Category: Thank

The Big Thank-You Mistake That Chases Away Donors

Jeff Brooks  |  Thank
Thank

When I was a Cub Scout, proudly dressed in the blue uniform with the yellow scarf, I once helped an old lady cross the street.

It went like this: I sidled up to an elderly woman who was standing on a corner, waiting for the light to change.

“Can I help you across, ma’am?” I asked.

She looked me up and down. Suspiciously. “Yes you can, I’m sure,” she said. “And you may.”

Her jab at my word choice went over my head.

The light changed, and I hooked my arm around hers and started across. I concentrated on matching her speed, as I’d heard about another Scout who had moved too quickly and pulled his old lady off her feet; he ran off in a panic, leaving her on her hands and knees in the middle of the street.

We made it across fine. Both of us upright. We got to the other side, and I unhooked by arm from hers.

I waited for my much-deserved praise.

She said: “Thank you for your commitment to traffic safety.”

And walked away. Leaving me gaping and confused, silently vowing never to help weird old ladies across the street again.

Okay, I made up that last part about her strange form of thanking me. No human being would do that.

But nonprofit organizations do exactly that all the time!

It’s probably happened to you as a donor:

  • You donate to help hungry children in Haiti, and they thank you for doing your part to fight world poverty.
  • You donate to fight a terrible government policy you hate, and they thank you for protecting civil liberties.
  • You donate to save some beautiful animal from extinction, and they thank you for your commitment to habitat preservation.

I know why it happens. The organization thinks of its mission as fighting world poverty. But if they sent out fundraising with that as the offer, they’d have shut their doors years ago. So they raise funds with specific offers, like feeding hungry children in Haiti …

But when it comes time to thank donors, they forget — or more likely, they don’t really care. So they thank the donor for helping them accomplish their mission in the broad sense.

Which is basically rude. And not human.

Don’t be that organization. Thank your donors for doing the thing you asked them to do.

It would be perfectly fine if — once you’ve really piled on the gratitude for the thing their gift accomplished — to tell them their gift also helped do that bigger thing.

But don’t act like you live on a different planet by thanking them for something they likely have no sense that they did at all.

Thank your donors for doing the thing you asked them to do.

Then they’ll happily keep coming back to help you across the street, again and again!

​Send a Pure Thank You Email

Steven Screen  |  Thank
Thank

Either this week or next week, my advice is to send an thank you email to your donors. That’s right, a pure thank you.

Fill it with gratitude. Thank your donor with raw emotion. Thank her for what she did (gave a gift to help), not for what your organization did. Tell her how valuable she is to your organization.

Thank Her As If You Actually Need Her

Most organizations thank their donors as if the donor is a very small part of a very big process.

You know intuitively that’s not a good idea. That’s like treating everyone you meet as ‘just one of the several thousand people you’ll meet in your life.’

Your goal is to make her FEEL your gratitude and thankfulness. Thank her as if your organization actually needed her gift last year!

Fine. What’s the Benefit?

You mean other than being honorable and polite?

Because she likely just heard from you (and a lot of other organizations) asking her to help. This is your first chance in 2018 to close the loop and show her that she matters.

Right? She’s about to receive all sorts of annual reports and other messages that say, “Look what WE did last year, look how many people WE helped last year, WE are awesome!”

I submit to you that you’ll build deeper relationships with your donors more by saying, “Thank YOU for what YOU did last year!”

How To Write It

Always remember: your headline and first sentence are really important because most people won’t read the whole thing.

But if you get your message of gratitude in your subject line, your headline, and your first sentence, your donor is almost guaranteed to get it.

Your goal is to be emotional and personal. Don’t sound corporate. Sound like one person writing to express sincere thanks to one other person.

You don’t have to overthink this. I bet the following would be very effective:

Dear [NAME],

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

Last year when your gift was needed, and you reached out in faith and generously helped. You and your gift matter, and you made a difference.

I am so incredibly grateful for you. Thank you for being a donor!

[SIGNATURE]

Try to have your email look as personal as possible – like it came straight from Outlook. If you have a fancy email template, try to use as little of it as possible. If you normally have a bunch of social or donation links at the bottom, delete them if you can. Don’t think of this as an email to your list. Think of it as an email from one grateful to one donor who is wondering if they matter.

Who To Send It To

Your donors.

