Best Practice #3:
Change your Yellow Candle distribution program from ONE donation request letter to THREE letters using this or your own custom marketing approach detailed here.
1. Have your Rabbi prepare a letter encouraging congregants to light the yellow candle in observance of Yom HaShoah and encourage donations of any amount. The letter should be sent six weeks before distribution of your candles.
The letter will be more effective if you include what charity your congregation’s or club’s donation will be used for. Sample Rabbi letters can be found at www.yellowcandles.org.
2. With each candle distributed, include a meditation with the synagogue’s and Men's Club president’s letter. Sample letters and meditations are at www.yellowcandle.org.
a. Personalize meditation with names of children that perished in the Holocaust. Children’s names, birthplace, age and place when murdered are available at www.yellowcandles.org.
b. The Presidents’ letter, inserted with the candles, includes form for donations equal to the Rabbi’s letter. Sample letters and meditations are at www.yellowcandle.org.
c. Ask all participants to post a picture of their candle lighting to social media. #yellowcandle on twitter, post on your own Facebook page and share on #yellowcandle and https://www.facebook.com/YellowCandles/, etc.
3. Six weeks after the candle distribution, a third letter is a positive factor. Send a reminder request letter to congregants who have not yet donated after having a Yellow Candle delivered to them. The letter should be sent under the name Yellow Candle Committee Chair.
Best Practice #4:
While you would hope that all the people who you distribute such candles to will remember to light them on Yom HaShoah, there will be recipients who forget to light them on that day.
We urge you to suggest that if they forgot to light the candle on Yom HaShoah, there are other days (this list is far from complete) in which lighting them would be appropriate.
• September 29-30. Babi Yar Massacre of 33,000-Jews
• November 9th – Kristallnacht
• November 15th – Warsaw Ghetto Sealed
• Any day when your congregant has a personal yahrzeit. There were tens of thousands of Jews who had no one to light a candle on their behalf. By the congregant lighting a candle, those victims have not been forgotten.
In addition, you want them to have used the candle, so that when, next year, you distribute the candles again, they don’t have two candles, and they become less likely to send a contribution.
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