped her guest post but took her best material. 2. Watch your words. This is the advice that initially hooked me: Hohlbaum says, Busy is the new fine. Its true. Someone asks, How are you? and you say, Busy. Can you see how messed up that is? Its a script, right? The person doesnt really care how you are. The person wants to just hear that youre fine and move on to the meat and potatoes of the conversation. So if you say busy, you are either saying you do not understand the social convention of opening niceties (very bad to say) or you are saying that busy is the new fine (also very bad to say). Busy is not fine. Busy is too much going on to be your best self. So stop talking about it and fix it. 3. Honor Set-Up Time. You know the feeling. You return from a weeks vacation to a mountain of work that piled up in your absence. It takes you three days just to slog through it all, and you wonder why you even bothered to leave in the first place. We have the expectation that we should be able to jump right back into what we were doing at a rapid pace. Not so. Every project requires set-up time. Honor the time it takes to get started. It is not about procrastination. It is about wading into the task at hand. It is no wonder you get your best ideas in the shower. You are relaxed and stress-free. Set-up time allows you to tap into your deepest thinking. Make room for it in your lifeit will contribute more to your success than pushing through with no stops. 4. Save the best for last. Procrastination is a huge time-killer. You spend most of your time worrying about what you havent started, pushing it into the recess of your mind. Instead, start saving the best for last. Tackle the hardest project earlier in the day. Reward yourself with your favorite project at the end. I love this advice in a book about slow, because its not just a way to get your stuff done. Its a way to slow time down. If you are procrastinating, time goes so much faster than if you have your most important stuff done. I am trying to figure out what mindful is. And Im pretty sure its doing this stuff. Its making little rules for yourself throughout the day that force you to check in to make sure you are living a conscious life, purposefully guided. These might not make me happythat might be impossiblebut they might make my head spin slower.