The support letter is the right instinct, and it has worked for decades. The part that breaks is what happens in the thirty seconds after someone decides to give.
Your share of the trip is $2,800. Registration closes in six weeks, and the team needs half of it before the flights get booked.
You have written the letter. It's good — where you're going, what the team will be doing, why you want to be on it. You've got a list of about forty people: family, your small group, two sets of grandparents, the couple who taught your confirmation class, your old boss.
Twelve of them have already said yes.
This is the whole problem, and it's almost never the ask.
Your letter lands and someone decides to help. Then: write a check and remember to mail it. Or find the church office hours. Or catch you at coffee hour with cash.
Each of those is a small errand, and a small errand is where a yes quietly becomes a next week. The twelve people who said yes aren't the problem. The six who meant to are.
| What you keep | 100% of every contribution. The 6.9% fee is added at checkout and paid by the contributor, not taken out of what you receive. |
| When it arrives | Standard payouts reach your bank in 2-3 business days. |
| Who sees it | Only the people you send the link to, unless you choose to make it public. Nothing is listed or searchable by default. |
$2,800 is twenty-eight contributions of $100.
You have forty people on the list and twelve already said yes. You don't need a crowd, a campaign, or a share count — you need the list you already wrote the letter to, and a link that turns a yes into a yes.
Nothing to create a request. Nothing to send it. The only fee is the 6.9% a contributor pays on top of their own contribution — a $100 contribution costs the giver $106.90, and you receive $100.00.
One person's share, with a number on it. Mission trips are priced per traveler, and that's an advantage. "My $2,800" is a clearer ask than "our team needs the full amount," and the person reading it knows exactly what they're covering.
The list you already have. Family, your small group, the people who've known you since you were small, your church directory, your coworkers. The support letter assumes that list exists. It does.
A date you can't move. Registration closes, flights get booked, the team leaves in June. A trip has hard dates, and so does the ask.
Contributions start at $100. That's the scale this is built for — a grandparent covering a twenty-eighth of a trip, your old boss covering four of them. Twenty-eight people and you're going.
Trips that aren't mission trips. A school trip to Washington, a choir tour, a band competition, a semester abroad, a service trip with no church attached. Same shape: one person, one number, one list.
Run them. They reach people your list doesn't, and some of them are half the point.
A request is for what the letter already asked for, with somewhere for the yes to land.
