With the sales letter you're also to produce--collaboratively or individually--a fact sheet. A fact sheet is a one- or two-sided document presenting essential information about something in an informative, attractive, and sometimes persuasive manner. Sometimes fact sheets are used for promotional, marketing, and/or advertising purposes, being mailed to potentially interested parties or being handed out at presentations or conventions. However, some fact sheets are purely informative, such as many of those produced by the US government to inform people of laws and procedures. These sheets are commonly just displayed in offices for citizens to browse through and select. A great many fact sheets are produced on medical topics. A fact sheet has more text than a flyer but is often not as slickly produced as a brochure.

Produce a fact sheet for a real organization, product, service, procedure, etc.; do not invent your subject. Select a subject you have knowledge of and experience with.  You will be supplied with an example from Habitat for Humanity in class. Make it look as professional as possible (within reason); use color, employ some graphics; employ slightly heavier than normal paper, and so on.  The fact sheet may treat the same topic as the sales letter, but the content and appearance will differ greatly.

Here is an overview of the fact sheet in terms of SCAMP:

• Style: Fact sheets are used to present an organization, product, service, etc., and so they create an image or an initial impression of the subject matter. Above all, then, a fact sheet should present a competent, professional image: be correct. Also, be careful to say nothing that will reflect poorly on the subject; avoid anything that anyone might think is in bad taste. Because your purpose is in part to present a subject that your audience may not be familiar with, be clear and factual. Include specific details and use verbs that present your subject as active, progressive, interesting, attractive, and so on. Verbs animate your subject. For example, here is a sentence from the fact sheet for Habitat for Humanity: "Habitat invites people from all walks of life to work together in partnership to help build houses with families in need." Those ideas can be expressed in a much less interesting way by weakening the verbs: "Habitat is about people from all walks of life who are partners in an effort to build houses with families in need."

• Chunking: A fact sheet is a one- or two-sided (front and back) document with more text than a flyer, which has a minimum of text. The fact sheet features short paragraphs, heads, bulleted lists, bold typeface, and selected visuals, such as clip art, images from the Web, and word art. Text is sometimes presented in three columns of equal or unequal widths, but two- and single-column fact sheets are even more common. Fact sheets must be balanced top and bottom, left and right at least on the first page. A second page can be less than completely full and may  include a section that will become the face of the document if mailed.

  Heads for a fact sheet correspond to the key parts of the subject that you want to discuss. If, for example, you are introducing an academic honor society that you'd like the audience to join, then the fact sheet's heads would concentrate on various benefits of the organization, programs and scholarships it offers, famous and powerful people who are members, and so on.

• Audience: Your audience is a particular kind of person looking for a certain kind of product, service, program, or organization. For example, you might picture your audience as a career-oriented college student looking for a professional organization that offers experiences and contacts that might be useful when the student enters the job market. Your fact sheet for such a student, then, would emphasize the professional relevance of whatever organization you were presenting. Assume your audience is a potential buyer, client, or member. What does your subject offer to help the audience accomplish its objectives?  Don't make the mistake, like the fact sheet on stress did, of starting with definitions or history or founding members, all of which are topics far from an audience's interests and concerns. 

• Message: What you say about your subject should be determined by what is new or notable about the subject and by what your audience plans to do with it. If, for example, you are presenting a new book for a publisher, you want to make it clear what is new about the author's message and/or method and what the book will do for the reader. If the reader is a teacher, the teacher wants to know how the book could be used to change teaching on a particular subject, whether the book can be used as a reference tool, and who could read the book--undergraduate students, graduate students, or strictly professionals. Your message is not just "the facts" about the subject, but rather the facts that are most interesting and useful to the audience.

• Purpose: The purpose of the fact sheet is often two-fold, informative and persuasive. The word fact recalls the document's informative aim; a fact sheet always contains essential and useful details about the product, service, program, or organization. There are often statistics, lists of parts and features, historical facts, and so on. But the fact sheet also presents the subject in the best possible light in order to persuade the reader to buy, join, or at least inquire further.