Not to everybody on your email list. Just your donors. You do not want to give your non-donors one of the emotional benefits of giving (being Thanked) when they have not given a gift.

If you can’t segment out your non-donors, then send it to everybody.

When To Send It

As soon as you can!

Start your donors’ 2018 off with an incredible expression of gratitude to them! They’ll love it, your open rate will be higher than normal, you’ll feel great for doing it, and you’ll have taken a powerful first step towards fundraising success this year!

Thankuary is here!

Steven Screen  |  Thank

Wanted to let you know about something special that’s happening this month . . .

Introducing Thankuary

We’re taking plain old January and turn it into Thankuary. It’s a whole month to help you and your nonprofit shower your donors with gratitude.

Two reasons:

  1. Your donors deserve it. They gave you gifts last year out of pure generosity! Do you know if they feel your gratitude? They sure deserve to. And personally, I think there’s a moral imperative to Thank and Thank well. (It might not be a moral imperative, but it sure was my Mama’s imperative!)
  2. It will help you raise more money in 2018. Thanking well is the very first step towards retaining a donor and making them more likely to give additional gifts. Just one data point for you: Leah Eustace from Blue Canoe Philanthropy showed that a 3-minute Thank You call raises donor retention by 10%. And, Thanking is part of the Virtuous Circle.

Here’s What We Propose

You take the month of January and intentionally Thank your donors with emotion and focus.

We know you have other stuff to do, too. We get it.

So to help, we’re going to spend January talking about the most effective ways to Thank your donors. You’ll get step-by-step instructions. Great ideas. Guest posts. Sample sentences and paragraphs you can steal.

If you think you do a fantastic job Thanking your donors, that’s great. I hope you’ll comment and share what’s worked for you.

How Thankuary Started

A couple of years ago we were working with an organization that swore up and down that they Thanked their donors well. So I looked through all of their receipts and thank you letters.

The first receipt letter I looked at began with this sentence:

“Recently our entire staff went on a retreat.”

That, my friends, is not the best way to start your receipt letter. What in the world were they thinking about Thanking where that sentence seemed like a good idea?

Fast-forward to last month we were meeting with another client. We were talking about spending January making sure their donors knew how important they were to this organization. (Is that something you should do for your organization?)

I said, off the top of my head, “Let’s call it Thankuary!”

And after much rejoicing, Thankuary was born.

So, Thankuary begins today. Stay tuned for our best advice on how you can Thank well, start your year off with some real donor love, and be on your way to a successful 2018!

Say “Thank You” Like You Really Mean It

Steven Screen  |  Thank

Note from Steven: This is a guest post from Lisa, an experienced Development Director who is on the Better Fundraising team.

Your receipt letters are arguably the most-opened, most-read piece of mail (or email) you’ll ever sent to your donors. Are you giving them the attention they deserve?

When I started as the Director of Development at a local non-profit, the first thing I looked at was the receipting process. Why? Because the receipt letter was the first ‘touch’ a donor would receive after sending in their gift.

What I found was an organization that loved their donors but didn’t know how to thank them. It was common practice to hold on to the receipts until there were enough to mail at a bulk rate. This meant some donors were being asked for another gift BEFORE they had been thanked for their first one.

The receipts letters were generic so they could be used year around. There was no acknowledgment of the donor’s actual gift amount, or what their gift was used for.

Put on your “donor hat” for a moment. How would you feel about receiving a generic receipt after you’ve been asked again?

I would probably look somewhere else to donate my charitable dollars. And I believe many of their donors did.

So simply saying “thank you” IS NOT enough.

Better Fundraising understands the importance of saying thank you and how to say it well. It is part of their “virtuous circle” and the Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat system.

So what does it mean to thank donors well?

  • Let them know you received their gift in a timely fashion. Ideally, within 2-3 business days after you received their gift.
  • Be sincere and emotional in your thank letter. True gratitude shines through a well-written thank you.
  • Let them know what their gift was used for. For example, if you asked them to give a gift provide food and shelter, thank them for providing food and shelter.

And the thank yous don’t need to stop here! You can thank donors multiple times for their gift. By phone, text, online, at an event, a hand-written note. You can also develop a different thank you strategy for your mass, mids and major donors.

Thanking donors well should be part of your organization’s culture. If it’s not, start today!

