Tag: receipts

Six Tips for the First Sentence of Your Next Thank You/Receipt Letter

Steven  |  Thank
Heat Map

How you write the first sentence of your receipt letter (or autoreply email) makes a great deal of difference for whether your donor keeps reading… or not.

Let me give you five tips we live by at Better Fundraising.

Be Direct

The more direct and “to the point” you can be, the better. Here are two first sentences that I use all the time:

“Thank you for your generous gift of [GiftAmt]!”

“You are so generous, thank you!”

Using your first sentence to “send the main message” is an effective tactic in your donor communications. Your donor doesn’t have to read any further and she’s already received the message you’re trying to send.

Short and sweet

Think of the first sentence as the “on-ramp” to the rest of your note or letter. If the on-ramp is easy, your donor is likely to keep reading.

If the on-ramp sentence is long, with lots of clauses or jargon, your donor is less likely to keep reading.

Share the Outcome

Another powerful idea is to share the outcome of the donor’s gift. This isn’t always possible, but here are some examples:

“Thank you for your gift to put on this fall’s exhibit.”

“Thank you for your poverty-fighting gift!”

“Thank you for your generosity, your gift will fund vital research!”

It’s great if you can thank your donor and give her a sense of what her gift will accomplish – in one short sentence.

Start with the Beneficiaries

It’s always a good idea to mention the people or thing your organization serves! This results in first sentences like this:

“Thank you for your gift to protect endangered wetlands!”

“Thank you for your gift to help the children!”

“Thank you for preserving heirloom quilts for quilt-lovers to see!”

Use ‘You’

The word “you” is magical at getting your reader’s attention. It’s also a good way to signal to the donor that this piece of communication is about them – that they should be interested in this and want to read it.

“Your generosity amazes me!”

Use the word “you” early and often.

It’s Not About Your Organization

One of the secondary benefits of using the word “you” is that you’re not writing your organization’s name, or the words “we” or “us.”

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with those words or your organization’s name. Just remember that the best Thank You’s tend to be about the donor and their gift – and not about the organization.

Final Thought

You want to write something that your donor is interested in reading, and makes her want to keep reading.

If it helps, here’s an example of what not to do. It’s my all-time favorite bad opening line of a thank you / receipt letter:

“Recently, we returned from an all-staff retreat.”

Ask yourself, why would a donor want to keep reading?

If you want your donors to keep reading, follow the guidelines above. Your Thank You’s and Receipt Letters will improve in no time!

What a Heat Map Should Teach You About Thanking

Steven  |  Thank
Heat Map

I want you to think about the graphic above the next time you look at your Thank You/Receipt letter.

Why?  Because let’s make sure you’re not accidentally hiding the main message you’re trying to send a donor right after they’ve given you a gift!    

Heat Maps

The graphic above is what’s called a “heat map.”  It tracks where reader’s eyes looked as they read this piece of direct mail fundraising.  It also tracks the order in which the Reader looked at each area.

Not all heat maps look the same, but they generally look like this one.

And if you look at any of them, you quickly see that donors tend to read the beginnings and endings of your messages, and not much in between. 

A Question for You

I want you to visualize your organization’s Receipt letters and Thank You letters.  Better yet, print them out and put them on your desk.

With this heat map in mind, do your receipt letters and Thank You letters actually communicate what you are trying to communicate?

Is it easy for a donor to read that she is being thanked, and that your organization is full of gratitude for her?

Or have you accidentally hidden the main message in places where your donors are less likely to read them?

My advice is to make sure that there is a clear Thank You in two of the following three places:

  • The first sentence
  • The last sentence
  • In the upper right corner

Why two of the three?  To increase the chances that a “skimmer” will read one of them.  Because you don’t know what part a donor is going to read!

Your Assignment

I could go deeper on all this.  But I’d rather you spend your time looking at your Thank You and Receipt letters.  Same thing goes for the email versions.

Make sure that your message of gratitude is easily seen at just a glance – because that’s often all you get! 

Does the rest of your message need to be well-written?  Of course (I talk about it in this post).  But a surprising amount of Thank You success is dependent on getting the top and bottom correct!

An Unfortunate Thanking Adventure in Three Paragraphs

Steven  |  Thank

Today I want to share an example of an unfortunate Thanking experience that happened to me.

It’s from a small, under-staffed organization. I’m not throwing rocks here – I love the organization, we’ll donate again, and I know full well the challenges of doing all this stuff well at a small shop.

But it’s a real-life example of how a Thank You can get off-target in just three short paragraphs.

