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!