To learn more about thanking donors (especially important this time of year!) watch Jim and Steven’s video on saying “Thank You.”

What I Wish I Knew Then

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Report, Thank

Note from Steven: This is a guest post from Lisa, an experienced Development Director who is on the Better Fundraising team.

When I was a new development director, there never seemed to be enough time, money or man power to get everything done. It was overwhelming. Sound familiar?

I knew I needed to prioritize . . . but even that was hard.

As you sit in your seat today, wondering how you can have the biggest impact possible, take this advice from a person who played every role in her development department. Here are three things I wish someone would have told me right at the beginning . . .

Make it clear what the donor’s gift will do

Specifically, make it clear enough so a donor could easily repeat it to their friends.

Your organization probably does a lot of great things, but you need to focus on just one powerful thing. It’s ok if what you ask donors to do is only part of what your organization does. I’ve noticed that most donors respond better to one simple thing than having to learn about all your organization does.

Always have a system to thank your donors promptly

Donors should be thanked and receipted 24-48 hours after you receive their donation. If they give online they will get a digital thank you right away, but follow that up with a thank you in the mail. For larger gifts, you may want to call and personally thank the donor.

As I built relationships with donors over the years I learned that you cannot thank a donor too quickly. But, thanking a donor to slowly is a surefire way to losing donors over time.

Show each donor the difference their gift made

People give because they want to make a difference. So let them know how their gift made a difference! For most of your donors, this can be done in your organization’s newsletter. Or an e-update, but in my experience e-updates aren’t nearly as good at engaging donors as a printed newsletter.

And for major donors, do whatever it takes to show them.

Take them on a site visit, prepare a special report just for them, whatever it takes to show them how their gift made a difference!

Do these three things and you WILL see improvements in your program. Better Fundraising gets this. Their Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat formula teaches and emphasizes the fundamentals of fundraising, helping you prioritize and work on the things that really matter!

​Improve Your Fall Fundraising the charity: water Way

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Report, Thank

Had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Harrison, the founder of charity: water for the Fundraising Is Beautiful podcast.

There’s a TON of tips you can use to improve your fall fundraising results! You’ll hear Scott talk about:

  • How important immediacy is
  • How to take your donors on a journey with every piece of donor communications
  • How charity: water “productizes” what they do to make it easy for donors to understand and then do something meaningful with each gift
  • How he’s comfortable sharing bad news with donors, and why that ultimately helps his organization.

I really encourage you to go take a listen.  I’m a better fundraiser for having listened to Scott, and you will be too! Here’s the link.

How To Write This Fall – Tips For Fundraising Success

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Repeat, Report, Thank
An old typewriter sits on a wooden desk

Fundraising Season is beginning . . . and you’re going to write to your donors a LOT in the next few months. And I have an important tip for you.

Don’t assume your donors will read what you write.

Donors are moving fast (especially in their inbox). They are busy. They support multiple charities. And they don’t have to read your organization’s communications.

Right? Nothing bad happens to your donors if they don’t read your stuff. Their life just goes on. And as a matter of fact they’ve saved themselves some time.

So what is a nonprofit writer to do?

In almost all cases you have to earn their attention by being relevant and getting to the point quickly.

So pay special attention to your first sentence. Think of it this way: your first sentence has to earn your reader’s attention enough so that they want to read your second sentence.

I use two main strategies to get more people to read our clients’ fundraising materials:

#1 Very quickly state the point of your letter/email/brochure. Why are you writing the donor today? If you want the donor to do something, say it clearly right away.

We’ve improved the fundraising results for hundreds of organizations just by helping their fundraising materials get to the point faster. Because most nonprofits seem to assume that their donors will read the whole thing. So, they take a long time to get to the point, and then they only mention the point once.

My operating principle is that maybe 10% of donors will read it, but 50% of people will skim it IF you give them something interesting/urgent/valuable enough to skim.

Note those percentages don’t add up to 100%. That’s because no matter what you do, a significant percentage of donors are either going to miss or not read each message you send out. And that, my friend, is why nonprofits need to communicate more often than they think they do. Because most nonprofits assume every donor receives and reads every message. That’s a long way from what actually happens.

OK. The second way I get people to read is to use drama and tension.

#2 Write such a drama-filled first sentence that the reader really wants to know what the second sentence says.