The Salutation

“Dear Stephen.”

Ouch. Not a great start to misspell my name (especially after spelling it correctly in my email address), but we’ve all done it.

The First Paragraph

“Your generous donation is greatly appreciated!”

That’s a great first paragraph. It starts with the word “you.” It’s short and easy to understand. The exclamation point makes it feel human, not corporate. Great stuff.

The Second Paragraph

“You are cordially invited [Organization Name]’s Giving Circle and gift a free membership to the [Organization Name]’s Health Advisor Training Program to anyone of your choosing. You can find an explanation of the giving circle here: https://organizationname.org/join-our-giving-circle/”

This is where this short Thank You email loses track of its job, its purpose. A Thank You should be about the donor and the gift they just gave, not about the organization and the donor’s next gift.

A one-sentence Thank You followed by an invitation to give more is not what I’d recommend when thanking a donor for a gift.

The Third Paragraph

“Please find attached a personal thank you from [Name], Executive Director of [Organization Name]. If you would like to receive a magnet ([Organization Name]’s logo) in the mail, please reply to this email with your physical address. Again, thank you for your support!”

As a donor, I wondered why the Executive Director didn’t send their Thank You to me directly. The subtle message to the donor in a situation like this is that “I’m not important enough to hear directly from the highest-ranking person.”

As a fundraising professional, I marveled at the email bringing up another thing for me to do. If you’re scoring at home, that’s three (join the giving circle, give a free membership to something I’ve never heard of, and get a magnet), which is two too many.

The Lessons

There’s a lot going on in this little three-paragraph Thank you. But here are three lessons you can use to make sure your Thank You’s are on target:

  • I said it earlier, but it bears repeating: a Thank You should be about the donor and the gift they just gave, not about the organization and the donor’s next gift. Use your Thank You’s to make your donor feel appreciated and special. Save any overt talk of further giving until later communications.
  • Keep it simple. Sharing a way a donor can get more involved is a great idea – the magnet in this email is a nice touch. But giving a donor three different things is too many. There should never be more than one.
  • Save it for later. There’s a lot of great content in this email; it’s just too much for one email. Save some things for later (or your New Donor Welcome stream), and use them as reasons to contact the donor again. For instance, this organization could send me a separate email about the free membership that I can give.

If you want to go deeper, I recently shared a free template for a Thank You/Receipt letter, and an 8-minute video walking you through the template, over at Work Less Raise More.

The Thank You section of that letter is a great example of a short, powerful Thank You.

Good luck with your Thank Yous!

A System to Thank the Right Donors the Right Ways at the Right Times

Steven  |  Thank
Envelope with a thank you note.

I want to share some simple best practices for your Thanking system.

Think of these as our recommended “default settings” for a system that thanks the right donors the right way at the right time.

And I want to acknowledge right away that you don’t have to do exactly what I suggest below. But in my experience, you want to be close.

There’s no magic to any one of these things. But there is fundraising magic to doing all of them on a regular basis.

Here’s the list…

  • Mail out a printed receipt letter, within 24 to 48 hours, for all individual gifts.
    • You don’t need to do this for monthly donors.
    • Include a reply card and a reply envelope. Here’s why.
  • For gifts received via your website, your system should send out an immediate autoreply.
    • For smaller organizations, I recommend sending a printed receipt even if you send an e-receipt. For those smaller organizations who struggle to find new donors and keep their existing donors, being “extra thankful” to a donor is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.
  • Make sure the receipt letter (printed or electronic) directly reflects the donor’s intent when they made the gift.
    • This means you want to have custom receipts for each piece of fundraising you send out. For instance, if your appeal asks donors to “give to help during the summer slump,” the first paragraph of your letter should say something like, “Thank you for giving a gift to help during the summer slump” and then reuse words and phrases used in your appeal. Why do this? Because when your donor gives to the summer slump (or to your event, or whatever) and you send her Thank You that talks about your 14 programs and how effective your organization is, she thinks you did not do with her gift what you said you were going to do. You want to avoid that!
  • The text/letter portion of your receipt should be more about the donor and less about your organization.
  • All gifts over a certain amount should receive a call and a hand-written note from your Executive Director/CEO within 48 hours. You get to decide what that amount is, based on how much time your ED/CEO will allot to make those calls and write those notes. In other words, if your ED is willing to call five donors a week for this program, lower the gift threshold so that she gets to make about five calls a week.

Thanking Systems can get super complex. This one should get you started. Tweak it as necessary per your organization.

But remember: build your system to Thank and retain the donors who are giving the highest amounts!