Steven Screen

We’re reposting this graphic because it got a lot of traction recently.

Most organizations don’t realize that after their donors make a gift the donor doesn’ know what happened and they don’t know if their gift made a difference.

So the job of your follow-up communications are to convince your donors that their gift made a real, important difference!

Your Thanks You’s / Receipts should tell each donor that their gift was received, that it matters, and that is is appreciated.

Your Reports (Newsletters, usually) should show her how her gift helped make a difference in the life of a beneficiary.

If you Thank and Report well, each donor will know their gift made a difference.  And because they know their gift made a difference, they are FAR more likely to give your organization another gift.

So, do your donor communications close the loop?  Do your donors know their gifts made a difference?

If not, you have some work to do (and you should get in touch!).  And if you are Thanking and Reporting well, I hope you enjoy all the money you’re raising!

We looked at the fundraising performance of hundreds of nonprofits.  Big ones and small ones.  Here are the lessons from the most effective fundraising organizations:

• Ask your donors to send a gift to help a beneficiary in a specific way.
• Thank donors for exactly what they gave for.
• Report back to donors on what their gift accomplished.
• Repeat the steps above at least a couple times each year.  Each time you do, you’ll build trust, relationship, and revenue.

The lessons from successful organizations are really simple at their core: practice and get really good at Asking, Thanking and Reporting.  Master those three things and success will follow!

We talk a lot around here about “Reporting back to donors” so that they know the difference their gift made.

Because if they don’t know the difference their gift made, the chances they are going to give you another gift have flown out the window and landed on the doorstep of the next nonprofit they are going to support.

But I want to talk for a moment about the goal of your Reporting.  It’s to make your donor feel like she made a difference.   Not “understand” that she made a difference, or not “prove” that she made a difference, but FEEL like she made a difference.

And you do that by using stories, not statistics.

Internal staff and experts love statistics.  But most donors don’t.  In all the testing that I’ve done, making a big number or a statistic the main part of any fundraising piece will reduce the amount of money you raise.

Statistics and big numbers have their place.  But they should be supporting points, never headlines or first sentences.  To appropriate a famous quote from Steve Jobs, “If you see a big number or statistic, they blew it.”

Instead, tell compelling stories about people whose lives have been changed with help from the donor’s gift.  That’s the way to make a donor feel like she made a difference.

Aim your communications at donors’ hearts, not their heads.

When a donor gives you a gift something very important has happened.  Your organization has become part of her life.

It’s also true that she has become part of your organization’s life.  And unfortunately, that’s what most organizations focus on.  They say things like, “Thank you for partnering with us as we …”  Or they’ll solemnly say, “Your partnership helps us to complete our mission to…”

From the donor’s perspective, that’s a pretty big miss.

You’ll raise a lot more money if you adopt the posture that your organization is part of the donor’s story – not the other way around.

When your donor opens your communications, do you know what she’s hoping for?  Your donor is hoping that some organization – finally – will tell her a story that has her in it.  She doesn’t really want to hear a story about you.

She’s thinking, “If you’re just going to talk about yourself, leave me alone.  Don’t waste my time.”

In your communications with donors, are you talking about her?  About what she can do with her gift?  About what she has done with her gifts?  Or are you talking about all the stuff you’ve been busy doing?

Listen, at a donor-centric organization you’ll never hear the phrase, “We have to tell them what we’ve been doing!”  You’d hear something more like, “We have to show our donors what they and their gifts have done!”

You’ll know you’ve really embraced donor centricity when a phrase like “We have to tell our donors what we’ve been doing” sounds self-centered and awkward.

So if a donor doesn’t get anything in return for her gift, what do you need to do?

You need to close the loop.  In the extraordinarily helpful book Getting Things Done, author David Allen introduces the concept of “open loops.”  In short, these are:

Commitments or arrangements that are made but not yet completed. 

Now, he’s not talking about fundraising here, he’s talking about life.  But he’s absolutely talking about fundraising.

When a donor makes a gift, she makes a commitment to your organization in the form of money.  She knows she may never find out what happened because she took action and gave a gift.  But imagine her delight when an organization gets in touch with her and shares a story of a life changed because of her action!

And, at the moment she knows she made a difference, you can almost hear the loop snap shut with the satisfying sound of trust being formed.  She’s now far more likely to give that organization another gift.

But most donors are never given that delight by the organizations they donate to.  So their donors feels good for giving the gift . . . but in the back of their minds they are wondering if they really made a difference.  So – at this moment — they don’t know if giving the gift to you was a good idea.  The loop is open.

If you never tell her what she’s accomplished, that loop will always remain open.  She will likely not give another gift to your organization.

If you tell her what your organization has accomplished, maybe she’ll realize she was part of that.  And maybe it will feel to her like the loop is closed.  And maybe she’ll give you another gift.

But you can do better than that.  Tell her what she accomplished!  Close the loop with your donors!

With Major Donors, you should be able to close every single loop.  They are worth the time and attention.  For Mass donors, you need to be sending a regular stream of communications, some of which need to Report back to donors and close their loops.

And remember, each time you complete the Ask, Thank, Report cycle you close the loop, earn trust, and earn the right to Ask them again.