Company Funds, Inc Three identical letters in one week- none eligible for grants Las Vegas Nevada
I am a community relations manager for a major financial services corporation. We have a very busy and active community grants program. I have recieved three letters from three different companies requesting sums between $300,000 and $500,000.
These letters are:
a) poorly written and ungrammatical
b) poorly formatted and look like they were printed directly off a screen
c) clearly created from a database and template
d) are clearly ineligible for funding based on public disclosure
for example: the greeting in each of the letters was
Dear Manager Lastname:
The purpose of this letter is to announce this company's intention to seek grant funding from organizations that help busines with community, economic, and program development.
All the letters give the same information, personalized by individual census tract information. After speaking with the people who have requested funds, I have found that Company Funds, Inc. has charged these desperate people ridiculous sums of money to send out these useless letters. My company does not give to for profit organizations or to individuals. We do not give in amounts greater than $100,000 except under some pretty extraordinary conditions. Finally, as an experienced grants officer (not just for this company) I can state with some certainty that such a poorly presented proposal would never make it to consideration.
Grant
Los Angeles, California
U.S.A.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Scott
Yonkers,New York,
U.S.A.
Grant is in Error about Company Funds
#2UPDATE Employee
Thu, March 26, 2009
In response to Grant of LA, CA, I am writing to inform you of some of the misinformation this person has posted. I am a Letter Writer for Company Funds. My job is to write Letters of Intent which are then sent to foundations in order to receive applications or requests for proposals. These letters ARE NOT proposals, as Grant has said. They are grammatically correct as they are proofread several times within the office, as well as by the customer, before being sent to foundations.
We work with a simple template. However, there are only two to three sentences that remain the same for each letter, sometimes less. Each letter is individually tailored to each customer's business or non-profit, clearly stating in simple terms the grant request and what the grant will be used for. These letters ARE NOT poorly formatted, nor are they "printed directly off a screen," whatever that means. Each letter is composed in MSWord, proofread, corrected, and then printed. I have written letters of intent for several companies before working for Company Funds, including for-profit and non-profit organizations. Many of these customers have received requests for proposals or have been sent applications, JUST BASED ON THE LETTER OF INTENT THAT WAS WRITTEN.
It seems that Grant from LA, CA does not have a very good idea of what this company does, or how we perform our tasks. Perhaps he is just angry about receiving a flood of mail from companies that want grant funding. It is upsetting that he would vent about his workload by picking on companies that provide a good service.
-Scott
Letter Writing Department
Company Funds, Inc.