Pick right up in the middle of the beneficiary story you’re telling. Or summarize the most drama-filled moment. But use emotion to get a reader curious about what happens next.

Here’s a great example, “When the police rang the doorbell, Gloria didn’t know what she was going to do.” This works for even the most boring subjects! “Our fiscal year end is approaching and I don’t think we’re going to make budget” is the opening line of one of the most successful letters I ever wrote.

So when you’re writing this fall, remember that your donors are busy and moving fast. Pay special attention to the very first sentences of anything you put out there. And I guarantee you that if you earn your donor’s attention, you’ll earn more of their donations!

Why Your Donors Deserve Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Report, Thank, Uncategorized

You’re no doubt familiar with Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat, the fundraising rhythm we teach here at Better Fundraising.

There are two equally strong reasons you should follow this approach to fundraising.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that we arrived at it because it raised our clients the most money and retained their donors the longest. Both Jim and I come from competitive fundraising environments where we were pressured to raise money in the short term AND to set organizations up for long term success. And when we looked at what worked and what didn’t in fundraising — really getting deep in the data — it was clear that Asking, Thanking, and Reporting were the key elements for fundraising success.

And that Repeating the rhythm (and some of the messages) helped organizations grow over time.

So we developed Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat simply as a way to help organizations raise more money.

But there’s another line of thinking that leads you to the same place. We call it ‘treating your donor the way she deserves to be treated’ . . .

  • You honor your donor by sharing the problem your organization is working on, and asking your donor to help solve the problem.
  • You honor your donor by thanking her like crazy when she gives a gift to help.
  • And it’s really honoring her by showing her what happened because she gave a gift. To Report.

You could argue that it’s a moral imperative to Report. She gave you a gift in faith and received nothing in return but a hit of dopamine. How can you in good conscience ask her to give another gift without showing and telling her that her gift made a difference?

This is one of the reasons, by the way, that fundraisers don’t like their jobs. They have to ask and ask and ask. They know in their hearts that donors get tired of being asked! But the fundraisers who work in environments where their donors are honored with regular reports? Those fundraisers enjoy their jobs much more. And their donors enjoy the fundraising much more.

This is the heart of donor centricity. It’s acknowledging that the donor is central to the process of philanthropy, charity and your organization. It’s acknowledging that her role is not just “supporter” or “partner” but as central as your organization’s.

So ask yourself, “Have we Reported to our donors lately? Do we deserve to ask them for another gift?”

When you’re great at reporting you’ll notice three things: you’ll raise more money; you’ll keep your donors for longer; and you LOVE knowing that you’re treating your donors the way they deserve to be treated!

Get Storytelling for Action eBook Now!

Steven Screen  |  Ask, Report, Thank

If you’ve read our blog over the last few years, you’ve heard us talk a lot about storytelling. We’ve written about it, we’ve spoken at conferences, and we share tips about storytelling with our clients.

This summer, we decided it was time to pull everything we’ve learned over the years into one place, so fundraisers like you can benefit.

That’s what we did with our new eBook: Storytelling for ACTION

Three Big Ideas That Nobody Told You

It’s easy to say that storytelling is important. It’s more difficult to use stories to raise more money. That’s why we’ve shared three big ideas in this new eBook:

  1. Your donor should have a role — and see herself — in every single story you tell.
  2. How you tell a story is less important than what story you tell and when you tell it.
  3. You have a Big Story you need to constantly tell your donor.

Sound interesting? We promise it’s more than that. It’s also actionable and proven. Download your copy of the free eBook now.

Practical Advice You Can Use

One of the things that we focused on in Storytelling for ACTION is actionable advice. We didn’t want to just share concepts — we want you to equip you with the tools to start telling better stories for your organization right away. That’s why we’ve included the following tools in Storytelling for ACTION:

  • A matrix to help you to decide what story to tell at what time
  • Easy-to-use checklists
  • Real-life samples
  • Our 3 Big Ideas Cheat Sheet

Market-Tested And Proven

The ideas in this eBook are market-tested and proven to increase how much money you raise. They will help you get more new donors and keep your current donors around for longer. And they will even— if you let them—help you love your job qand fundraising more than you thought possible.

These ideas are not fancy. They are not just for the “big” organizations and “seasoned” fundraisers. They are for you.

Download your free eBook now.