Ok cool welcome to the cover letter side by side.
We're going to be writing the cover letter today for Alex Smith.
Alex is a recent graduate of Sacramento State University and he's looking to join a nonprofit organization.
So one of the first things we're going to do is just take out this red bit here and we're not going
to mess too much with this contact information section because that'll be your contact information and
we're going to just go and open the website of the organization that Alex is targeting in this case.
It is the Sierra Health Foundation.
And so one of them one of the first things that we're going to do actually is go over here to the easel
SJS guide.
So you'll see how to use the SJS.
And so step 1 let's just start to think about the organizations culture and let's see what size the
organization is.
Let's go back to Sierra Health and actually what you can see is that the we have the staff page open.
And so when you go you look at the staff you'll see that it's not.
There's not too many people at Sierra Health.
So it's a fairly small organization.
And then when you go back and you look at the essays you can see that you'll need to talk about you
know the variety of needs that Sierra Health might have.
And you'll also notice that your audience is probably not going to be like an dedicated recruiter.
Will probably be the founder of the organization or even you know an assistant or something like that.
So in that case you can write a little bit more informally.
And then let's just go to step two which is to look at the cultural tendencies of the particular industry.
And so when we go down here we're going to go to government and nonprofits and you'll see that they
tend to value candidates who are all about fulfilling their mission and serving the public interest.
So when we go back over here to this year a health Fondation I have their vision mission and values
up.
And you can see right here from their vision that their vision is to have a healthy life for Northern
Californians.
All right cool.
So then what we're going to do is just keep that in our minds as we start to develop this cover letter.
If you were actually going to be applying to some organizations you might want to continue down to the
third part of the SJS which is who owns the organization in this case since is nonprofit it's the general
public or donors.
So again this is going to be about candidates who are in it for the public good anyway so we're back
here.
And actually one thing that I've noticed here is we have to decide whether we're going to send this
as an e-mail attachment or as a separate attachment.
So let's go back over here.
And one thing you'll notice is that when you go over to the news page you see Chet Hewitt's contact
information right here.
He's the president and CEO.
So you can actually e-mail him and that's great.
So we're actually e-mail it.
So because that's the case we're just going to actually remove this stuff here.
And actually what we'll probably do is remove this whole section here because they're going to know
that it's coming from Alex Smith because Alex is going to be sending it via e-mail.
All right.
And then let's just address this to Mr. Hewitt and the Sierra Health Team.
OK.
And Alex is applying for a lead fundraiser position.
All right.
So now Alex is going to move on to the second bit in blue here which is to show the organization that
you care because you've done some research.
Remember these people are dedicating a lot of their lives to this organization so they want to know
that you care about it.
So one thing that I that I've done here is I've opened the news page on this year health Foundation's
Web site and you can see that they've launched this California Health Report TV.
So if I was Alex actually what I would do is go and watch this episode.
You could learn more about it.
But in this case let's just go back to the cover letter and say something like I see that your health
has resus recently launched an initiative to increase public awareness with the California Health TV
project
OK.
Call
All right.
And then evidence of what you're going to see is I think that this is redundant to say you're a health
again here.
Let's just take that out.
And then now we're going to have to decide whether or not there are some barriers that that Alex needs
to address in his cover letter or if he's going to go ahead and just talk about his X Factor.
So what he's going to do is just open the barriers checklist and I've got that open in another window.
Here we go.
All right.
So Alex just going to go down this checklist and and make sure that that and see if he has one of these
barriers in this case.
I know Alex his this is kind of his industry.
So he doesn't have any of these barriers but let's say that he was in his last position for very long
then he would probably want to just go ahead and talk about this part here.
Look look at this green bit here about how to address this barrier in his cover letter.
But in this case we're not doing that we're talking about the X Factor so we're going to go back over
here to the cover letter and just going to delete this here
all right.
So now we're going to delete this stuff here again because we're not going with option number two the
X Factor.
And in this case Alex's X Factor is engaging and managing thriving online communities like Facebook
groups and stuff like that.
So let's just say it seems pertinent for your team to know about my ability to engage stakeholders online
and grow online communities.
All right
and then so this stuff here is for the option 1 and in so here we're going to go delete that.
And so for option 2 which is describing the X Factor.
We're going to first explain how the X Factor came about.
So you might say something like this skill came about when I was a student at Sacramento State University
and then just going a little bit so you might say something like There I created the first Facebook
community for the university and grew it to over 5000 members in just under three years.
All right you might even say something like that group is still the defacto university community.
All right.
The next move is to just connect that skill to your health.
And so we know that Sierra Health's mission is to increase health and health awareness in northern California.
So we might say something like If I join the team at Sierra Health I would love to bring these skills
to the table so that we could increase awareness about health and healthy living in Northern California.
All right so you see here when we talk about you know health and healthy living to the community in
Northern California.
If you remember when we go here and we look at Ceara health vision that's exactly what they're trying
to do.
So you want to connect your skill to what they're trying to do.
All right I don't think in this case we need a summary.
So let's just delete that.
OK.
And then so we're just going to wrap it up and then so I know how important it is that that's how leave
this to find a person who.
OK.
In this case fundraising is about engaging stakeholders and basically getting them to donate money.
So let's try to connect that back
so some might say something like find a person who is able to engage Sierra stakeholders and allocate
the resources necessary for the organization to execute its mission.
All right so then let's just go ahead and plug that in here health.
Find someone who will be a.
So in this case Alex has done a lot of description about himself.
Maybe you can just talk a little bit about how he is on a team.
So maybe they find someone who will be a dynamic active and passionate member of the team.
As a member of a team.
All right.
And so we're just going to wrap it up here with Alex Smith.
So I've used pages to create this document.
You can certainly use Word or any other word processing software.
The final thing to do is just to go in here and to make this black.
And then you can copy paste that into your email and you can use it maybe for other purposes as well
down the line.
This completed cover letter is available to you as a download attached to this lecture.
So check it out.
And please leave questions and feedback if you would like to so that we can engage in the on the platform
here.