Advice needed - First donor mailing

Dear all

I have recently joined a relatively new charity, 2 years old, as their first paid fund raising\development employee.

Having now pulled together all of their historic donor information onto a database (excel for now but we are considering highrise or salesforce) we have a very healthy amount of contacts/donors.

The initial phase of their fund raising proved some wonderful results of which we would like to share that news with our donors in the form of a personal thank you letter from the recipient of the care that their money raised.

We would also like to improve on our monthly dd's and encourage some employee fundraising as I am developing and defining their income streams.

I don't want to over ask and I don't want to under ask. We know that this first year will be mainly development but it would be great for me to generate some donations too!

So I have a couple of questions

1) How many times a year do you mail your donors?
2) Do you send a newsletter?
3) If you were sending a personal thankyou such as this, what ask would you be making? I'd like to go for a one off donation or monthly ask. Realistic?
3) Any other advice you can offer would be much appreciated especially if you have been in a situation like myself before.

Many thanks all
Victoria