Question: How do you get donors to give to a disaster that hasn't happened yet? Or worse, give to a disaster that happens time and time again, and so seems a pointless cause, because nothing can be done to stop the inevitable.

This has been a problem that Chris and I have faced a few times, for clients who had asked us to do disaster-risk-reduction (catchy title, no?) - or DRR - mailings for them. The answer seemed to be: "you can't".

Disaster risk reduction packs had just not worked. So when Christian Aid wanted us to come up with concepts for this type of pack we were a little wary because of knowledge gained from previous attempts.

But we love a challenge, so we took a close look at the lessons learned from DRR packs that hadn't worked before, stripping out anything that might have stopped them working harder. We also looked at traditional emergency mailpacks that had done really well, and applied lessons learned from these. The result, our latest disaster risk reduction donor appeal.

We're really excited about this pack, and feel it has all the right ingredients to do really well.

The bright red outer with the words 'Flood. Drought. Cyclones.' in bold lettering has real emergency presence and begs to be opened. Inside, the letter asks the donor to help poor communities prepare for floods in Bangladesh, drought in Malawi and cyclones in India.

The ask is a monthly/cash gift to help provide three simple solutions that will help protect lives.

To reinforce the need, the lift piece uses a powerful pictorial message. Over thirty black and white disaster images from around the world have been used on one side, with minimal copy which, at a glance, gives the sense that 'enough is enough' - we must act now.

Will it work this time? We'll keep you posted (pardon the pun).

Bee Clarke